ScottFHallSculpture010

myminifactory

These pieces make up one body of work that art and design professor Scott F. Hall has been creating from 1989 to the present. Hall developed this style initially by creating large, intertwined spans of figures within drawings that were up to 3.5 meters wide. The drawn figures emerged through an automatic process of additive and subtractive mark making which often induced pareidolia (visions conjured from amorphous fields, as in cloud reading). Once noticed in the field, each figure could be elaborated upon to bring it into full view. As an undergraduate sculpture major at that time, Hall soon began creating equivalent 3-D imagery focused on a single clay-modeled figure presented in a particular pose, usually in half-bodied form (depicted only from the pelvis upward). Throughout this three-decade-long series, Hall's sculptures show figures in solitary and bound conditions: this depiction directly references Existentialist philosophy which was of focal interest to him in the late '80s during the heyday of Postmodern disillusionment. Though Hall's philosophical outlook has moved beyond Existentialism and Postmodernism, the stark and quietly tortured look of his figures persists for consistency. Every sculpture in this series remains untitled, appropriately in-sync with the surrogate nature of Hall's figures. In each case, a Hall sculpture begins as white oil-based clay on a small scale, with the height of each figure ranging about 12 to 20 centimeters. Usually, modeling is done entirely with fingers. Composition of poses (i.e., the observation of persons set into poses) happens only during study phases; these always occur prior to actual sculpting of clay. Ultimately, Hall sculpts each figure quickly and from memory. The works produced exhibit high realism in an impressionist sense: each viewer is led to cloud read each Hall sculpture for himself/herself. Following the act of sculpting, each clay figure is turntable-scanned, cleaned of stray pixels, and converted to STL file. If some artifacts of digital processing persist (i.e., small areas of faceting), Hall tends to accept these as markers of process. Several of Hall's earliest pieces were molded in silicone and cast in wax, plaster, or resin. The very first piece in this series exists as a one-of-a-kind lost wax bronze, remaining in the collection of the artist.