HILLS SNYDER

In the seventies and eighties Hills Snyder was known for labor-intensive, Prismacolor-based constructions and drawings featuring mythic narratives laced with dark humor and deceptive whimsy. His decades-long use of Plexiglas as a material came to the front in the nineties with projects in which a large variety of images/objects were marshaled into cohesive semi-site installations interacting with pre-existing architectural elements. For the past decade his work has taken a turn toward performance and the interactive, using any media appropriate to the project at hand.

In 2005, he created Book of The Dead for his project as a resident artist in the International Artist Residency program at Artpace in San Antonio. This project was the beginning of an ongoing series of exhibitions linked by the verses of Song 44, a murder ballad written by the artist in 1997. Other projects in this series include Misery Repair Shoppe (2006), All Good Children (2008) and Casual Observer/Causal Observer (2010).

October 2010 saw Snyder spend nine days on the road replacing objects gathered by curator Jens Hoffmann for the Artpace exhibition On The Road. This action retrieved the objects contextualized by Hoffmann as stereotypically Regional and returned them to their original or near-original locales, hence salvaging them from the sealed narrative projected by the curator. To complete this task Snyder drove Hoffmann’s route in reverse, driving throughout Texas and Eastern New Mexico. Highlights of this project included a Stetson placed on the grave of Blind Lemon Jefferson, pouring back sand “stolen” from White Sands, New Mexico and a 1950s era Lone Star beer can donated to the permanent collection of the San Antonio Museum of Art, which was converted in the late seventies from the historic Lone Star Brewery that the can came from over half a century ago.Hills Snyder lives in San Antonio, Texas.