Stephen Hilyard

Lives and works in Madison, WI, USA

Artist statement

My work deals with the power of ideas, and ideals. I am particularly interested in a range of concepts that might best be described as “the profound”. My work identifies our various understandings of the profound as ideals. As ideals they are necessarily unachievable. Never the less we continue to strive for experiences of the impossible profound - such concepts as The Sublime, The Divine or True Love. For me there is something tragic in this yearning for unpresentable concepts, maybe even pathetic, but there is also something heroic in the fact that, in the face of inevitable failure, we continue to live our lives and build our worlds according to these ideals, we continue to believe. Time and again we return to a re-affirmation of the profound. Recent bodies of work have led me to deal with less abstract ideals. In the case of “Катюша (Katyusha)” it was the socio-political ideal of the Soviet system which led to the creation of an artificial community in the Arctic, the northernmost town on earth. When the Soviet ideal failed the town was evacuated over 48 hours, leaving a ghost town. I am currently working on a new movie project entitled “Rousseau’s Daughter” which deals with western culture’s prioritization of the power of reason over lived experience. Ultimately, my work is designed to remind the viewer that she is in the presence of artifice - that this work is attempting to present something of a profound nature, but that it is failing because of its connections to...

Artwork