Lace Under Top Loop Once: Gordon Hall

Hua International is pleased to present Lace Under Top Loop Once, Gordon Hall’s first solo exhibition at the gallery following their solo booth in the Statements section of Art Basel. Hall’s works recreate and “unmake” objects that typically recede into the background, recasting commonplace yet peripheral things in ways that compel those who witness them to consider the poetics of the everyday. Their sculptural works draw our attention to the performative capacity of objects, how motionless things might nonetheless possess a choreographic language. Hall’s works move beyond the so-called “universal” discourses of minimalism and abstraction to foster a mode of looking and relating that is intimate and variable, gesturing towards the many lives lived with and through objects.

Unfolding over three rooms in Hua International’s Berlin location, Lace Under Top Loop Once presents sculptures in wood, concrete, paper, and projected light that engage the experience of waiting—interstitial moments that seem inconsequential yet nonetheless produce profound, lingering sense memories. Many of the sculptures in the exhibition derive from furniture,inviting their viewers to question their functions,histories, and orientations. The works in Lace Under Top Loop Once—which include altered recreations of a slanted stool for trying on shoes, table legs, wooden shoe trees, and video projected on the ceiling that recreates the darting reflection cast from a smartphone screen—recall things that have once carried our weight, held the shape of an absent body, or absorbed our attention. Gordon Hall’s practice is full of replications, transitions, and cross-overs: between the object and its recreation, the specific and the general, the space of memory and the presentness of performance. Their approach to working with objects resonates with anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s contention that things, like humans, have a social life. "In some way,” Appadurai writes, "all things are congealed moments in a longer social trajectory [...] brief deposits of this or that property, photographs that conceal the reality of the motion from which their objecthood is a momentary respite."

Lace Under Top Loop Once is accompanied by a suite of performances made in collaboration with Leah Katz, Mickey Mahar, and Michelle Moura and performed over two days in the gallery with Gordon Hall. This movement originates from the sculptures and takes place on, with, and around them, responding to the desires of this group of objects as they are arranged in this specific space. Consisting of ten short pieces— four solos, three duets, two trios, and one quartet—the performances of Lace Under Top Loop Once occur at unannounced times during their three-hour presentations and take place regardless of whether there is an audience present to see them. Viewers may find themselves arriving to an otherwise empty gallery to find a performance already underway, or waiting with the sculptures for one to begin. These ephemeral, intimate, and introverted occurrences remain part of this body of work after their disappearance, reminding us of the many lives of objects beyond our human demands.

Gordon Hall is a sculptor, performance-maker, and writer based in New York. They have presented solo exhibitions at EMPAC (2014), Temple Contemporary (2016), The Renaissance Society (2018), MIT List Visual Arts Center (2018), and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (2019). Hall's sculptures and performances have been exhibited in a variety of group settings including Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2010), SculptureCenter (2012), Movement Research (2012), Brooklyn Museum (2014), White Columns (2015), Whitney Museum of American Art (2015), Hessel Museum at Bard College (2015), Art in General (2016), Wysing Arts Centre (2017), Abrons Arts Center (2017), Socrates Sculpture Park (2017), The Drawing Center (2018), David Zwirner New York (2018), Verge Center for the Arts (2019), and AIR Gallery (2021). Hall’s books include Reading Things—Gordon Hall on Gender, Sculpture, and Relearning How To See (Walker Art Center, 2016), AND PER SE AND (Art in General, 2016), Details (Walls Divide Press, 2017), The Number of Inches Between Them (MIT 2019), OVER-BELIEFS, Gordon Hall Collected Writing 2011-2018 (Portland Institute for Contemporary Art/Container Corps, 2019), Other People's Houses (AIR Gallery, 2021), and Circling the Square: Words from END OF DAY (Hesse Flatow, 2021).

1. Appadurai, Arjun.“The Thing Itself.” Public Culture 18, no. 1 (2006): 15-22.