Trulee Hall

Trulee Hall deals in sensual titillation, but what unfolds does not lead to an orgasmic thrust but is a winding yellow brick road of innuendo and analogy. She flirts with illicit subjects, makes jokes and lures us in with glitter, intrigue, and colour. Moving between digital, clay animation, live action, paint, soft sculpture, and set building, Hall creates a world where darkness is as accepted as light, where characters swap medium and gender as easily as they swap dresses — a cohesive and understandable whole where anything can happen comes into being.

Painting, Hall says, is the start of it all. The place where the idea coalesces; the colour, the character, their action and the scene all are initiated on the flat plane of a painted surface. Her paintings, like all her work, are a mash up of styles and processes; they are part sketch and collage, at once surreal, naïve, abstract and photorealist.

Hall’s work is informed by her childhood growing up in the Southern state of Georgia, her current home of Los Angeles, and a background working on film sets, in artist studios and as a tech for major theme parks. This informs the alchemy of her practice, fuelling her embrace of lavish simulacra; her objects and characters are stand-ins for larger propositions or archetypes. The worlds Hall creates are enchanting and enticing, yet retain an underlying uneasy seediness that permeates their experience – inviting the viewer to question if the discomfort they feel is warranted or is a result of their own internalised prudishness.

Trulee Hall (b. 1976) received her BFA from Atlanta College of Art in 1999 and her MFA from CalArts in 2006. Hall’s first gallery solo exhibition, The Other and Otherwise, was held at Maccarone, Los Angeles in 2019. Other recent projects include All of Them Witches at Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles, Infestation, a video and sculptural installation at Paramount Studios for Frieze Projects (curated by Ali Subotnick), as part of the inaugural Frieze Los Angeles (2019). Exhibitions and screenings of her work have been held at the Rubell Family Collection, Hammer Museum, Redcat, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND), Human Resources LA, Barrick Museum of Art, Michael Benevento Gallery, OUTFEST LA, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Billy Wilder Theater, Yale Union and Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) among other numerous exhibitions and screenings internationally. She is represented by Maccarone, Los Angeles.

Courtesy of Zabludowicz Collection