Doug Hall
In Silence brings together excerpts from four different bodies of Doug Hall’s work spanning over twenty years that explore the theme of archives through its quintessential medium—photography. The earliest work is from The Archive Project (1995-96), created while Hall was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome. These photographs of ancient archives in Naples and Rome reveal a humanist need to order that is being replaced and made widely available through the internet, furthering a process of democratization Hall characterizes as “devour[ing] epistemological palpability, its aura as well as its vain will to order.
Doug Hall has worked for over 40 years in a wide range of media, including performance, installation, video, and large format photography. In the 1970s he became prominent for his collaborative work with the media art collective, T. R. Uthco, which, among many other works, created the video and installation, The Eternal Frame, 1976 (in collaboration with Ant Farm), a reenactment of the Kennedy assassination, filmed in Dealey Plaza, Dallas. Public collections include the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Contemporary Art Museum, Chicago; The Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, California; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Vienna; The San Jose Museum of Art, California; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Among the grants and fellowships he has received are those from The National Endowment for the Arts, The California Arts Council, The Fulbright Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, and The Guggenheim Foundation. He is the co-editor (with Sally Jo Fifer) of Illuminating Video (1991, Aperture Books, New York). Hall is represented by Benrubi Gallery in New York City and Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco. He is Professor Emeritus at the San Francisco Art Institute.
For press and other inquiries, please email: info@benrubigallery.com
Gallery hours: Tuesday - Saturday 10-6pm
Doug Hall received a BA in anthropology from Harvard College in 1966 and an MFA in sculpture from the Rinehart School of Sculpture of the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1969. That same year he moved to San Francisco where, in the late 1970s and early 80s, he came to prominence for his pioneering video and performance, done as a founding member of the multimedia art collective T.R. Uthco, as a collaborator with another San Francisco Bay Area collective, Ant Farm’ and, when those groups disbanded in the late 70s, as an individual artist.
In the late 1980s Hall’s interests shifted from video and installation to include large-scale photography, both as a means to critically document the way that spaces and visual structures organize and define human activity, and in order to remove the predetermined temporality of video from his audience’s experience of the work. Using digital technology to generate a resolution and focal depth beyond the limitations of the human eye, Hall pushes his photographs past the realm of literal description, ushering the viewer into an allegorical space in which the act of seeing itself comes under scrutiny. His images often “critique society,” in the words of one reviewer, “but he leaves his conclusions ambiguous
Hall’s work can be seen in the public collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Contemporary Art Museum, Chicago; The Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Archive; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Vienna; The Whitney Museum, New York; The Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis; and The Miami Museum of Art, Florida. Among the grants and fellowships that he has received are those from The National Endowment for the Arts, The California Arts Council, The Fulbright Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, and The Guggenheim Foundation. He was the 1995/96 recipient of The Gilmore D. Clarke & Michael Rapuano Rome Prize in Visual Arts from The American Academy in Rome. Currently he is Visiting Artist at the California College of the Arts, San Francisco/Oakland.
DOUG HALL
Mar 12 - May 9, 2020