Stev'nn Hall

"Born in a scrap of a small town in rural Ontario where the road runs rough, Hall was raised by a mother with a dash of wanderlust and a father with a shot of whiskey.  His early identity was both grounded in and took flight from those places.  Hall eventually studied film production in Montreal at Concordia University in 1990 and then worked as an award-winning television promo producer in Toronto.  Still, memories of his past remained as a riddle meant to be puzzled out if not solved.

Hall's photo-based images are part of his effort to re-engage and revalue his early experience, to travel old roads but in a different direction.  Through looking back Hall finds his way forward.  There is a purposeful feeling of motion in the work, a cinematic unspooling of awareness. As Hall explains: I take many of my photographs from moving vehicles – sometimes a train, sometimes a car.  It's part of the re-creation of my childhood experience of traveling in the backseat, staring out the window, driving along the backroads, past the fields and skies and neighbor's houses.  I like the feeling of movement in the work as though it was happening, as if the still photograph was still in play.

The photos themselves feel spellbound and are bled through with the ambient light of 1970's cheap camera photography. Hall then roughs up the work with sharp brushstrokes and personal scratchings which connect the images to more private associations.  The surface resin mimics the feel of looking at the world through an old car window, inviting the viewer to draw close yet still keeping us at a remove."