Artist statment: "My practice is an exploration of the impossible absolute of biracial identity. Considering W.E.B Dubois theory of double consciousness, I am interested in redefining what visualizing the duality of a mixed-race experience can be in terms that are both personal and cultural. It’s a way to attempt to express my internal dialogue of existing in between fixed identities, black and white. Making paintings that are visual embodiments of past histories and present trauma, I aim to confront social and racial realities by creating unsettling moments through which we consider how dynamics of race are foundational to America.
The subjects and the landscapes of my paintings may be familiar, familial or historical. The colorfully, loose and audacious strokes on cotton canvas create representations that are coded in injustice, disinvestment and the resilient fortitude of people who have endured under tight constructions of identity. The cotton canvases remain partially unpainted, giving the impression that the surface is activated with white paint. It’s one strategy of engagement that seeks to force the viewer to account for the erasure of black achievement, history and identity under white supremacy. My use of impasto techniques next to tonal washes aim to liberate the paintings from a legacy of American portraiture which doubles as a metaphor for a history defined by perfection and exclusion. The strokes of color contending with a vacuous whiteness takes the shape of protest, in form. I utilize a mosaic style to build the flesh of my figures as a way to articulate racial confusion. On my canvases where whiteness seems to engulf color, rendering the figures and scenes incomplete, the racial absoluteness of both whiteness and blackness are evoked both conceptually and visually."
Chase Hall (b. 1993, St. Paul, Minnesota) lives and works in New York and Los Angeles, and was raised across Minnesota, Chicago, Las Vegas, Colorado, Dubai, Los Angeles and New York. Recently, Hall has been included in exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Kunsthalle KAdE, Amersfoort; and with the Public Art Fund, New York. In 2019, Hall attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and last year he was a resident at MASS MoCA. Hall’s work is included in the collections of The Studio Museum in Harlem, ICA Miami, and The Rubell Museum