Gary Hill and Martin Cothren

the long version

The encounter between international artist Gary Hill and Martin Cothren, an Amerindian fisherman from the Yakama reserve, thrown in prison and died homeless shortly after his release: conceived by Gary Hill, this singular book alternates the story of their common history over twenty years, touching and tragic (an opportunity for Hill to look back on his own trajectory) and Cothren's letters, interspersed with his extraordinary naive drawings.0While searching for subjects for his installation Viewer (1996), a happenstantial encounter between the artist Gary Hill, a white middle-class Californian and Martin Cothren, a Yakama Native American, morphed into an ambivalent friendship of otherness?a twenty-year saga encompassing frustration, paranoia, generosity, forgiveness and deep sorrow. Perhaps the meaningfulness of their connection is an unspoken one. Nevertheless, the encounter herein becomes a non-linear play with living memory constructing a fluctuating space of drawings and hand written letters intercut with prose in which these two particular human beings continue to manifest kinship.