§ Susan Hiller (American-British 1940-2019) Lucid Dreams IV, 1983 set of four works, C-type photograph with ink on Agfa lustre paper (each 67cm x 49.5cm (26 3/8in x 19 1/2in)) Qty: (4) Provenance Gimpel Fils, London. Exhibited Orchard Gallery, Derry, Susan Hillier New Work, March - April 1984; National Portrait Gallery, London, Self-Portrait Photography 1840s - 1980s, October 1986 - January 1987; Gimpel Fils, London, Collector's Choice II, 8 March - 28 April 2017. Susan Hiller (1940-2019) is widely regarded as one of the most influential women artists of her generation, as well as a pioneer of installation and multimedia art. Born in the USA, she made London her home in the late 1960s, where she became a key voice in the nascent counter-culture and feminist movements. Her practice spanned a broad range of media including installation, video, photography, painting, sculpture, performance, artist's books and writing. Her work often took for its subject aspects of culture that were overlooked, marginalised, or disregarded – which in turn spoke to issues of gender, class and politics. Hiller freely collaged ordinary found objects into her work, using photo-mat machines, children’s wallpaper, postcards and other commonly disregarded or denigrated aspects of popular culture, blurring the boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘low’, challenging our perceptions of cultural value After graduating from Smith College, Massachusetts, in 1961, Hiller had pursued doctoral studies in anthropology at Tulane University in New Orleans, conducting fieldwork in Mexico, Guatemala and Belize. However, she became uncomfortable with academic anthropology's claim to objectivity; she wrote that she did not wish her research to become part of anthropology's “objectification of the contrariness of lived events”. During a lecture on African art, she made the decision to abandon anthropology to become an artist. She lived in France, Morocco, Wales and India with her husband, the writer David Coxhead, before settling in London, where she made that very ‘contrariness of lived events’ the basis of her practise, focussing on the products of our society – our dreaming through commodities – that are often overlooked, ignored, or repressed. Her projects have been described as ‘investigations into the unconscious of our culture’. As she explained: “I’m committed to working with what I call ghosts, that is, with cultural discards, fragments and things that are invisible to most people but intensely important to a few: situations, ideas and experiences that haunt us collectively.” In regards to the Lucid Dreams works, Hiller noted – “I’m trying to erode the supposed boundary between dream life and waking life. The work is clearly positioned in the waking world since [it] start[s] off with photomat portraiture, but uses the disconnected and fragmented images produced automatically by these machines as analogies for the kind of dream images we all know, for instance suddenly catching a glimpse of oneself from the back… it doesn’t seem to me accidental that the machines produce this kind of image because, as I’ve been saying for years about popular, disposable imagery, there is something there beyond the obvious, which is why it’s worth using in art (the Artist quoted in Susan Hiller 1973-83: The Muse My Sister, The Orchard Gallery, Londonderry, 1984, p.25) Hiller's work features in numerous international private and public collections including the Tate Gallery, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; National Portrait Gallery, London; British Museum, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; National Museum of Norway, Oslo; Ludwig Museum, Cologne; Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; and the Inhotim Centro de Arte Contemporañea, Brumadinho, Brazil.