An unwavering tendency toward the center of a blistering sun. The name of the exhibition summoned in my mind all the times the sun touched my eyes, or rather when my eyes were seduced by the sun’s touch: eclipses, sunrises. Only as those moments waned did I register just how much I had looked directly into it and how exhausted it made my eyes. The feeling builds up, the feeling of having light burned into the visible plane and light preventing perception of anything else but it, in unreal imperceptible colors like pale blues and purples and oranges. But sometimes there are astronomical events and blissful sights that are worth the risk.

I often think of EJ Hill’s work in celestial terms. He manages to balance the forms of everyday life with sustained gestures requiring massive, life-altering amounts of energy. It is not hard to imagine he has the resolve to stay standing on the platform of Excellentia, Mollitia, Victoria (2018) for months, years, decades longer, like a pillar saint pushing away from earth to commune with heavenly bodies. He has spoken to me more than once of lifting off in the moments during and after a performance, of blasting off or of rising and ascending into the sky. Yet the return to earth, though never explicitly described, is always present. EJ’s work does not encourage us to make him into an alien or inhuman figure, and this is because he does not refuse the social contexts within which he is immersed.

It is apropos for EJ to have turned to photography, the medium of light, to conduct grounding acts of looking during the shadowed moments of this performance period, through which he can continually situate himself in a specific place and time and with specific people. Photography allows for this detailed immersion in the contexts of what is being photographed. In these images, EJ ties potentially abstracted parameters back to specific referents: gradients of blue turn into the wide open 3pm Los Angeles sky. Moments of figurative monumentality are presented not anonymously, but as part of a social history and material infrastructure. There are very few bodies depicted, and those that are remain mostly in the distant background, worlds away from the photographer. Is it possible to expand current possibilities of representation without abandoning the body? The historical tendency of photography to objectify the very marginalized subjects it claims to be bringing visibility to makes this an urgent question. EJ, an artist who uses his body frequently in his work and who orients his work towards marginalized bodies, understands this risk. He is keen on positing another ethos.