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swathed in bands of light, the sky never hovering, but rather like a window. Doug Hall’s intimate double portrait of the Golden Gate Bridge offers unbelievable vistas, visual records of its comings and goings and inner workings in a way that completely changes our perceptions and understanding of it and the space in which it engages. Hall, a force in his own right in the San Francisco art scene, filmed container ship traffic through the Golden Gate using twin video cameras mounted side by side on a tripod. For this unique project, he filmed
both from the bridge span itself, as well as while riding out with bar pilot boats to shoot ships from the water. The overall video composition created by Hall incorporating these tandem projections is sublime, suggestive of a full day in the life of the bridge, but compressed. We become intensely immersed in the work, a heightened state, alert and imaginative, aware of every visual cue. We cease to become onlookers but rather full participants. Offering both continuity and counterpoint, Doug Hall’s Chrysopholae challenges us in its constant back and forth, materially and conceptually.
Joan Didion once wrote “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” to make sense of the whys and why nots, the way the cards fall, the streaks of luck and the staggering losses. And yet perhaps, what is most notable beyond what we think we know, any certainty or explanation, is our capacity for change…the conversion, the flip, the about face, the surprise, the new day.