Return, triumphant: Lauren Hall at DepARTment and Peak Gallery
Lauren Hall, who fled our lovely little country for Berlin not long after graduating from Waterloo's Fine Arts program in 2006, is back in force at the moment, showing in two places along the burgeoning Dundas West art corridor. The venues speak to Hall's rapidly evolving career; the first, the brand-new(ish) DepARTment (caps are theirs) at 1389 Dundas West, a cultural marketing agency with ties to various art instutions like the AGO that maintains independent gallery space on its main floor; and the much more established Peak Gallery, which shares the post-industrial art compound on Morrow Street with Olga Korper and Christopher Cutts.
The piece above, Doctrine of the Hinterland, is outside at Peak, the result of Hall's entering gallerist Zack Pospieszynski's Walls Competition, which is more or less that: An open call to emerging, unrepresented artists local and global to take up the considerable space on Peak's summer-bare walls.
Hall's work for the competition, an angular crystal-like form rendered from silver bubble wrap, was arresting -- enough that Pospieszynski signed Hall, a young unknown to his roster. He also gave her the gallery's outdoor space for another piece, Doctrine of the Hinterland (above), a simply-rendered mountainscape of such disposable materials as green plastic pallet wrap and simple wire clothesline.
Hall keeps her references close: From obvious engagment of the Minimalist aesthetic (I'm reminded of Dan Flavin's fluorescent tube sculptures, which he returned to the hardware store once his shows were done -- at least, before they started selling for six figures) to an embrace of the widely-held conceit of using synthetic, disposable matertials to render the heroic signifiers of our natural landscape, creating an obvious polemic between form and material, and the implied content.
That being the case, I was actually more interested in Hall's work at the DepARTment; here, the sculptures, which share floor space with work by Jebal Dolson, seem a little less of a one-liner, and more ominous in their intent. Like her orginal wall work for Pospieszynski, the DepARTment (man, that's tough to type repeatedly) pieces are geometrically complex, silvery, weird; almost molecular, the implication -- of elemental building blocks of matter, rendered from sparkly trash -- gives pause. They're also, it can be fairly said, gorgeous, which helps complete the picture. A lot.
All that said, Hall's 'unknown' status appears set to vanish; following this work, she's been chatting with the National Gallery about the possibility of showing there -- which, three years out of an undergraduate degree, is not bad at all. Stay tuned.
about the exhibition
|
