The title of David Hilliard's upcoming exhibition, Tending to Doubt, came out of a discussion between the artist and his mother regarding the latter's bible study group. Hilliard — whose work often addresses personal and collective pasts through themes of masculinity, coming of age, sexuality, spirituality, and family ­— offers up an exhibition that allows the quest for spiritual identity to come to the fore.  His subjects will be familiar to admirers of his esteemed oeuvre.  Hilliard's family and friends often figure prominently in his work, particularly his father, a divorced navy veteran and self-taught philosopher, and his mother, fervently devoted to both Florida and Christianity.  Hilliard employs panoramas of his atheist father and his pious mother as touchstones to encourage a dialogue about spiritual exploration book-ended by these oppositions.

   

With his characteristic color panoramic style — most often presenting his pieces in two to five-part tableaux — Hilliard conveys a contiguity that affectively mirrors lived experience.  His sequences of prints present to the viewer multiple perspectives on a given scene, but the resulting visual narratives leave room for subjective interpretation of how their plots unfold.