Artist: Robert Hite

Robert Hite is an artist whose movement out of the South and through the world suggests the essence of "yesterday won't be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago" (William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust).

Born in 1956 in rural Virginia, Hite attended Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond and the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, DC, and studied ink brush painting in Malaysia. Hite also worked for and studied with Washington Color School painter Leon Berkowitz.

Hite is inspired both by a rich Southern narrative tradition and closeness to nature. He has photographed and made a study of rural houses and shacks in Central and South America, Asia, Europe, the Caribbean and the southern United States. His paintings, sculptures and photographs come filtered through a lens on the natural world, layered with gestures of human and ecological struggle, and with sensitivity to what is beautiful, poetic and harsh within this interaction.

The imagery in his work draws upon the memories of his childhood during the civil rights era - a world that was organized around proprieties and manners but that was also charged with segregation, discrimination, and violence. The patched-together shacks and weather- beaten shelters are remnants from Hite's youthful wanderings up creeks and through woods in the Virginia tide waters.

Hite is interested in exploring issues of local knowledge, memory, transience, environment, disenfranchisement and domicile as living art. His subjects often emerge from opt-out communities (where subsistence living is more attractive than wage earning). Although these explorations inform Hite's work, his primary goal is pursuing a profound and moving piece of art and retaining the instinct to do so. Thus, in the breadth of his work - photography, painting, sculpture, and the interactions among these media - Hite realizes abstractions that are inextricably rooted in the real. He prizes meticulous attention to detail and refined technique in orchestrating illusions that are both realistic and transformative.

In Hite's series, "Imagined Histories," he takes fabricated structures out of the studio and re- situates them in outdoor surroundings, generating black and white photographs that hauntingly juxtapose the artificial and the natural, while playing with architectural scale. Recent solo shows have featured these photographs together with the sculptures themselves, magnifying the striking effects of dislocation and confounding of scale central to the images.A reviewer observed, "I immediately gravitated to these images; they possessed a quality of deep storytelling. After questioning the gallery owner on Hite's process, I was struck by how personal and fresh the work was, and how rare it is that an artist can successfully make art that is so autobiographical yet universally relevant." Emberly Modine, buzzine.com.

In 1997, Hite and his family moved to an old Methodist church and parsonage in the small village of Esopus, New York. The clapboard church, built in 1846 and carefully restored by the artist, serves as studio and muse for his ongoing meditations on the social meanings and visual potential inherent in informal buildings.