AXIS Contemporary Art
- This event starts
- Thu January 5th, 2012 @ 5:00 PM
This event ends- Tue January 31st, 2012 @ 5:00 PM
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AXIS Contemporary Art: Featuring New Axis Artist, Stev'nn Hall, Toronto
STEV'NN HALL
Mixed-media Artist
Stev’nn Hall’s work represents a collision between two worlds – where photography meets painting and earth meets sky. Photography, Oil paint, ink, wax, varnish and vinyl latex all conspire to create a common ground where two disciplines coalesce. Both painting and photography, separately and together, exist in one moment to create a balance and union of elements – and its in this moment that we’re are offered a glimpse of what might lie at that unattainable and metaphysical telemetry.
In Horizon, Stev’nn invites us to look past our foreground to an infinite point beyond – an unreachable vanishing point that divides above from below, offers untold possibility, and grants us the perspective to chart our future bearing.
A R T I S T S T A T E M E N T / B I O
The artwork of Stev’nn Hall is limned with the light and memory of half-forgotten days and places. Scenes scarred by the neglect of time yet still valuable, as essential as the memory of innocence to our older selves. Hall grew up in rural Ontario “with a 35mm camera in one hand and a paintbrush in the other”. After studying Film Production at Concordia University in Montreal and then working as an award-winning television producer, Hall began thinking about something from his past and decided to follow it back - to travel that road again but in a different direction. That is the origin of his photographic work.
These are places seen by a boy riding backseat in the car, his eyes still half in love with sky. You pass them by - farm fields and overpasses and front yards full of yesterday’s plans – and yet they have a way of staying whole in your head. The photographs themselves seem a bit spellbound. There is a purposeful feeling of motion in the work, a cinematic unspooling of awareness.
He roughs up the work with sharp brushstrokes and personal scratchings which connect the images to more private associations. They’re bled through with the ambient light of 1970s cheap camera photography, all that crackling at the edges as if the pictures were stained by whiskey. Through his photographs, Hall reworks his idea of the past into his present.Through looking back Hall finds his way forward.
