Gordon Hall will present a lecture about their just-opened exhibition at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, consisting of eighteen new sculptures made from cast concrete, poplar, colored pencil, hand-dyed fabric, and carved brick. These objects feel familiar yet strange, made up of the edges of recognizable things—benches, shims, a basin, turned table legs, a saddle, tools. They ask to be used, but are not clear about how or by whom. Through this potentiality, they are rendered anew, and slightly perverted. We watch the sculptures as they watch us. Together, our usefulness is called into question. Those who spend time with this family of things are interlocutors engaged in the question, “What does it mean to be witnessed?”

Gordon Hall's sculptures and performances have been exhibited at SculptureCenter, The Renaissance Society, Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Whitney Museum of American Art, Movement Research, EMPAC, Art in General, Temple Contemporary, Hessel Museum at Bard College, White Columns, Wysing Arts Centre, Abrons Arts Center, Socrates Sculpture Park, and The Drawing Center, among others. Hall has had institutional solo shows at MIT List Visual Arts Center (Boston, MA, 2018) and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (Portland, OR, 2019), who also released an edited volume of Hall's writing, OVER-BELIEFS: Gordon Hall Collected Writing, 2011-2018. Gordon Hall holds an MFA and an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA from Hampshire College.