Download PDF - ARTisSpectrum

CAROLINE HALL M.A.
Things are really looking up for artist Caroline Hall. She was
one of the artists chosen by juror Manon Slome, the chief
curator of Chelsea Art Museum, in the 2008 Chelsea International
Fine Art Competition. She has just held her first solo exhibition
in March of this year, and was recently featured by the Londonbased
Degreeart.com as an emerging artist of note. So what is all
this art world attention about? A compelling concept: bridging the
divide between video and painting.
With a fifteen-year career in broadcasting for the BBC, Hall
has spent much of her recent life immersed in and surrounded
by the moving picture. After relocating from Berlin back to her
native England in 2001, she immediately enrolled in a Visual Art
Bachelor’s program, later graduating in 2008 with a Master’s in
Painting, all the while developing her distinctive style. She began
experimenting with video projections on canvas, altering the
imagery and speed of the moving picture.
Her matured process confounds the line between video and
painting, as Hall deconstructs digital video to remove contextual
information, leaving behind moving pixelated abstractions. She
Attempt to Capture Moving Pixels Number 10 Oil on Canvas 35”x 55”
Attempt to Capture Moving Pixels Number 10 (detail)
Oil on Canvas 35”x 55”
then projects these video abstractions onto canvas and works in a
staccato, rapid-fire manner to capture a selection of pixels as they
journey across the image plane. Hall achieves a surprising amount
of variety with her methods. Radial motion blurs race at dizzying
speeds, while others capture luminous Technicolor streaks of
color zipping vertically or horizontally across the canvas.
Her body of work is ripe with philosophical and metaphorical
connotations. Pitting the capricious human hand versus the cold,
unwavering precision of digital imagery is one. But also, within
this conceptual framework, lies a sense of time and place.
Whereas video operates only as a virtual configuration in a
series of frames, her painting captures a reflection of such events
in a tangible form and through this objectivity becomes more real
to us. It is in this pairing of opposites that Hall’s work displays it’s
true strength— condensing fleeting moments without eliminating
the energy and momentum of time.
Website: www.carolinehall.net
Caroline Working in Her Studio
24 ArtisSpectrum