Trulee Hall

The Other and Otherwise, Trulee Hall’s first solo exhibition with Maccarone, presents a surreal geography drawing on motifs of the domestic, the decorative, and the erotic. Installations comprised of video, sculpture, paintings, composed soundtrack, kinetic mechanics, and choreographed dance challenge prescribed notions of viewing by offering comparative versions of the same subject. The viewer moves through a series of discordant rooms featuring non-narrative video alongside related forms, creating multiple layers of representation. Hall invokes a fractured gaze, activating an embodied perception within the work.

Each of the artist’s willfully inscrutable spaces represents one part of an anti-linear whole that eschews a coherent narrative. Instead of settling for conventional dichotomies such as masculine and feminine, here and there, interior and exterior, we are offered both an outlier and a comparison: ‘the Other’ and ‘the Otherwise’, respectively. Alienating and rejecting the social identity of the Self, the Other is inherently distinct and separate. However, the concept of the Other relies on the Self. One cannot exist without the other, which is communicated in the Otherwise.

Similarly, Hall’s constructed scenarios are intended to be both inviting and disorienting. Imagery redolent of popular “straight” pornography is repurposed as erotic grotesquerie. These humorous, uncanny analogues propose an unorthodox perspective on sexuality; the unabashedly nude feminine form assumes both dominant and submissive roles, often turning the female gaze onto itself. Both object and subject are viewed from a feminine perspective in works like [corn fetish/snake fetish], which simultaneously challenges and compounds on the canon of the female nude. In the diptych [Country and Goth self-portraits], two women embody stereotypes of opposing sub-cultures while nonetheless retaining artistic ownership over their own image.

With these fantastical vignettes, the viewer cedes to the installation’s conceit, welcoming its shifting ground. The Other and Otherwise presents an environment that flouts convention and stimulates an intersubjective experience where artwork and audience coalesce. As familiar boundaries dissolve, the artist exorcises the isolated, disconnected “I” at the heart of the modern human experience.

As part of the inaugural edition of Frieze Los Angeles, Trulee Hall will be exhibiting a site-specific installation in Frieze Projects curated by Ali Subotnick.