Eli HIll

Region: Northeast

 I create oil paintings inspired by my fascination with how humans order and classify gender, sexuality, and the natural world. My paintings merge figurative and landscape traditions, calling attention to the ways in which bodies—celestial, earthly, or otherwise—are routinely subject to binaries, alienation, hierarchy, and the struggle for survival and self-actualization.

My paintings speak to the problematics of anthropology, the subversion of the naturalist’s impulse to categorize, and the painter’s age-old communion with nature. I often create configurations of personal, political, and scientific concerns and draw parallels between the transgender body and planet Earth.

Often, transgender lives are framed around heightened states of being, such as joy or death. I aim to depict life between and outside of this binary. The figures in my paintings experience a wide range of emotional and somatic experiences like frustration, confusion, apathy, and affection, among others. Using narrative compositions, saturated color palettes, and complex layering processes, I aim to make the internal world visible to the viewer through my imagery and materials.