Untitled from the Super Freaky Memories Series

Craig Hill

collage and decollage on paper

2018

$300

Season’s Greetings

artwork by Craig Hill

holiday greeting card

$4.00 for two cards

Artist Craig Hill collects comic books, cheap plastic toys, vintage wallpaper, old magazines, and sewing patterns. Hill is interested in the histories of these objects, their messages of modern life, and their connections to cultural nostalgia. The Santa at the center of Hill’s collage is evocative of the imagined frenzy of a young child’s Christmas morning, as wrapping paper, toys, comics, and kitsch are strewn across the floor and under the tree. This sense of excess, punctuated both by religious iconography (Jesus in white robes on the left) and overt sexuality (a buxom brunette in distress at the right), is emphasized by the density of his composition. The swirl of colors and fragments of texts suggests a psychedelic, almost dreamlike flashback to one’s own childhood, or to a mid-century American fantasy of violence, religion, and desire – a Super Freaky Memory.

Designed and printed by Ejecta Projects, the accompanying note card reproduces Craig Hill’s collage. Send it to family and friends this holiday season as a unique greeting in these distanced and disorienting days; it will also reflect a love and longing for seemingly simpler times. 

Craig Hill is Associate Professor of Art at Kenyon College, where he teaches drawing, painting, and printmaking. In using well-known childhood imagery such as super heroes, toys, and ray guns, Hill creates works of art that often examine issues of masculinity and male rites of passage.