video projection, 58 seconds, 25kg plaster

Tracy Hanna “Hill Walker” 2009

[credit]

“Tracy Hanna works with video projection and three-dimensional media to explore perception and our physical relationship to sculpture. ‘Hill­ walker’ is perhaps uncharacteristic of her work in that it otters both overt comedy and bathos. We encounter a lone, heroic figure, seen at a miniature scale. Footage of a walker, climber or mountaineer struggling up a snow-covered hillside is projected onto a bag of plaster that has been formed into a cone shape that looks like the ur-form of a mountain. The form is not unrealistic enough to be cartoon-like or alarming. But nor is it realistic enough to be any mountain in particular. It merely evokes the category of ‘mountain’ with the minimum means required. The hill-walker’s progress from bottom to top takes only a minute, after which it is repeated – again and again. The brevity of the process renders the arduous efforts expended on the task seem ludicrous. It is as though men’s motivation to walk, climb, explore and conquer was merely a pathology, or an adjunct to a will­ to-power. ThewalkerseemsmorelikeSisyphus than the single-minded hero that a mountaineer must be to stay alive.