Visual artist Craig Hill’s pop culture paintings and collages will be on view at the Rebecca Randall Bryan Art Gallery from May 17 through June 13 at Coastal Carolina University. The exhibition is free and open to the public.

Hill is an artist who explores how images found in advertising, magazines, newspapers and billboards create and shape contemporary human experience. He creates large-scale paintings combining iconic images of superheroes, candy and cowboys with unexpected materials such as glitter and rhinestones.

“I have developed a visual vocabulary inspired by an archive of countless images,” says Hill. “At first, my work may appear pretty, ridiculous or naive, but all of the images and materials I use have a very specific purpose. A lot of the research for my work is done by shopping in toy stores, craft stores and supermarkets and observing how boys and girls are marketed towards. I’ve noticed there are reoccurring visual devises used to appeal to young boys and young girls. I have adapted these visual elements to subvert the appropriated images of boyhood icons in my paintings and works on paper.”

Hill earned a BFA in drawing from the Atlanta College of Art in 1998 and an MFA in painting and printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2001. Hill has exhibited extensively in group and solo shows in cities including Washington, D.C., New Orleans, Minneapolis, Boston, Atlanta and Philadelphia. Hill is currently a visiting assistant professor of art at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio.

The Rebecca Randall Bryan Art Gallery is located on the campus of Coastal Carolina University in the Thomas W. and Robin W. Edwards College of Humanities and Fine Arts. The gallery is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Thursday and Fridays from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. For more information, contact James Arendt, gallery director, at 843-349-6409.