Curated by Ebony L. Haynes, EJ Hill’s Low-slung Promises on the Tongues of the Devout at 52 Walker is, at its core an exploration of devotion, with the gallery reimagined as a “chapel of stamina,” as Hyperallergic put it. After a seven year hiatus, the exhibition revives Hill’s longtime practice of durational performance. Every day, for eight hours a day without any breaks, Hill bows on a red leather kneeler between the slight opening of a crimson-colored velvet curtain in what looks like a posture of quiet prayer. Accompanying Hill’s performance are paintings and drawings of joyfully rendered clouds and flowers, some in the artist’s signature pink and some in bright hues of orange, blue, and purple, their patterns mimicking the interlocking panes of stained-glass church windows. As with much of his practice, Hill creates these colorful works at moments in which he is responding to grief, searching for transcendence, and yearning for liberation. 

The pageantry marks a strange confluence: while Hill seems contrite, the imagery around him is light and free. Viewers are left to ponder what fills Hill’s prayers—and what might fill their own. Suffering and grieving, gratitude, joy? Whatever is animating Hill to kneel, there is also a sort of transmutation of emotion happening between artist and audience. Raised and educated in the Catholic faith from childhood through adolescence, we have to wonder if Hill is reconsidering the principles that articulate the backbone of his moral code and examining the unwavering conviction with which organized religions bestow the promise of salvation. Several critics have read this tableau through the lens of Catholic ritual, with one reviewer describing the work as a gentle—but unmistakable—form of mortification and devotion. Whatever the case, it is undoubtedly a show about faith and the weight of keeping it.