Among the incalculable ways of appreciating David Hilliard’s photographs, it is both rewarding and tempting to view them as individual components of an ongoing, Proustian novel about Hilliard’s small corner of the world. Playing with conventions of memory, autobiography, theatricality, and documentary realism, Hilliard’s work moves fluidly between scenes of bucolic reverie and sharply drawn turmoil. Quality Pictures is very happy to have received the latest “chapter” in Hilliard’s visual story: The Boston artist just released a new suite of images, “Being Like,” which contains some of his finest work to date. Hilliard’s style–as well as many of his principle subjects–will be familiar to those who know his work, but “Being Like” exhibits a level of psychological intensity and graphic subtlety that even we hadn’t prepared ourselves for. Trickles of blood, images of people fishing in lakes and rivers, other scenes of people swimming in lakes and rivers, rugged icons of masculinity, and depictions of the “Floridian Christian world” that Hillard’s mother inhabits, all reoccur throughout the new work, adding new layers of rich, humanist imagery to Hilliard’s evocative photo-epic.

Hilliard’s second solo exhibition at Quality Pictures will be held May 7-June 27, 2009. Please contact the gallery with any questions about the artist’s work.