Inside The Hill

1 In 1982 Jim Magee acquired 2000 acres in the desert outside of El Paso. On it he created The Hill, a series of structures so intricate and majestic they resemble an ancient monument.
2 For comparable feats of non-utilitarian building, in service to art or God and unintended for human congregation, you have to look back to the megalithic cultures of Europe and the Mediterranean.
3 A multipartite, Chinese box of a sculpture, sitting atop a ziggurat-like plinth, is one of two works by Magee in the first building.
4 Within the Hill’s second building, a small triptych is surrounded by a frieze of contiguous metal boxes, each filled with half an inch of motor oil. Says Magee, ‘Its called Vaccinations. We think they’re diplomatic dispatches from the last Hittite war, but no one can decipher them.’
5 The inside of the third building, looking across one of the compound’s raised causeways to the unfinished fourth structure. Here the ‘wings’ of the glass and metal floor are caught in mid-ascent.