You know where I'm at and I know where you’re at

While searching for subjects for his installation Viewer (1996), a happenstantial encounter between the artist 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 frustration, paranoia, generosity, forgiveness and deep sorrow. Perhaps the meaningfulness of their connection is an unspoken one. Nevertheless, the encounter herein becomes a non-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.