This interview originally was published on Frontier Psychiatrist August 13, 2013.
My introduction to the work of Lyra Hill was on a seasonally appropriate Chicago January evening, on a second floor art gallery in Wicker Park. I walked into the middle of a performance called Brain Frame that involved Hill sitting on a ladder, in front of a projection of her comics, as she looped and processed her voice to create the soundtrack. Billed as a live “performative comix reading” the event takes place every two months in various galleries around Chicago and recently celebrated its two-year anniversary.
At the most recent Brain Frame, Hill performed one of the most terrifying things I have ever witnessed. In “Dream Home,” she dresses in a homemade demon costume, accompanied by slides that initially resemble a cabin in the wilderness but gradually devolves into an abstract universe of the mind. Her costume, dubbed Llamaman, is inspired by nightmares, and is a reoccurring character in her work. “[Llamaman]’s like a psychpomp for the audience where he takes them to this realm and it’s just very threatening and scary. All the monologues I write for him basically boil down to ‘You’re here in this dream world, I own this place, but you made it unconsciously, and you’re never going to escape because every time you fall asleep you’ll come back here.’” For me, it was terrifying to witness, but it has its effect on the performer as well. “I haven’t dreamed about him [since I started performing as him] and sometimes I wish I would. But then again I hope I really never do. Because even when I put on the costume it feels really evil and sometimes really fucks with me afterwards. I’m interested in that place, even if its unpleasant. A lot of my ideas are pretty dark and it’s one of the best ways to get there.”
In addition to Hill’s life-affirming/depression-inducing performance (under the name Night Terror, accompanied on synthesizers by local musician and Hill’s boyfriend Tyson Torstensen), Brain Frame 13 included a live rendition of the Infinite Corpse, an online exquisite corpse comic, Jeremy Tinder performing a chapter of The Eye about a mutant detective, and Sara Drake and Pup House performing “Saltwater Weather“, a dual-projector based 2-D shadow-puppet show backed by experimental musician Quicksails. Needless to say, all of these descriptions sound pretty abstract, which makes every Brain Frame such a unique experience. It’s hard to go in with any pre-conceived notions of what to expect. “I think the reason my performance is encased in this show form is because if people are ready to have a good time and if people are enjoying themselves, then they are so much more open to receiving whatever message you want to deliver.”
Hill is a recent graduate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her day jobs include being a projectionist at the Gene Siskel Film Center as well as a film archivist at Kartemquin. Originally from Sebastopol, California, she moved to Chicago to attend SAIC, after moving to San Francisco at the age of 16. Her upbringing was remarkably unique. “I grew up going to a lot of environmental protests. My earliest memory is from an anti-nuclear testing protest in the Nevada desert. I was also raised as a Pagan in a worshipping goddess spirituality called Reclaiming. It’s organized around the idea of reclaiming the divine feminine, and also if the Earth is a goddess, you have to protect her. It’s like a political, non-hierarchical feminist eco-activist spirituality.” After the move to San Francisco, she taught Reclaiming at summer camps, organized rituals, and joined the circus to learn acrobatics.
She doesn’t view her work as overtly political, but this influence certainly still plays a role in her art. “I have recently come around to the fact that even though I don’t make expressly political work, the existence of my work is political and so many of the themes that I work with are fraught and so nearly by expressing myself in a very capable, powerful way, I am being an activist. I’m making a difference in women’s lives by acting and performing in this way. I’m bringing up questions or feelings in the people who are watching me perform that I think everyone should consider or think about. I’m conscious of that influence. It’s what makes my work feel valid to me. Whenever I read “Go Down” there are always women that come up to me and say “Thank you so much, that was so good, I am so glad you made that”; they are just really grateful and moved by that performance. That’s exactly what I want to happen.”
Her early comic inspirations are the usual suspects, but nevertheless eye-opening, Alan Moore and Robert Crumb. “[Reading] Alan Moore was like ‘ok, comics can be intellectual’ and Crumb was like ‘whoa, comics can be dirty and they can be really, really weird.’ And the style of his work is so captivating. It’s so accessible and at the same time so incredibly uncomfortable and gross. That really appealed to me. Things that are beautiful and disgusting. That’s something I like.” She continues to explain why she further experimented with her own alternative comics: “The thing that appeals to me most about comics is that they can be about anything, they can go anywhere, they don’t have to have a story. The way that you lay out a page and the pace of the story is limitless and I’m fascinated by it. I’m fascinated by the timelines possible in comics, the way you can direct somebody’s eye through your drawings and in directing their eye you direct the pace and sequence of a story. The first comics I ever made were really too fussed over, but they were experiments in doing a page with no panels or just trying to do experimental stuff with comics. Before I felt comfortable in my abilities as a story writer, it was all about structure.”
In the past two years, Brain Frame has evolved from a friendly get together to full on subcultural phenomenon, and Hill is the mastermind behind the whole thing. Originally a comic artist and filmmaker, she’s gradually adding performer to her creative arsenal as well, while coming to terms with being a multi-faceted artist. “I’m still not totally comfortable with being a performer,” she reveals. “I think it’s because once you’re a performer, that’s what people know about you, and I do so many other things, that I want them all to be equal.” She also expresses a natural hostility towards performance art. “I think it’s really hard to do good performance art. I think part of the reason why is not only is a lot of it self-involved and rehashing the same shock values, but it’s really aggressive and it’s really manipulative. Even if an audience is coming to see performance art, I feel like there’s just an element to it that’s combative. I would rather seduce people before making them feel uncomfortable.”
Hill has already announced the last Brain Frame ever will be the third-anniversary. Which is not to say she doesn’t like doing it, but she anticipates will have run its course by then, and inevitably someone else will pick up where she left off. In October, she will go on a mini-tour to White River Junction, Providence, and Detroit. She is currently running a Kickstarter for an experimental film shot on 16mm. While the current version of Brain Frame may cease to exist in a year, Lyra Hill is certainly not short on ideas of where to go after.
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