Kevin Hatch

During the late 1950s and 1960s, the deterioration of private, interior life in postwar America haunted the work of the San Francisco-based artist Bruce Conner. This study focuses on Conner's artistic activity in the first decade of his career in order to explore how this preoccupation informed his early assemblage, filmmaking, and drawing. Considering Conner's work in these three different media as the product of a single artistic vision allows an elusive but important artist to come to light in all his complexity—a complexity born of his liminal position between two extremes, living and working in northern California while operating in dialogue with New York, the epicenter of the American avant-garde.