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Trautwein Herleth is pleased to present an exhibition with a new series of paintings by Kate Mosher Hall (b. 1986, lives and works in Los Angeles). Working mostly with a reduced pallet 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 this new body of work, Hall turns towards the place where she lives and works – the city of Los Angeles. L.A.: the perennial dream machine, the city of images that shape our desires, a sprawling domain built to stimulate our collective imagination. We see the city from an aerial perspective – broken up, appearing in different resolutions like a disintegrating circuit board, multiplying, becoming recognizable and then losing its familiarity. Los Angeles becomes a black screen dotted with light, mirroring the sky and stars above it. Hall's paintings are created lying flat, from an aerial perspective. They are complex layerings of different resolutions that bring differing 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 texture with a painterly practice to create intricate, often uncanny details. The title of the exhibition, Hollywood Forever, takes its name from a cemetery located on Santa Monica Boulevard. In a city where the dead are as important as the living for keeping the dream machine alive, Hall captures that city of lights and fallen angels in all its ambiguous fascination. In both observation and projection, Jean Baudrillard wrote about LA in his 1986 book, America: "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."
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