CHASE HALL

‘The Great White Hanging (2020)’, on loan from the Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody, might be read as a reversal of power with the image of a Black fisherman and his catch of the day—a great white shark bound, tied, and strung up--- the rope eerily reminiscent of a noose.

Chase Hall’s paintings and sculptures respond to generational celebrations and traumas encoded throughout American history. Responding to a variety of social and visual systems, each of which intersects with complex trajectories of race, hybridity, economics, and personal agency, Hall generates images whose materiality is as crucial to their compositional makeup as their indelible approach to representation. A central body of paintings, made with drip-brew techniques derived from coffee beans and acrylic pigments on cotton supports, is notable for both its conceptual scope and its intimacy. The use of brewed coffee carries powerful symbolic weight since it evokes centuries-old geopolitical systems associated with the commodification of a plant native to Africa, but in Hall’s hands, it also becomes a means of achieving subtle visual textures, a range of brown skin tones, and a mark-making vocabulary precipitated on the closeness of touch. Above all, however, it is his improvisational willingness to immerse himself in the indefinable personal hieroglyphics of each picture that gives his work its resonance and impact.