NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — Break Run Helix, EJ Hill’s solo exhibition, curated by Alexandra Foradas at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), explores amusement parks and museums as historically charged sites where joy and resistance coexist. Running from October 2022 through February 2024 and taking up three galleries and two floors in the institution’s massive Building 5, the exhibition also represents an unconventional and ambitious undertaking for both the artist and the institution.
In the month and a half leading up to the exhibition, Hill designed and constructed seven new sculptural works in the gallery in collaboration with MASS MoCA’s fabrication team. Assembled using recycled wood sourced from MASS MoCA’s wood shop and recycled neon works from Lite Brite Neon, each piece formally references parts of roller coasters and embodies the artist’s investigation into structuring and engineering joy. Upon entering the space, visitors must navigate through and around these structures, in effect participating in a choreography of joy. Indeed, Hill accomplished this by commissioning dancers and performers to activate the sculptures on several occasions.
Two smaller adjacent galleries, beyond the sculptures, contain 21 new and recent paintings, drawings, and photographs and one new neon piece. Most works on display come from Hill’s Joy Studies series (2020–22) comprised of paintings and drawings that playfully depict roller coasters, pink roses, and fluffy, stormy, or neon clouds. While the sculptures explore the form of the roller coaster and the embodied experience of traversing theme parks, Joy Studies evokes the atmospheric qualities of these rides and spaces.
At the heart of the installation stands “Brava!” — a fully functional, gravity-powered, bubblegum-pink roller coaster built into the architecture of the museum space and situated atop a large wooden platform, her stage. “Brava!” is an animate art form, whose name — an Italian phrase traditionally showered upon a female opera singer after a powerful performance — both signals her gender and emphasizes her role as the show’s principal performer. When I visited in October, Brava! was down for maintenance that lasted from mid September through early December. However, visitors can now sign up to ride the coaster during one of six daily time slots, which fill up quickly (currently every weekend is “at capacity” until late January).
In previous exhibitions, Hill has demonstrated his own stamina and strength through performance — most notably in Excellentia, Mollitia, Victoria (2018), for which he stood stoically atop a winners’ podium, without a break, every day during opening hours for the show’s three-month run. With “Brava!,” he asks the museum to facilitate performances of joy that necessitate a certain amount of endurance on their part. One wonders if the ride’s closure and sign-up process work for, against, or somewhere in between the conceptual intentions of the work?
The exhibition comes to a close in a second-floor gallery that also serves as the loading platform for “Brava!” Opposite the platform hangs the show’s only new neon work, a hot-pink message in the artist’s handwriting that reads: “promise me peril.” Peril, defined as the exposure to the risk of being injured, destroyed, or lost, refers to experiences of both riding a roller coaster and navigating the world as a Black, queer, joy-seeking individual. Indeed, whether entering a club or an amusement park, pursuing and experiencing ecstasy has necessitated clandestine and revolutionary acts for marginalized folks. In the face of this, Hill has mounted this exhibition to propose “joy as resistance, [as] refusal, as priority, as antagonism.”
EJ Hill: Break Run Helix continues at MASS MoCA (1040 MASS MoCA Way, North Adams, Massachusetts) through February 11. The exhibition was curated by Alexandra Foradas, curator of Visual Art at MASS MoCA.
