Interstitial was an exhibition of the work of Boston based photographer David Hilliard. The INTERSTITIAL Gallery Guide is available for download and an edited version of my statement from that guide is below.
I was immediately drawn to the work of David Hilliard from my first encounter at the Pulse Art Fair in Miami in 2005, where I added a diptych called Green to our collection.
Probably more so than any other piece in the show, Green offers a break in the panorama between the panels. You don’t realize it at first, but when you spend some time you realize the two views have very different focal distances and perspectives. I find myself thinking about the world between the panels—what I call the interstitial space.
When I first proposed the title Interstitial to David he was, shall we say, less than enthusiastic – “I have heard the word before (never brave enough to use it) but was trying to relate it in a solid way to the work…” I started questioning my own understanding of the word and when looking through definitions from various disciplines I found my usage was actually a hybrid I had created in my own head. I work in the audio/video industry, specifically the medical A/V world, and interstitial spaces in this context are the non-public spaces between the floors of hospitals and other medical buildings that house the mechanical, communication, and other back-of-house equipment. These “inter-floors” allow servicing of procedure rooms that need to be sterile and online 24/7 without disruption. Our work is done in the negative area and goes unnoticed, but it supports the critical work done in the public space.
Interstitial struck me as a good descriptor of what I find so compelling about Hilliard’s work. David has a remarkable ability to create a narrative in just 2,3, or 4 discrete panels, but moreover, he creates opportunities to fill in the narrative around and in between the panels.
This exhibition was the most logistically complicated ever undertaken at Cassilhaus. It contains work from our own collection and six other private collections and involved coordination with three of David’s galleries and an art transport company. Seven of the works came from a museum exhibition in Provincetown that closed 5 days before they needed to be hung at Cassilhaus. Two pieces were produced specifically for this exhibition, including Shortest Day, which was exhibited here for the first time.
Interstitial would not have been possible without the generous loan of work from Don Ball, Larry Wheeler and Don Doskey, Allen Thomas Jr., Jack Gorman, Glen Medders and Paul Coggin, Kyle Worsham and David Witsell. I am also grateful to Joseph Carroll, Mike Carroll, Yancey Richardson, Maggie Waterhouse, Fred Hutchinson, Jessina Leonard, Ellen Cassilly, Marc Elliot, and Liz McLean. Finally I cannot say enough about the amazing support and encouragement of David Hilliard throughout this entire process. He is a great artist but an even greater friend.
Enjoy the space between.
—Frank Konhaus, October 2016
Like many exhibitions the work begins by looking at an enormous number of images. We have three of David's pieces in our own collection and I was looking for at least 15 more. I scoured his website and the websites of all of his galleries and asked him if there were new images he was working on. I put out an all-call to my collector friends in the area to see what Hilliard images they had in their collections. I made a dream list of images I wanted to have for the show and I got to work tracking them down. David offered to connect me with some of his major collectors to try and find pieces that were not available from his gallerists. I was over the moon when one of his very well known and prolific collectors (who will go unnamed) had EVERYTHING I was looking for and agreed to lend and then completely crushed when at the last minute they changed their mind and would not lend anything. It took me a few days to shake that off and reconfigure the show and seek new lenders. We're not the National Gallery here and it sometimes is a stretch for people to wrap their brains around lending to the gallery in Frank and Ellen's house!
After jumping through quite a few hoops I had a line up that I was very happy with and just had to get the work here. As I mentioned above, some of the work was in a museum exhibition in Provincetown and came down less than a week before we opened. Much of the rest of the work was coming from New York and Boston and my schedule didn't allow for me to pick up the work myself. Enter the amazing art transporter Liz Mclean with Continental Courier. Liz does fine art deliveries up and down the East Coast and the stars aligned for her to pick up all of the work at 4 different locations and bring it all to Chapel Hill on her way to Florida in time for us to hang. She saved my butt and although I blew my non-existent budget, she gave me a really great deal and was incredibly professional. It was a first for Cassilhaus to use a real art courier.
Everything arrived in perfect shape and Jessina and I did a marathon installation session. I had final locations for everything as I had exhaustively moved 8 1/2 x 11 images of each of the pieces around the gallery.
I timed David's show to be up during our annual Click! Photography Festival and it was a really exciting time. French artist Georges Rousse and his wife Anne Marie were in town for a public art installation and Zanele Muholi was in residence at Cassilhaus.
David spent a few days here around the opening and was very generous with his time mentoring former Cassilhaus intern Michaela O'brien's photobook students.
He gave an artist talk at his opening that was very enthusiastically received.
David's parents are separated and figure prominently in his work although almost as two entirely separate bodies of work. He is extremely close with his father and has been photographing him for decades. He spoke to him almost every day while he was here. He had recently moved into an assisted living community and David continued to work with him there. As I was finalizing the exhibition I concentrated images of his father in the back project gallery and I felt like something was missing. I asked if he was willing to share/loan some of his father's treasured possessions and he very generously shared one of his father's journals, some personal notes, a model of a ship, and some of his books--all of which were featured in images in the show. I felt like it made the exhibition and made it deeply personal.
“I like that a photograph alludes to something and doesn’t really fully tell the story." -David Hilliard
