121.9 x 91.4 cm
Half Note is Chase Hall's first solo exhibition with the gallery.
With his vigorous portraits, Chase Hall creates representations that are coded in improvisation and empathy. Redefining colonial instruments and re-working their function, creating Jazz is a reminder of the malleability of sound, life and history. Hall explores the absolute of biracial identity, redefining the duality of a mixed-race experience in terms that are both personal and cultural. A self-taught multi-disciplinary artist, Hall considers the internal dialogue of existing in between fixed identities, Black and white, reclaiming past histories and residual traumas in order to consider how the dynamics of race are foundational to America.
Essay by Essence Harden
July 2020
This essay begins and ends with a rumination on fugitivity, on the notion that Blackness and Black life are a state of refusal, a negation of “standards imposed from elsewhere,” ingeniously and dexterously marking a future in a world that suggests that impossibility.1 Fugitivity is both a desire for escape of external impositions and acts that affirm (via image, performance, sound, movement, sentiment) the everyday realities of Black life. Neither the exception to anti-Black imaginings of Black people nor the pathology relegated to Blackness, the fugitive expression is one that affirms Black subjectivity for itself.
2020 has highlighted the global pandemic of anti-Blackness via a virus and extrajudicial killings wherein Black people’s deaths are exhibited as somehow inevitable and spectacle. In this deluge there is also protest, there is outrage, and perhaps most importantly, there are the fugitive visions in which Black people hold themselves, their histories, and their futurity as sacred, whole, and freestanding. February James’s and Chase Hall’s solo exhibitions, We Laugh Loud So The Spirits Can Hear and Half Note, respectively, are two beautiful and dynamic moments that call towards that state of escape. Interior scenes and sonic waves, vibrant hues and saturated fibers, affective space and diasporic routes are mapped in portraits of acrylic, watercolor, and oil.
James’s works are primarily singular portraits that weep and waver. The subjects’ eyes with weary lids overwhelmingly direct their attention towards the viewer. Burgundy, plum, and crimson oil find their ways in the faces of those in the Tethered series (#1- #6), illuminating the flow of blood that circulates just beneath the surface. Their faces are warmed, close, and intimate in gestures offering a vision of a proximity and kinship in excess of what is possible today. James’s watercolors bend and mold the figurative works on paper, shaping pools and puddles, streaks and streams for the subjects that follow.
Hall’s work is a procession of ensembles. Duos, trios, and individual subjects are framed with string, percussive, and woodwind instruments. Though static, these works convey a sway and movement in the permeation and strokes of acrylic. Hall’s subjects, with lips
that curl upwards in their corners, are enshrined within their own actions and states of making. In O’Hare, the tenderness Hall paints between an older couple is the same tenderness in Like the back of my hand, a detailed vision of clasping hands two moments that hold the textures of Black life and intimate proximity.
Together James and Hall work towards what Fred Moten names “a desire for the outside, for a playing or being outside, an outlaw edge proper to the now always already improper voice or instrument.” 2 This want for existence on the outside is a hallmark of fugitivity; it is a position that affirms a move towards liberation and autonomous subjectivity in the face of a status that should/could/would mark you otherwise. It is not lost to me that this moment presents an anxiety around exteriority as we are faced with a seemingly endless cycle of quarantining. And yet, this reality for Black people, this desire for the outside, is something historically rooted and a profound position in the “afterlife of slavery” that we exist. 3 James and Hall both offer a means to imagine that outside-ness in familial portraits and visions of Black gatherings. They are in excess of prescription shutting improvisational strokes, figures, and movement within their works. These figures do not shy away from the gravity that is part and parcel of Black life—figures and the frame itself are often pulled within the canvas as there is surely a weight present—but they do serve as a container in which life thrives and shifts. We Laugh Loud So The Spirits Can Hear and Half Note are projects of the fugitive, and life here, in the realm of the outside, thrives.
1. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/fred-motens-radical-critique-of-the-present
2. Moten, Fred. 2018. Stolen Life. Consent Not to Be a Single Being, [v. 2]. Durham: Duke University Press.
3. Hartman, Saidiya V. 2007. Lose Your Mother : A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route. 1st ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
