Reclamation

Description

Michael Hall received his MFA from Mills College in 2008. For his MFA exhibition Hall presented
several large-scale oil paintings depicting animals in degrees of stress as metaphoric stand-ins
for corporate malfeasance and social excess. The paintings were oil on canvas, deftly brushed,
with a subdued palette. Fast forward to Reclamation, Hall's recent series of oil paintings. His
focus turns to surveillance bunkers constructed during WWII, located on what is now known as
the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Overlooking the Pacific Ocean, the area proved
strategically important, providing the bunker/look-out posts a watch-guard to the East.
The buildings came to Michael's attention while he was a Graduate Fellow at the Headlands
Center for the Arts, located in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area since 1987. Michael Hall
talks of his experience, "While a Graduate Fellow at the Headlands Center for the Arts, I became
fascinated with the bunkers dotting the coastal landscape of the Marin Headlands. The coastal
defense structures remain in a dilapidated form today – resting military monoliths in the now
public land of the National Park Service. Facing the Pacific Ocean, the bunkers are slowly being
reclaimed by the land, giving way to erosion".
The look-out posts happen to be located in some of the more spectacular natural landscape that
California has to offer. Hall's paintings contrast that backdrop of WWII history with the
spectacular environment in which these edifices exist. Michael further explains, "Reclamation is a
painterly exploration of the coastal defense structures located in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Based in the history of landscape painting, but injected with remains of the complicated military
history in the region, the paintings imagine the bunker’s further dissolution into the landscape
and highlight thier isolated and largely forgotten past".

More Info

Link

http://www.patriciasweetowgallery.com/exhibitions/current.ph...