Blair Saxon-Hill - Artists - Nino Mier Gallery

Upholding the Broken: Blair Saxon-Hill Interviewed by Ksenia M. Soboleva December 2022

When I first saw Blair Saxon-Hill’s assemblage installation at the 2021 New Museum Triennial Soft Water, Hard Stone, I instantly knew that I wanted to be in dialogue with this Portland-based artist. Her use of discarded materials and found objects spoke to my ongoing interest in queer artists’ engagement with the supposedly disposable fabrics of everyday life.

FRIEZE

‘Refreshing and Mighty’: Cecilia Alemani’s Top Choices for Frieze New York 2021 May 2021

The first time I saw these works I was reminded of Italian artist Enrico Baj, who like Blair, loved to combine scraps of fabrics, trimmings and found objects to compose seemingly grotesque portraits. In this presentation at Frieze, Saxon-Hill brings a cohort of formidable portraits, alternating large canvases with modest collages. Take a close look to appreciate all the details of the surface!

New Museum

2021 TRIENNIAL: SOFT WATER HARD STONE April 2021

The title of the 2021 Triennial, “Soft Water Hard Stone,” is taken from a Brazilian proverb: Água mole em pedra dura, tanto bate até que fura (Soft water on hard stone hits until it bores a hole). The proverb can be said to have two meanings: if one persists long enough, the desired effect can eventually be achieved; and time can destroy even the most perceptibly solid materials. The title speaks to ideas of resilience and perseverance, and the impact that an insistent yet discrete gesture can have in time.

ARTNews

2021 New Museum Triennial Reveals Artist List, Putting Focus on Perseverance April 2021

The New Museum Triennial, one of the few biennials set to take place this year, has revealed an artist list for its next edition, which is due to open in October. Organized by New Museum curator Margot Norton and Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles senior curator Jamillah James, the exhibition will focus loosely on forms of perseverance and the ways that the past informs the present.

Oregon Live

5 Portland Artists Recognized with $25,000 Joan Mitchell Foundation Grants Featuring Blair-Saxon Hill January 2019

The Eugene native and Portland artist works at the intersection of several mediums, including photography, sculpture, painting, printmaking and site-specific installations. In 2015 she described her work to Oregon Arts Watch as prompting “considerations of material, space, presence and absence".

Artforum

Critic’s Pick: Blair Saxon-Hill Winter 2016

To be common is to be many things: popular or plentiful, lowbrow or uncivilized, a thing which two or more people can share, an icebreaker. In Blair Saxon-Hill’s exhibition, visitors are welcomed by a theatrical gathering of characters just slightly larger than the average human and constructed from proletariat materials, such as cardboard, clay, sticks, and borrowed wares including umbrellas and handbags. They float on the walls in dialogue or as if they were a choir.

Artforum

Critic’s Pick: Blair Saxon-Hill May 2015

At a glance, Blair Saxon-Hill’s newest assemblages appear to be the relics of an indeterminate past. Their distressed surfaces and moody hues evoke postwar movements such as Arte Povera and Nouveau Réalisme, and the artist’s iconography feels similarly dystopian in its overt humility bordering on impoverishment.

Frieze

Portland 2014 June/July 2014

In the April issue of frieze, Dan Fox prefaced his review of the 2013 Carnegie International with some observations about the perplexing lack of consensus around what, today, a biennial is actually for. ‘Portland2014’ is the third in this current formulation (the Oregon Biennial ran from 1949 until 2006) but its agenda and format are still, evidently, very much up for grabs.