Gordon Hall

The Kitchen presents Gordon Hall: Hands and Knees. Animated by a transgender politics that questions the norms that govern embodied life, Hands and Knees extends Hall’s investigation into the politics of vulnerability and corporeal support. Performers demonstrate possible uses of the sculptures in weekly performances that emerge from Hall’s inquiry into the paradoxical interplay of dependency and liberation in moments of waiting. Gordon Hall: Hands and Knees is organized by Matthew Lyons, Curator.

In Hands and Knees, five sculptures wrought from pairs of existing chrome cantilever chair structures stand in impermanent positions throughout the sunlit loft in The Kitchen at Westbeth. These abstracted chair sculptures are bridged by platforms that support reclining bodies in specific and unexpected ways. As they wait for bodies to reshape themselves around them, viewers also wait for the possibility of performance. When a body prostrates on one of the horizontal structures, they may likewise wait. Hall describes the powerlessness and pleasure in this act: “an erotics of anticipation, hope, following the Muñozian question: ‘what do we do while we’re waiting for a liveable world to arrive?’”

Stripped of seats and backs and reshaped into new geometric structures, the hardware of the Breuer- popularized and mass-reproduced form is both recognizable and abstract. The snaking metal forms once designed for support now assert themselves anew and open themselves to unexpected uses. In each performance, the sculptures create a sense of physical strain and demand, and by the end are rearranged in space. They rest in their new positions—static but animated with potential —until they once again encounter other constantly transforming objects: human bodies.

Hall, who rigorously trained as a dancer and choreographer as a young person, found themselves increasingly interested in the props and costumes they were creating. They describe, “the objects in my performances got more and more elaborate until I realized I was making sculpture, not props. From the start, I was thinking about our bodies as incredible objects that can be trained and transformed and changed—not in a degrading way, but in a way of respecting the fundamental power of material objects, our bodies included. I make sculpture as a way of exploring these embodied possibilities.”

For that reason, Hall’s sculptures always come well before their accompanying choreography: they are generated by the objects’ forms, and those forms’ desires, with structure dictating human interpretation rather than the other way around. Ultimately, Hands and Knees imagines bodies emancipated from their prescribed uses. “Part of what I love about objects is that they always exceed what we might hope for them, even as the maker,” says Hall. “There's a politics of taking materiality seriously on its own terms, not as a mere tool for our own goals.”

Gordon Hall (b. 1983, Boston) is an artist whose work encompasses sculpture, performance, and writing. Hall has had solo presentations at the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer, Troy, New York; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Oregon; Temple Contemporary, Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia; and The Renaissance Society, Chicago; among other venues. Gordon Hall is represented by Document in North America and Hua International in Europe and Asia, and is an Assistant Professor of Art at Vassar College.