HOUSEWORK(S)
Pam Hall
Central Gallery
January 17 to March 14, 2015
Curated by Dr. Melinda Pinfold
Pam Hall is an interdisciplinary artist working across and sometimes in between the boundaries of medium and discipline. She makes visual art, constructs installations, works with language and is engaged in film, video and, most recently, performance. She works alone (inside and outside of her studios) and collaborates with others (sometimes individuals, sometimes communities). Based in St. John’s, Newfoundland, she travels extensively to pursue the creation and presentation of her work. She also teaches graduate students in the United States. Her work has been shown throughout Canada and internationally.
For Hall, art’s work and thus her work is social labour. In identifying her (art)work in this way, the artist signals her awareness of the human condition. Despite often strenuous and even coercive efforts to silence, marginalize or ignore them, the voices of (all of the) Others are always and everywhere present. One only has to listen for them. Hall celebrates the extraordinary that she finds in so-called “ordinary” lives. Her art is intentionally provocative. More importantly, her works are embarkation points that invite responses and engender candid conversations.
HouseWork(s) represents a decade (2004-2014) of creative work. This exhibition shares the artist’s reflections, daily gestures, invitations and exchanges with people across the nation and around the world. Hall engages us in serious word play with her choice of title for the exhibition. “Housework,” generally, is understood to be women’s work. But Hall challenges some of the gendered connotations of this term. The word “house” functions as both a noun and a verb. “House” may refer to a structure or an action. As a structure, a house could be a shelter, a place of refuge, a dwelling or a sacred space. As an action, however, “to house” is to hold, to encase, to collect, to protect or to accommodate.
Prominent throughout this exhibition are four suspended “five-pole houses.” These structures hover above the floor of the Gallery. They invade, inhabit and physically reconfi gure the space. We have to deal with them. With HouseWork(s), the artist confronts our complacency, alerts us to our humanity and reveals the complexities and layered associations underneath the skin of the easy and familiar.
Pam Hall: HouseWork(s) is organized by The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery Division, St. John’s Newfoundland, with support of The Canada Council for the Arts.
Installation view of Pam Hall: House Work(s)
Photo: Devon Lindsay
