Some of you may remember a review I did of some of the galleries and artists that partook in this last Culver City Artwalk. One of the artists, Robert Hite, had a couple of photographs up at Cardwell/Jimmerson. I immediately gravitated to these images; they possessed a quality of deep storytelling. After questioning the gallery owner on Hite’s process, I was struck by how personal and fresh the work was, and how rare it is that an artist can successfully make art that is so autobiographical yet universally relevant.

Robert Hite was raised in the deep, well-mannered, rural south. Memories of his own childhood during the Civil Rights Era — a period of segregation and the plight of the sharecropper, violence, and the decay of poverty — translate into images of haunted structures. The lean-to shacks and shelters he creates are pieced together using recollections of his youthful wanderings up creeks and through the woods of the Virginia tide waters. These black and white images seem, at first, to stand as real-life documentation. Closer inspection reveals an impossible sense of scale — the buildings are suddenly realized to be inaccessible; they are something recreated from memories that have been filtered through time, distilled and distorted through recollection.

Hite’s more recent works have taken on a sentimental quality and have become more playful. His structures have become part of the environment, accepted by living things, supported by the trees growing through the mouths of watering cans. The trees themselves are revealed as sentient denizens of the forest and swamp, and seem to be reclaiming man-wrought structures, lifting them up and adorning them.

Though there seems to be a different narrative when comparing past and present work, the seminal themes remain consistent, persuading us to ponder our own associations with dwellings and the possible lives within and without.

Robert Hite “Living on Earth” will be showing at The Pearl Gallery in Stone Ridge, New York, September 13th to October 26th. For more information, please visit The Pearl’s Website.

Top Image: Mud Flat House, Courtesy of the artist

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