 Mount Rushmore, 2004 Digital c-print, 49 1/2 x 64 5/8 inches Doug Hall Photographs September's exhibition at the Rena Bransten Gallery will consist of new large-scale photographs by Doug Hall. Since the 1980's, Doug Hall has used large-format photographs to show us how both natural and constructed spaces affect our experiences and perceptions of our habitats, public forums, and communities. For this new work, Hall traveled from coast to coast in the US, to Europe, Asia, and South America, documenting landscapes and cityscapes that exemplified this point of view. While the concept of the power of visual information to influence and manipulate how we see ourselves in the world has intrigued artists internationally and has long been a leitmotiv in Hall's photography, these new images when seen together have a startling resonance. Hall corrals overwhelming pictoral evidence in each image to prove his point - tourists dwarfed by the legs of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France in one photograph perfectly mirror tourists surrounded by the loose helix of viewing levels in the Guggenheim Museum in New York in another. In both photographs, the diminutive public stands confined by architectural wonders designed and constructed to impress. In Hall's photograph of Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, viewers of his large-scale photograph and tourists viewing the real thing alike, are awed by the mountain vista. The gigantic heads of presidents carved into the stone grandeur become symbols of human power that reduce the natural stone formation to billboard status. Hall's photos point out our human tendency to let no advertising opportunity go unused as well as our tendency to continually engage in self-aggrandizement. Hall studied and holds degrees from the Rinehart School of Sculpture of the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and Harvard University. He was a recipient of a National Endowmwnt for the arts fellowship in Media Arts, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, the Gilmore D. Clark & Michael Rapuano Rome Prize in Visual Arts, and a Flintridge Foundation Award for Visual Artists. He is a professor at the San Francisco Art Institute. His work has been collected by many museums including Centre George Pompidou, Paris, France, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Vienna, Austria, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. Exhibition: September 8 - October 8, 2005 Gallery hours: Tues-Fri 10:30am - 5:30pm, Sat 11am - 5pm Rena Bransten Gallery 77 Geary Street (between Kearny and Grant Streets) USA-San Francisco, CA 94108 Telephone +1 415 982-3292 Fax +1 415 982-1807 Email info@renabranstengallery.com www.renabranstengallery.com |
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