PAF008EJ Hill, Surrendered (Total Ascent), 2025
Medium
Nylon and steel
Date
2025
Dimensions
126 x 96 inches
Photo
Carlson Art Photography
EJ Hill has evolved a rich and celebratory artistic vocabulary that brings together long-held passions as disparate as roller coaster design, historic preservation, durational performance, and sculpture. Whether building new rides or repurposing forgotten ones, Hill increasingly works at a civic scale to create inclusive spaces for beauty and abandon. Core to his work are questions about place and belonging.
Informed by his interest in amusement parks and the aesthetics of joy, Hill has created a design system comprising a series of sculptural interventions for the new Timberline, Lightning Ridge, and Paradise lifts. Hill has selected a series of vibrant colorways for the lifts that transform the familiar, utilitarian machinery of a mountain resort into monuments to exuberance. Conceiving of the lifts as a living system that changes over time, Hill has designed a series of sculptures for the lifts that will evolve further in the years to come.
At the top of the Timberline Lift, a towering white flag of surrender marks the moment where the anticipation built on the journey upward becomes relinquished to gravity and the thrill of descent. The glowing neon text “At the Edge of the Earth Lies a Love Song” sits on the Terminal at the base of the Paradise Lift, evoking the romantic power and unique intimacy of Powder Mountain’s remote and rugged terrain.
AboutTheArtist
EJ Hill was born in 1985 in Los Angeles, where he currently lives and works. In 2022, Hill presented a one-person exhibition in Building 5 at MASSMoCA, and his work has been included in the Whitney Biennial (2022; Prospect.5 New Orleans (2021); the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2021); Dallas Museum of Art (2019); California African American Museum, Los Angeles (2019); Aspen Art Museum (2018); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); The Underground Museum, Los Angeles (2017); Institut d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne, France (2017); PinchukArtCentre, Kyiv (2017); and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2016). Hill's work is in the collections of Dallas Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Institut d’art Contemporain, Villeurbanne, France; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Studio Museum in Harlem; and Whitney Museum of American Art.
