E-Minor’s starting point is a linoleum tile depicting a clown’s face that existed in the basement of Hill’s grandparents’ home on Staten Island, New York. The clown in question was Lou Jacobs, a German-born American who became the first living person to be placed on a US postage stamp with a cartoon-like rendition of his grinning expression. The iconography of the clown, together with the pervasive pop culture metaphor of the threatening basement space, become vehicles through which Hill explores the darker side of western cultural life by asking what lies beneath its surface.
The location of the artist’s grandparents’ home in New York takes Hill back to the city that she comes from but has never lived. This geographic fragmentation between the US and Europe becomes the impetus for E-Minor’s weaving together of a kaleidoscopic visual essay that expands from the artist’s family history to themes of grief, time, memory, and ghosts amidst the constrictive binds of capitalism in the western world.
In addition to New York and its islands, E-Minor draws upon and includes footage captured in and around other island locales – England, Ireland, Sardinia – each of which represent Hill’s personal journey through pattern recognition, exploring and making visible the realities of human experience within a landscape of encroaching division and nationalism. In this, the film builds upon her previous work, Crowtrap (2018), which centred upon the UK political climate and its imminent withdrawal from the EU.
Like the ubiquity of linoleum – the material in which Jacobs’ face was embedded – E-Minor pulls up a veneer to reveal a series of uninhibited and potentially liberating truths. It is a film that dwells in the spaces of confusion, fragmentation and irrationality in order to reimagine the homogenous and toxic systems that characterise contemporary western society.
