EFA STUDIO PROGRAM: Member Artists
Janet Loren Hill
In compositions shaped like a binocular’s viewpoint, I paint surreal characters who play out propaganda techniques and warped ideologies from the past and present. The main characters in this series are the Chattering Teeth (based on the 1950s wind up toy of the same name) and their crowned followers. These noise makers are up to no good, misdirecting and fuming nonsense dogma. Humming from their vibrations, they churn inside fields of perceptual color built from countless tiny marks. Colors that only fully merge through optical mixing in the eye of the viewer.
From these charged color fields, plants begin to bloom. Each is carefully redrawn from historical propaganda posters and contemporary manipulative media in which state power uses the beauty of nature to obscure coercive ideologies. These floral symbols trace global histories where control wore the mask of care, including the Lebensborn program in Germany, Red Scare-era campaigns in the United States, QAnon’s infiltration of wellness spaces, and China’s One-Child Policy.
Alongside these painted viewfinders, triangular pennants flutter with signs of unrest. The Hammerheads move through them, not in triumph but in struggle, tugging at roots, torching seeds, their gestures half-finished, caught between defiance and fatigue. For a time, the fields shift. The visual order begins to fray. But the uprooted plants do not vanish. They drift, accumulate, and reassemble. Their petals cling to boots, their vines curl back into cracks. The Hammerheads press on, even as the symbols they resist multiply. Theirs is not a clean revolution. It is a looping one that labors against forgetting and insists, again and again, on the possibility of rupture.
Janet Loren Hill is a New York City-based artist and educator whose work exists at the intersection of textiles, ceramics and painting. Dripping with absurdity she has built a world around the Chattering Teeth and Hammerhead People who play out propaganda techniques within her paintings and installations. Hill received an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and a BFA from the University of Washington, where she also studied in Rome, Italy as part of the University’s studio art program. She has exhibited at numerous galleries nationally, including Field Projects Gallery (NYC), The Border Project Space (NYC) and Abigail Ogilvy Gallery (Boston). Her solo show, Origin Story, at Kapow Gallery (NYC) received critical acclaim in Widewalls magazine. Hill has participated in multiple residencies internationally, including Wassaic Project, Anderson Ranch, McColl Center, Beijing Royal School and The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (EFA) Studio Program. Hill’s work has been recognized in Artnet, Hyperallergic, The Boston Globe, Boston Art Review and W Magazine. In 2017, Hill was spotlighted in the MFA Annual Edition of New American Paintings by Elisabeth Sherman, Assistant Curator at the Whitney Museum of Art.
