Bite Sizes: Maegan Hill-Carroll

Throughout the Summer Institute, we'll be bringing you Bite Sizes which is sort of an episodic mini studio visit where we get to know bits about what the participants are up to and a bit about themselves. In this episode, we speak with the Vancouver based artist Maegan Hill-Carroll who just earlier this year, had a solo show, Green Puce at Winnipeg's Platform Centre for Digital and Photographic Art. 

Hill-Carroll’s association to photography as a photographer is at a point of constructive progression. The way she has seen and worked through the medium has evolved and is evolving from her formative image making processes to what now incorporates narratives and pure colour. In my short conversation with Hill-Carroll, informs me of this reassessing as a way of looking at what it means especially for her to take pictures particularly in our present day inundation of images. And more than anything else, she is after what is more satisfying out her practice. This, she recognizes is becoming through writing. For Hill-Carroll writing is becoming a way to open up personal narratives that were otherwise incapable of surfacing through conventional photography. “A picture can’t share a narrative and that’s what so great about them. The viewer has to bring their own story,” she indicates. It is exactly why she is compelled to tell the stories she is interested in conveying outside of photography’s parameters. “The story is more interesting than the photograph.” Describing the pictures instead of showing them with the added effect of colour video streams is not only a way for Hill-Carroll to bridge over to the image she wants us to see but that where we can engage in and even soak up. 

After coming across a pair of paintings on view at LACMA, Hill-Carroll became drawn particularly by the feet and the stones. She later realized the figure within this pair was of Lucretia—a Roman figure—who was this woman who kills herself after being raped. Hill-Carroll later came across 55 paintings in a digital archive and coming into the Institute, she’s been thinking about using these painting to further integrate writing—personal and imagined narratives—further into her new venture her practice.

She tells me the interaction with peer and Chris Kraus throughout the workshop has been a really insightful. "The opportunity to delve into reading and really think critically about writing has been incredible and particularly meaningful for me to be here in my home town where I have storied for every corner."