Chase Hall (b. 1993, St. Paul, Minnesota) documents the ever-shifting lines between personal and generational narratives. Often rooted in autobiographical experience, his explorations of overarching systems of power result in works with both expansive historical sweep and intimate, of-the-moment connection. Hall has developed a distinct material vocabulary to produce paintings that arise in equal measure from careful planning and an improvised, call-and-response interaction with his pictures as they take shape before him. This process has become increasingly alchemical: the artist uses brewed coffee to make pigments that he then uses to stain cotton supports, offering an embodied critique of the ways in which oppression and trade have defined the course of global history. Hall’s images shed light on the social striations of the American collective—ongoing research focuses on the vivid presence of Black life outside of stereotypical vocational and leisure-based contexts—and show, by way of hieroglyphic symbols and painterly gestures, how forces of nature and archetypal life cycles define the unfolding of history and the creative emergence of artistic imagination.

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