Louis Hock's artwork - films, video tapes, and media installations - have been exhibited in solo shows at numerous national and international art institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 1986 Hock completed a four part, four-hour video about the life and times of a community of undocumented Mexican workers in southern California, THE MEXICAN TAPES: A Chronicle of Life Outside the Law. The series was broadcast internationally on the PBS in the U.S., BBC in the U.K., and Televisa in Latin America. In 1997 Hock also completed a feature-length film, La Mera Frontera. The documentary work, twisted with fiction, offers a contemporary portrait of Nogales, Arizona and Sonora through the lens of the 1918 border battle between the U.S. and Mexico.

Along with the production of work for institutionalized sites such as theaters and galleries, since 1980 Hock has been engaged in a public art practice. The early 80s works, Southern California, an itinerant cinema mural, and NATURE, a searchlight/freeway signage installation, directly addressed the audience at public sites. This was followed by a series of seven collaborative, intentionally provocative media events initiated by an art gesture. Dealing with the Superbowl and San Diego‚s undocumented Mexican work force, the first was a bus billboard project in 1988, Welcome to America‚s Finest Tourist Plantation. In 1990, the “NHI”(No Humans Involved) project --- a billboard, book, gallery installation, performance, and panel --- addressed the fate of 45 women murdered locally. In 1993, Art Rebate/Arte Reembolso, sponsored by the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego and the Centro Cultural de La Raza, opened a dialogue on the “undocumented taxpayer” Installations based on these projects have traveled to the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Cameraworks in San Francisco, Art in General in New York, and other locations. Friendly Fire, was sponsored in 1996 by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The collaborative project consisted of a store and factory installation in San Diego, a website, and exhibition in Los Angeles at the Museum. In 2000, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art commissioned Hock, in collaboration with David Avalos, Elizabeth Sisco, Deborah Small and Scott Kessler, to develop a new art project for “Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000” titled oracle@casa_de_cambio. For 2003/4, the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Wexner Center have commissioned a new installation based on the 1993 media event Art Rebate / Arte Reembolso. The Puerto Rico Triennial presented another installation of Art Rebate in 2004. These public and collaborative projects have been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times. Writings on Hock‚s public artwork appear in Afterimage, Summer 1994; Is It Art?, Bay Press, 1994; Dialogues on Public Art, MIT Press, 2000; Art After Appropriation: Essays on art in the 1990‚s, Breach & Gordon, London, 2000; Intervention: Issues in Installation and Site-Specific Art, Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2000, Dialogues in Public Art, MIT Press, 2000, and The Expediency of Culture: the Uses of Culture in the Global Era, George Yudice, Duke University Press, 2004. The 2003 issue of FELIX journal contains a photo/text essay by Hock titled "Poinsettia."

In the fall of 1997 Hock participated in inSITE97, an international exhibition spanning the U.S./Mexico border region with his installation, International Waters / Aguas Internacionales. Poinsettia, a multimedia installation by Hock, was commissioned by the Ex Teresa Arte Actual in Mexico City in 2000/01. The work centered on the Flor de Noche Buena (the Poinsettia plant), and its emblematic relationship to U.S.& Mexico. La Panaderia in Mexico City exhibited Hock's Piramide del Sol: A monument to Invisible Labor in 2002. In the fall of 2003 the International Center for Photography in New York showed Hock's photos, Nightscope Series, in their traveling (through 05), “Only Skin Deep” exhibition, curated by Brian Wallis and Coco Fusco. At LAMOCA in the fall of 2004, Hock screened a new media installation, FERAL, as part of the LA Freewaves event. A single channel version of the work was then screened in Chile, Argentina, and Israel. Also in 2004, Hock screened a new digital version of his 1979 cine-mural, Southern California, at the Getty Center a one person event.

Hock has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants including the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Film Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation, and California Arts Council (2002). At the University, his research is associated with the Center for Latin American Studies (CILAS) , Center for U.S./Mexican Studies, the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA), and the University of California Digital Arts Research Network (DARNET).

More information and images: www.louishock.info