DEPART FOUNDATION IN MALIBU VILLAGE
3822 Cross Creek Rd, Suite 3844, Malibu, CA 90265

November 17 – January 15, 2018

FIRST WEST COAST SOLO EXHIBITION OF NEW WORKS
BY CHASE HALL
ENGAGES THE VISUAL HISTORY OF RACIAL BIGOTRY IN THE UNITED STATES

DEPART Foundation presents new works by New York-based artist Chase Hall in Saturday-Mornings. A self-taught photographer, painter, and mixed-media artist, Hall uses his artwork as a platform through which to critically engage the visual history of racial bigotry in the United States. Looking to the imagery that has validated racism through the negative typification of African Americans, Hall reveals the persistence of its readily ingestible types and caricatures. Though often presented playfully in the media, these images, in the absence of positive or heroic alternatives, impress a diminished and negating range of available representations.
By revealing the role of images in the insistent misrepresentation of race, Hall confronts its visual archetypes from sources such as cartoons, film, children’s books, and advertising to stress the perpetuity of disinformation these images inculcate. Saturday-Mornings is presented in a new dedicated project space at Depart Foundation Malibu Village, marking Hall’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles and the artist’s return to Malibu, the beach community where he spent part of his adolescence.

Hall was raised throughout the U.S and lived in Malibu as a teenager via Minnesota, Chicago, Las Vegas, Colorado, and Dubai. Now based in New York’s East Village, he works across a variety of media to articulate the reductive depictions of race and African American communities, looking to produce positive alternatives and optimistic engagements with this history. Striving to encourage a level of visual and racial literacy capable of understanding the painful inheritances of racism, Hall explores cultural narratives about “otherness” and identity that have long been disseminated uncritically through our visual culture.
The ubiquity of this imagery, and the facility with which it’s delivered through seemingly innocuous sources like children’s cartoons, commercial products, and entertainment media, is the focal point of Hall’s inquiry. A “Trojan Horse of racism,” in Hall’s words, these visual types are delivered comically, peripherally, and entertainingly, diffusing the segregating intent and effect of these portrayals. Looking at the history of these representations through the images that have reified them, Hall hopes to confront their negative effects through acknowledgment rather than disavowal.
The artist is best known for his poignant portraiture series. These photographs present candid and empathic representations of individual identity on the streets of New York, offering positive, iconoclastic, and countercultural depictions of the underdog. In contrast to these photographic works, in Saturday-Mornings Hall appropriates existing imagery, re-sensitizing his audience to the negative portrayal of African American identity in the media. Widely naturalized through historical reiteration, and absorbed from infancy by children, these portrayals function as cultural mechanisms to encourage segregation and perpetuate racial divides.
Saturday-Mornings presents a series of new paintings alongside a video work by Hall exploring
existing caricatural representations of African American identity from the present through the past. By looking to character types like the “mammy,” the “Uncle Remus,” the mistral, the jester, the addict, the puppet, or the fool, revealing just how widespread and available these ‘types’ have been in the visual landscape, Hall addresses the culturally impoverishing effect these impersonations have had on communities from within and without. Seldom depicted as hero or protagonist, the narratives available in the depiction of race are few.
By unpacking and re-appropriating some of the imagery that has perpetuated these sub-human
representations of African Americans, ultimately as visual justifications for prolonged racial inequity, Hall hopes to address the individual erasure and collective denial these images have enacted. By acknowledging the cultural legacy of misrepresentation, one that continues to infiltrate the media, Hall’s gesture of reclamation is a hopeful call for increased cultural cognizance and reparation.
Saturday-Mornings is on view at DEPART Foundation Malibu Village, concurrently with Sea Sick in Paradise, a group exhibition exploring diverse expressions of identity at the intersection of art and surf culture.

CHASE HALL
Born in 1993 and raised across Minnesota, Chicago, Las Vegas, Colorado, Dubai and Malibu, Chase lives and works out of his studio in the East Village of New York. He has been included in exhibitions with: IMMA Project Space in Ireland, Cob Gallery in London, Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, Moms favorite in Los Angeles, Sheridan in the Bronx, Edward Minskoff Project Space in NYC, among others. He has released the publications: Gaucho, Come, Irie Jesus, Mug, Milk and Honey, Milk and Honey II. His work was awarded “The Best VICE Photos of 2016” and his artwork has been featured in: Vice, Vogue, LOVE, Munchies, Arteviste, Patter, COEVAL and Dazed.

DEPART Foundation
DEPART Foundation provides an alternative platform for creative experimentation and exploration, set within a global context, that thrives outside of conventional, cultural structures. The impact of its work can best be understood as the charting of new artistic destinations with every project and program it undertakes.
Since its founding in 2008, DEPART Foundation has served as a catalyst for the Italian art and cultural community, strengthening the dialogue between Italy and the international art world.

DEPART Foundation has actively encouraged artistic production through sponsorship of young and established artists and the provision of space and resources conducive to research, production and exhibition of new work, and to the presentation of educational and public programs.
Some of the most interesting and dynamic artists of our time, from around the world, have been presented for the first time in Rome by DEPART Foundation. They include Cory Arcangel, Joe Bradley, Nate Lowman, Ryan McGinley, Tauba Auerbach, Darren Bader, Louis Eisner, Roe Ethridge, Sam Falls, Mark Flood, Elias Hansen, Brendan Lynch, Oscar Murillo, Sarah Braman, Seth Price, Jon Rafman, Stephen G. Rhodes, Amanda Ross-Ho, Sterling Ruby, Lucien Smith, Valerie Snobeck and Frances Stark. Since 2014, DEPART Foundation Los Angeles has presented solo exhibitions for Gabriele de Santis, Kour Pour, Grear Patterson, Petra Cortright, Mark Horowitz, Giorgio Andreotta Calo, Cameron Platter, Edward S. Curtis, Ulay, and Michael Pybus.