On a Fake Sea is a stop motion video work made up of nearly 15000 images. Drawing on the history of still life and vanitas paintings, it examines experience lived and avoided through the compulsive collecting of images and objects. The intoxicating stuff that makes up a life in avoiding its death and objects collected from the dead. What began as an attempt to uncover family histories became an exploration of these stories continued repression through object hoarding. Mourning these lost connections the work became a cathartic project that took solace in the shifting light of the studio over time, capturing sunrises and sunsets and the budding of tree outside the windows reflected in mirrors.
Artist Bio
Maegan Hill-Carroll is an artist and writer living and working in Vancouver, Canada, on the unceded and ancestral lands of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Watuth Nations of the Coast Salish peoples. She holds an MFA from UCLA and a BFA from the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, where she grew up building houses. Her work is represented by Wil Aballe Art Projects (WAAP) in unceded Vancouver and has been exhibited in Los Angeles, Mexico City and across Canada. Recent solo exhibitions include DRUNK at Vinegar Art Projects in Birmingahm Alabama and Lucretia’s Toe at WAAP. Her writing has been published in Fillip and elsewhere. She is currently working on a book project called Green Puce.