Amy Tobin writes: ‘Hill-Montgomery’s work bisected one of Artists Space’s three galleries with a 3-foot high picket fence, painted with white enamel on its facing side and black enamel on the reverse. The fence separated the viewer from a series of large unmounted paintings on tracing paper, resembling a street of tenement buildings. In front of the fence was a strip of road, complete with markings, into which extended four open gates. Beyond that she installed “unplanted rose bushes”, and another wall-based work connecting her Harlem scene to the gallery beyond with red thread and grappling hook.

The installation title was another wordplay. Candy Coated both alluded ironically to the saccharine American dream of home ownership and to Hill-Montgomery’s authorship, ‘Candy’ being a contraction of the artist’s first name. Despite this, one reviewer – William Zimmer – managed to mistake Haim Steinbach’s sculptures, exhibited in the gallery entranceway, for Hill Montgomery’s work, and vice verse. Perhaps Zimmer presumed Steinbach’s decorative domestic works could only be made by a woman artist, or that Hill-Montgomery’s ripped, torn, scratched and burnt tenenment paintings could not. Zimmer’s mistake also resounded with racialised and heteronormative understandings of home. Steinbach’s interior in an interstitial space was kitsch, welcoming and homely, replete with animal skin, while Hill-Montgomery’s ambitious landscape, divided across dynamics of otherness, deprivation and survival, took on political issues directly and expressionistically.’