Kenneth Hall

Statement

The painting is a place of construction and demolition; I sift through fragmented remains of imagery for things that I can salvage. Forms are pierced, fractured, inflated, spun, shaken, morphed, and spliced together as I rearrange them in this visual container. Source imagery comes from a multitude of places like nature video-documentaries, sketchbook doodles, and objects like toy dinosaurs, flowers, or cicada shells.

Abstraction is the means of layering and rearranging these quirky and mundane forms and spaces so that they become imbued with new meanings. I force photoreal elements together with decorative patterns and more gestural forms so that the contrast in perceptual “languages” implies a sort of violence. This is the violence that painting does best; paint-becomes-flesh and paint-becomes-vapor simultaneously.

Increasingly my work has been inhabited by figures from art history. Tiepolo, Rembrandt, and Correggio give me beautiful bodies that are being caught up either literally “into the sky” or figuratively “into rapture” as they swoon under the force of seduction. Paint becomes swirling, smeared, and pixilated as a metaphor for relational struggles; misunderstandings and unfulfilled desire between lovers. It also becomes a beautiful, raw, even sexy presence in its own right.

GlogauAIR Project

I make work as a desperate attempt to reconcile or process the disturbing violence I see in the world. I approach painting as a strategic ground for exploring emotional content. Spatial ruptures and dynamic formal elements create a sort of pictorial or aesthetic violence when superimposed with the human figure. A tragic quality emerges when the body is subsumed by its environment.

While at GlogauAIR I have been using collage as a technique in my painting process, both for the source imagery of the paintings and in making the finished pieces. I have been attracted to figures from the Old Masters; they invoke a sense of timelessness in my work. They function as surrogates within the paintings, referencing the original narrative, but also opening up new meanings and potential. I am calling the current project LOVEBOMB.

CV Summary

b. 1967 USA

EDUCATION

• 2007 Miami University, Oxford, OH (MFA Painting)
• 2004 Columbus College of Art and Design, Columbus, OH (BFA Painting)

SOLO AND TWO-PERSON EXHIBITION

• 2012 Fragments, Parkland College Art Gallery, Champaign, IL
• 2011 Fallout (2-Person), Waldemar Schmidt Gallery, Wartburg College, Waverly, IA
• 2010 Between Here and There: Painting and the Unseen, Mt Mercy College, Cedar Rapids, IA
• 2008 Zones of Permeability, ARC Gallery, Chicago, IL
• 2008 Escape Routes: Recent Drawings and Paintings, UNI Gallery of Art, Cedar Falls, IA
• 2008 Cosmic Rifts, 930 Gallery, Louisville, KY
• 2007 As Skin: Portals, Wormholes, and Breaches in the Levee, MFA Thesis Exhibit, Hiestand Gallery, Miami University, Oxford, OH
• 2004 Spatial Energies, Arts Annex, Grandview, OH
• 2004 Kenneth Hall, BFA Thesis Exhibit, Columbus College of Art and Design, Columbus, OH

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITION

• 2012 International Painting Annual 2, Manifest Creative Research Gallery, Cincinnati, OH
• 2011 Americas 2011, Minot State University, Minot, ND
• 2011 1st Annual Small Works, Goodkind Gallery, Glasgow, MT
• 2011 Paint Snob Invitational, Arkansas State University, Jonesboro, AR
• 2010 Magnitude 7, Manifest Creative Research Gallery, Cincinnati, OH
• 2010 Texas National 2010, Stephen F. Austin University, Nagadoches, TX
• 2010 Studio Visit Magazine, Juried Exhibition-in-Print, Issue #12, Summer 2010
• 2010 Object-as-Subject, University of Northern Iowa Museum, Cedar Falls, IA
• 2009 University of Northern Iowa Dept of Art Faculty Exhibition, Univ of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA
• 2008 Miami University Department of Art Bicentennial Exhibition, Miami University Art Museum, Oxford, OH
• 2007 International Exhibit, Marziart Gallery, Hamburg, Germany
• 2007 Aktuell: Deep Interests, Passing Interests, and Current Events, Cade Center for Fine Art, Anne Arundel Community College, Arnold, MD
• 2007 Resistance to Vision: Searching, Sifting, Finding, Seeing, Manifest Creative Research Gallery, Cincinnati, OH
• 2007 Cultivate Beauty, 930 Art Gallery, Louisville, KY
• 2007 Creative Quarterly Magazine, The Journal of Arts and Design Exhibition-in-Print, Volume VIII, July 2007
• 2006 Night of 1,000 Drawings, Artists Space, New York, NY

Gallery