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Trautwein Herleth is pleased to present an exhibition of a new series of paintings by Kate Mosher Hall (b. 1986, lives and works in Los Angeles). Working mostly with a reduced palette and stark contrasts, Kate Mosher Hall’s paintings inhabit a shifting space between representation and abstraction, where images seem to emerge only to recede from recognition. Often working from found digital imagery, Hall utilizes painting and silkscreen, expanding on the languages of reproduction, layering, and optical effects. In keeping with the multiple temporalities of a life that is often mediated, Hall’s subjects refuse stable recognition and meaning, emphasizing the very conditions that structure our perception and experience. In this new body of work, Hall turns towards the place where she lives and works—the city of Los Angeles. The title of the exhibition, Hollywood Forever, takes its name from a cemetery located on Santa Monica Boulevard. It reminds us that the dead are as important as the living in keeping alive the perennial dream machine that is LA, a sprawling domain built to stimulate our collective imagination. Hall presents the city from an aerial perspective: broken up and appearing in varying resolutions, invoking a disintegrating circuit board, multiplying, becoming recognizable, and then losing its familiarity. Oscillating between analog and digital, object and process, Los Angeles turns into a dark screen dotted with light, a refracted mirror of the sky and stars above it. In both observation and projection, Jean Baudrillard wrote about this overwhelming sight: “There is nothing to match flying over Los Angeles by night. A sort of luminous, geometric, incandescent immensity, stretching as far as the eye can see, bursting out from the cracks in the clouds. Only Hieronymus Bosch’s hell can match this inferno effect.” Hall’s paintings invoke this perspective of aerial descent and surveillance, and her practice of working on the canvas while it lies flat, from a bird’s-eye view, mirrors it in a material way. Her paintings are complex stacks of different resolutions that bring conflicting levels of image fidelity into contrast. Made using dozens of silkscreens, Hall builds paintings that incorporate a decidedly manual appropriation of an industrial printing process, merging familiar magazine textures with a painterly practice to create intricate, often uncanny details.
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