Gill's photographs and installations have often taken books and the printed word as source material. In 1992, she began a series of pieces that appropriate and transform books, often rendering them indecipherable. For Where to draw the line, Gill hired a typist to copy on a manual typewriter five essays she wrote (and revised with the assistance of an editor) over the preceding year, titled "Women," "Work," "Snake," "House," and "Copycat." The typist was instructed to omit spaces, overtype any errors, and repeat words as necessary to fill nine long, scroll-like sheets.
These highly personal texts are enormous, densely printed, and virtually illegible. In Gill's words, the work poses the question of "how much . . . we really give away" by putting such stories into the public sphere. Gill's text-based works allow her to experiment with the medium while maintaining a degree of privacy. They invite close looking, but remain inaccessible, and when seen from a distance they read as an abstract, variegated textile.
Gallery label from Sites of Reason: A Selection of Recent Acquisitions, June 11–September 28, 2014.
