Biography
Trouble (2006-present) is the collaborative identity of Sam Hillmer and Laura Paris who live and work in New York City. Their conceptual and polysensory practice spans installation, sculpture, performance, video, new media and social practice. Trouble’s work focuses on boundaries between social ritual and art.
Intricate life size maze sculptures are central to Trouble’s practice. Sprawling and complex in nature, these multimedia maze installations experiment with space and audience experience, testing the capacity of maze structure to interrupt habits of assembly. Site specific performance programs curated by Trouble are presented inside each of Trouble's maze installations. Trouble has garnered attention for the visceral audience response to their maze designs: fostering temporary loss of agency by inhibiting audience mobility, Trouble’s maze work provokes psychic states that hover between ecstatic and exasperated.
Their solo exhibitions and performances have been hosted in galleries and institutions including The New Museum, The Rubin Museum, the Queens Museum, Pioneer Works, Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), The Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art, White Chapel Gallery and the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) in London. Trouble has collaborated with and worked alongside artists including Genesis P-Orridge, Tauba Auerbach, Peter Coffin, Victoria Keddie, and Jace Clayton. Trouble’s light, projection and video based environments, often accompanying musical performances, have appeared at venues ranging from underground performance spaces including 285 Kent, Market Hotel and Secret Project Robot to concert halls and festivals such as Merkin Concert Hall, Roulette Experimental Intermedium, National Sawdust, Big Ears Festival (TN), Unsound Festival (PL), Kranj Layer House (SL), Urban Nomad Festival (TWN), Club Unit (JPN), and Sengghi Studio (KR). They have supported musical artists including Laurel Halo, Miho Hatori, Tristan Perrich and Arto Lindsay.
Trouble has a long term collaboration with member Sam Hillmer’s musical projects Diamond Terrifier and ZS, and have been creating projected video environments and installations for their performances since 2010. ZS and Trouble collaborated most extensively around ‘SCORE: Live Remix Installation’ which they presented collaboratively at Ecstatic Music Festival (NYC), South By Southwest (Austin, TX), Krems on Der Donau (Krems, AUT), West Germany (Berlin, DE) and Vacant Gallery (Tokyo, JPN). Sam Hillmer also cofounded New York city based music and performance venues Trans-Pecos and H0L0, where Trouble has worked often as projectionists.
Since their founding, Trouble has fostered opportunity for young artists, supported access to the arts for undercapitalized and underserved communities in New York City and helped to shape philanthropic initiatives through their work. Trouble has advanced this social practice through collaborations with organizations including the New York State Council for the Arts, the Department of Youth and Community Development, AHRC and the Coalition for Hispanic Family Services at venues including Pioneer Works, Issue Project Room, Knockdown Center and the New Museum. Laura Paris of Trouble co-founded the CHFS Arts and Literacy After-School Program in 1993. Today Arts and Literacy serves over 2000 children and their families in Brooklyn and Queens, New York.
The phalanx of media, mediums and milieu addressed (and embodied) by Trouble’s practice is a feature, not a bug. ;)