Opening Reception / Exhibition by Gordon Hall

Gordon Hall

THROUGH
AND THROUGH
AND THROUGH

June 8 – August 10, 2019

Opening Reception / Saturday, June 8, 2019 | 12:00 – 4:00 pm
Walk-Through / 12:30-1:30pm
*Brief performances will take place twice per hour throughout the opening.

Gallery Hours / Wed – Fri, 12:00 – 6:00pm I Sat, 12-4pm

Location for all Programs & Events: PICA, 15 NE Hancock St., Portland, OR

Brief movement scores choreographed by Hall will be performed with the sculptures by various Portland-based artists every Saturday between 12:00-4:00 PM and on every second Thursday of the month, June 13, July 11, and August 8, between 4:00-6:00 PM.

OVER-BELIEFS, Gordon Hall Collected Writing, 2011 – 2018, published on the occasion of THROUGH AND THROUGH AND THROUGH, will be available for sale at the opening reception, with an official book release and reading with Hall to take place Monday, June 10, 2019, 6:30 PM at PICA.

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Gordon Hall’s eighteen distinct sculptures, made from cast concrete, poplar, colored pencil, hand-dyed fabric, and carved brick, sit together quietly at the center of PICA’s expansive warehouse. The works deliver themselves to us slowly, requesting looking and re-looking, understood over time through a subtle language of material, color, and the relations between the objects’ constituent parts. Like a pair of clasped hands, Hall’s precisely made sculptures turn inwards and towards one another, simultaneously inviting and withholding.

Hall’s objects seek to trouble our efforts to definitively read them, preferring to perpetually waver between adjacent identities. They feel familiar yet strange, made up of the edges of recognizable things—benches, shims, a basin, turned table legs, a saddle, tools. These objects ask to be used, but are not clear about how or by whom. Through this potentiality, they are rendered anew, and slightly perverted. We watch the sculptures as they watch us. Together, our usefulness is called into question. What can we learn about our bodies, and the bodies of these objects, from this adjacency?

Correlating with the sculptures, eighteen short movement scores choreographed by Hall will be performed by the artist and a revolving cast of Portland-based performers throughout the run of the exhibition. These performances will take place even if the gallery is empty. Unlike props, the sculptures are the directors, dictating what takes place on and around them. There is a grammar to their shapes, waiting to be felt and spoken between our bodies and the bodies of these objects. Those who spend time with this family of things are interlocutors engaged in the question, “What does it mean to be witnessed?”

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In conjunction with the exhibition, an open edition of three cast concrete table-top sculptures by Hall titled Three Paperweights (Mug, Knob, and Claw) will be available for sale through the run of the exhibition. Proceeds will support the exhibition and publication.

THROUGH AND THROUGH AND THROUGH is curated by Roya Amirsoleymani, Artistic Director, Curator of Public Engagement and Kristan Kennedy, Artistic Director, Curator of Visual Art.

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Funded in part by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Oregon Arts Commission, Regional Arts and Culture Council, and Sarah Miller Meigs.

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DETAILS
Free and Open to All (All Ages)