JAMES HARRIS GALLERY

Ronald Hall
“Remnants”

November 9 to December 14, 2024

James Harris Gallery is pleased to present our first solo exhibition with New York artist Ronald Hall. The artist combines fiction and nonfiction in his narrative paintings, crafting otherworldly spaces where figures contemplate and navigate the complexities of the past, present, and future. Hall’s creative process is greatly influenced by Surrealism; reverberating its historical practices of creating an atmosphere where everything can be called into question. It allows Hall to challenge our buried histories and bring to fore the truths of the Black experience. The subject of his paintings often draws from actual events as well as from his personal experiences growing up in the 1970-80s in the challenging environments of Pittsburgh. Hall’s portraits and narrative compositions investigate ideas of race and class to reevaluate American history through the lens of the Black diaspora.

Hall paints with a heightened sense of color to create mystery, mood and ambience. Using digital tools in his creative process before each painting begins, the artist is able to experiment with color and scale, allowing him freedom to create a world that destabilizes reality, while also expressing hopes, dreams and revolution of a more inclusive future. Hall transforms familiar domestic spaces, southern plantations, and various architectural structures into dreamscapes to investigate past and present issues of systemic racism. He often references protest imagery from the civil rights era
as well as other media references to expose racial bias. He delves not only into the history of emancipation but also the horrors of the events that led to systematic exploitation of people of color. Drawing on his decade long career in the video gaming industry has enable Hall to depict a noir cinematic world in which the action is familiar yet ambiguous. This tension imbues his compositions with a state of suspended animation where the action is waiting for the viewer to play it out. He exploits this conflict through visual cues but where specifics remain elusive.

In the painting titled “The Rebirth”, birds fly over a pastoral landscape based on the John Savage 1787 painting of George Washington’s Mount Vernon’s plantation. In the left foreground, a man stands with his back to the viewer wearing a T-shirt with an image based on the art of the Black Panther Party. The shirt is an homage to Emory Douglas who created the artwork for all of the Black Panther’s propaganda. On the right side is a little girl holding strings attaching to smaller marionette-like figures symbolizing the importance of strong family ties within the black community. The strings also refer to the history of slavery in America and how Black families are still affected by it to this day. In the background, Hall has painted a large windowless multi- story building with ribbons of energy coming out of its roof to enhance the ominous mood of the narrative. Hall’s combination of elements from past and present evokes an unsettling feeling.

Challenging artistic conventions of Black representation and the shadows of its history, Hall’s hopes to question the underlying truth of growing up Black in America. He keenly uses familiar elements and recognizable imagery to investigate contemporary political, racial and social constructs that still exists in our world today. By drawing attention to our misapprehensions and using a combination of visually signifiers, Hall creates poetic moments that questions the past and present. More importantly, he is creating a more positive future for all of us.

A Pittsburgh native, Hall honed his artistic skills at the High School for Creative and Performing Arts, the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In 1999, he relocated to Seattle, becoming an artist-member of a Seattle based gallery called Gallery 110 and showcasing his work at prominent Northwestern institutions like The Tacoma Museum, The Seattle Art Museum, and The Wing Luke Asian Museum. Hall has been honored with numerous prestigious awards and grants, including the Gottlieb Foundation Grant, the Pollock-Krasner Grant, Headlands Center For The Arts Residency, a 2024 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Painting, The Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, The Bronx Museum of the Arts AIM Program, the Lillian Orlowsky and William Freed Grant, and the 2013 Artist Fellowship Award in Seattle.

“Storytelling”

November 9 to December 14, 2024

James Harris Gallery is pleased to present a group exhibition titled “Storytelling” featuring the work of Barbara Earl Thomas, Gary Hill, Jenny Holzer and Mark McKnight. The show depicts the many strategies used by artists to imply or construct narrative. The consistent element between the objections in the show is the use of the color black and its tonal quality to imbue a work with mood and atmosphere. Each of the works evoke a narrative, either real or fictitious, through language or image. By using visual cues each artist, leads the viewer on a journey to question what is seen, missing or heard. In this way the individual pieces communicate their own story.

Barbara Earl Thomas, creates deeply complex compositions through cutting and removal. Her large-scale linocut titled “In Case of Fire” depicts a turbulent scene of burning buildings in a flooded landscape where boats and people are being swept away. Two men grapple with a monstrous size snake on the left while a giant rooster wreaks havoc on the right. This stunning black and white composition tells a narrative of religion, mysticism and personal discovery.

“Eathskin” by Mark McKnight reflect his ongoing engagement with black and white photography. Through framing, composition, use of light and shadow, he produces a reality that upends its reliability as mere documents. Two craters appear paradoxically corporeal. The picture suggests time, desire, and deterioration but also, they occupy a kind of interstice. Situated between the real and the surreal, direct representation and construed meaning, the terrestrial and the ethereal – the picture illuminates the medium’s broader poetic and transformative potential.

Known for her LED installations that used text to delivery social critique, Jenny Holzer in the mid 2000s began a series of paintings and prints based on the declassified US documents concerning the War on Terror. In this five-panel etching titled “AKA,” the artist transforms these redacted documents into a powerful graphic story. Several times larger than their original size, the suite of prints, communicates a visual narrative from what is missing. The viewer can only guess at the truth.

Gary Hill investigates an array of issues ranging from the physicality of language, synesthesia and perceptual conundrums to ontological space and viewer interactivity. “The Whisper Room” uses the moving image as well as language to create an encounter with the artist. A small video monitor mounted upon a microphone depicts someone entering a sound proof booth, the camera slowly approaches a mic until its spherical grille becomes the central image. Through the headphones, the viewer listens to a narrative written by the artist, describing human connection of present and past.

James Harris Gallery
4829 Gretna St #102
Dallas, TX 75220
214.272.8427

gallery hours. wednesday—saturday // 11:30am to 5:30pm.

jamesharrisgallery.com