Hilary Schwartz – Artist Statement

Coded within the domestic spaces, scenes, and objects that I create are traces of intimacy. The suggestion of the body reveals absence and loss alluding to an interrupted personal narrative. Susan Stewart identifies narrative in On Longing as a structure of desire suspended in impossibility. My own experiences of displacement, nostalgia for intimacy and longing for an imagined home and family, as well as a larger queer narrative of dislocation and isolation, lead me to the subject of domesticity and the making of a “home”.

While queerness is not easily read in all of my pieces, it is coded throughout. Coding originates from within a context of marginalization, but moves beyond this in its role as a language of identity and a signifier of shared experience. The invisibility of queerness is an important aspect of my own experience as a queer femme. Femmes, as Tammy Rae Carland says, “consistently find themselves in the margins of (and draped on the arms of) discourses and representations of gender”. In my work and in my life, I subtly overstate and “queer” femininity to code it as femme rather than feminine. Materials in my work (sugar, fondant, upholstery, and sheets) are soft, inviting, and subtle in appearance, so as to imply traditionally feminine qualities. The excess and exaggeration of gendered materials test the boundaries of normativity. By directly responding to the work of artists such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Tammy Rae Carland, I identify myself with a queer visual lineage.

In Untitled (bed of sugar), a sheet and pillows coated in sugar lay above a mattress made of sugar. The bed is a sculptural snapshot preserving a fragment of memory. Impressions in the sugar allude to a relationship from my past. Reenactment of my memory both fictionalizes it and draws it out of past tense and into present. Even as the crystallized nostalgia coats memory, the precarious nature of the unfixed sugar reflects vulnerability and temporality.

Resume

Education

2009 MFA, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA

2006 BFA, California College of the Arts, Oakland, CA

2001-04 Boston University, College of Fine Arts, Boston, MA

Exhibitions

Solo

• 2006 mine, A21, Oakland, CA
• 2006 xxx, South Gallery, Oakland, CA

Group

• 2009 Home is something I carry with me, 951 Shotwell Street, San Francisco, CA
• 2009 Vernissage, Herbst Pavilion at Fort Mason, San Francisco, CA
• 2009 Dig: A Search for Lost Time, Diego Rivera Gallery, San Francisco, CA
• 2009 Refined, Diego Rivera Gallery, San Francisco, CA
• 2009 Sweet and Matchless, PLAySPACE Gallery, San Francisco, CA
• 2009 feminism is for everyone. Diego Rivera Gallery, San Francisco, CA
• 2008 Queerity, Million Fishes Arts Collective, San Francisco, CA
• 2008 thanks for the flowers, Diego Rivera Gallery, San Francisco, CA
• 2008 Art Language, Swell Gallery, San Francisco, CA
• 2007 The Postcard Show, Red Ink Studios, San Francisco, CA
• 2006 Baccalaureate Exhibition, Oliver Art Center, Oakland, CA
• 2006 Baccalaureate Exhibition, California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA
• 2006 OPN, Red Ink Studios, San Francisco, CA
• 2005 Color of 12, California College of the Arts, Oakland, CA
  

Publications

• 2009 “Freshly Varnished And Ready for Their Close Up”, JD Beltran, SFGate, May
• 2009 “New Art from Fresh Minds”, JD Beltran, SFGate, April

Awards

• 2007-09 MFA Grant, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA
• 2001-04 Alumni Scholarship, Boston University, Boston, MA
  

Professional Experience

• 2009 Teaching Assistant, Issues in Contemporary Art, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA
• 2009 Teaching Assistant Kinetic Sculpture, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA
• 2008 Teaching Assistant, Seeing and Cognition, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA