While searching for subjects for his installation Viewer, 1996, a happenstantial encounter between Gary Hill, a white middle-class Californian and Martin Cothren, a Yakama Native American, morphed into an ambivalent friendship of otherness - a twenty-year saga encompassing creative exchange and a myriad of extreme emotions and states of mind; a scribbled journey through serial frustration, generosity, paranoia, forgiveness, and deep sorrow. Perhaps the meaningfulness of their connection is an unspoken one. Nevertheless, the encounter herein becomes a vaguely linear play with living memory constructing a fluctuating space of drawings and hand written letters intercut with prose in which these two particular human beings continue to manifest kinship.
