LOOK HERE!
Jake Hill
Today is the last day to view the Look Here! exhibition at Milwaukee’s Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum. So, this week we present the work of Milwaukee commercial and fine-arts photographer Jake Hill, one of the 15 Milwaukee-area artists who created new work based on their research in UW-Milwaukee Libraries’ distinctive collections -- Special Collections, Archives, Digital Collections, and the American Geographical Society Library (AGSL). Jake is interested in incidental, marginal, and overlooked spaces; places that one might initially view as unaesthetic. Not unlike the photography of Ed Ruscha, Jake captures these unsung environments and somehow elevates them into vignettes worthy of notice.
Jake Hill was the only artist in the Look Here! project not to conduct research in the distinctive collections themselves. Instead, he took the project’s title, Look Here!, literally. He wanted to bring focus to those spaces within the distinctive collections that the public would never see, but especially those that even library staff give little consideration. Working with the curators of these collections as guides, the result is a Ruscha-like vision of the library’s distinctive collections that emphasizes the mundane, the ordinary, and sometimes even the disorder in those places that are often elevated in the popular imagination, and even among library staff. We showcase ten images from this series. Click on the images for their identification.
Among our favorites in the series is the final one shown here, which is a portrait of the lonely staff lounge in the library’s windowless lower level. There are two staff lounges in the library, this one in the basement and another on the top floor filled with natural light and lovely views of the campus, the library’s green roof, and Milwaukee’s downtown three miles in the distance. Of course, library staff use the latter exclusively and completely neglect the former. Jake Hill captures this isolation by presenting the lounge as a pristine time capsule of its mid-1970s decor. As if to emphasize its liminality, a spectral figure appears to emerge from the left (actually our head of Special Collections Max Yela).
Although today, September 16, is the last day to view the show at Villa Terrace, we are making plans to remount part of the show in the exhibition gallery outside Special Collections starting in November, so there will be at least one more opportunity to view the outstanding original work by the 15 artists in the Look Here! Project.
View more posts about the Look Here! Project.
