Gordon Hall’s version of this oddly gendered furniture item is riddled with tiny nails, a laboriously achieved decorative feature that resembles reptilian skin, silvery and shifting in the sunlight. Here it stands, drained of use but suggestive of function, stiff but body-like, in the gallery. These tensions in the clothes valet point to a sense of animacy that threads through the enigmatic works in Hall’s exhibition, which shares the clothes valet’s name: END OF DAY. While most of the works hover on the edge of domestic function—a table, a chair, a bench, folded linens—they veer in unexpected directions. The leg of a table becomes the foot of a bird; the line on the floor becomes the seam of some jeans; a letter becomes a step; a symbol becomes a seat. Both recognizable and opaque, the works’ forms have been drawn from the world in a variety of ways, at times retaining the materiality of their sources while elsewhere being remade in pigmented cast concrete or resurfaced with graphite or colored pencil. A shim from a past work is repoured in solid brass, shifting from an unassuming object of support to a sliver of reflected light. These alterations in form and surface hint at imaginative potentials for use, conjuring altered relationships between objects and bodies…
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