Ekphrasis
Curatorial Statement
Honor Bowman Hall | Kai Lin Art
Featuring artists Ben Tollefson, Michael O'Brien, Zoltan Gerliczki, Dove McHargue, Gregory Eltringham, Holly Matthews, and Matt Robertson
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.-Musee des Beux Arts, W.H. Auden
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Ekphrasis (Greek) translates to “description” in English. However, the word is most used to describe the detailed description of a work of art through written language as a literary device. The excerpt from Auden’s poem above serves as an example.
I have named this exhibition Ekphrasis because the word captures the way the artists here have approached their subjects and it captures the perceptual experience of viewing an artwork and translating the visual into information. Both processes are descriptive.
While the artwork I make in my practice as a painter is not figurative, I first came to love art through my fascination with masterful pictorial description of the human form. When I worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in my early 20s, I used to go sit in the American Wing in front of John Singer Sargent’s Madame X. At times, I felt that I could see her breathing. I could imagine her trying to stand still, holding her posture straight. Maybe the room was cold—her ears and the tip of her nose are very slightly flushed. While perhaps less elegant, Duane Hanson’s 1977 sculpture Woman with Dog is another favorite for the same reason—the scene expands in the viewer’s mind. The woman and dog are familiar characters and our mind’s eye fills in the blanks, asking questions and imagining the unpictured characters, the day’s events, and the scene beyond the little rug. Here, the artwork is a window onto a more expansive story. The figures are uncanny, banal, and completely compelling simultaneously as we look on, and as Elkin’s writes, the object stares back.
The paintings and photographs in this exhibition are contemporary examples of descriptive, figure-based work by artists living right here in Georgia in 2024. Masterful, contemporary, and connected by a commitment to capturing/describing their subject: the figure, identity, the human condition and story. Like Madame X and Woman with Dog, these pictures are also descriptive of their time and tell a story about how art can illuminate the boundaries of social conversations about taste, convention, and society.
One of my favorite examples of ekphrasis comes from Chapter 19 of Charlotte Bronte’s novel, Villette. The narrator, Lucy, visits a Belgian museum and offers her thoughts on a large-scale painting entitled Cleopatra. While Lucy has a cynical take on the artwork’s model (too fat) and comments on the immodesty of the sitter’s dress as a stunt for spectacle’s sake, the epic scale of the artwork and the title make an impression on her. She calls it “the queen of the collection.” Isn’t it funny how we size up and appraise representations of the human figure the same way we size up and appraise a real person? The urge to consider, judge and connect is automatic.
Bronte’s ekphrasis through Lucy’s eyes of the height, weight, and presence of the figure is captivating. The scene begins with Lucy offering these thoughts on her visit to the museum and her experience of the artworks, “…there were fragments of truth here and there which satisfied the conscience, and gleams of light that cheered the vision…An expression in this portrait proved clear insight into the character; a face in that historical painting, by its vivid filial likeness, startingly reminded you that genius gave it birth.”
Like Auden’s poem, this passage hits on the miraculous power that visual storytelling holds. We look past the surface of a figurative artwork into the eyes of the subject, and search for a reflection of our own experience there (colored by our biases, desires, assumptions, and position in the world). At times tongue in cheek and edgy, at times poetic, but always fictional, the collection of images curated into this show is a celebration of visual storytelling about the human experience in art objects, and the expressive, descriptive power of artistry in paint and light.
Honor Bowman Hall | Biography
Honor Bowman Hall (b. 1984) is an artist and educator living and working in Savannah, GA.
Hall is from Roanoke, Virginia and holds a BA in Studio Art and English from the University of Mary Washington (class of 2006). After moving to New York in 2007, where she worked in the music industry and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Hall relocated to Savannah and received her MFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design. Following her graduate studies, she lived in Anchorage, Alaska from 2013-2017 and was the manager of the International Gallery of Contemporary Art (IGCA), the only not-for-profit exhibition space in Anchorage solely dedicated to contemporary art.
In addition to her work promoting and programming experimental art and facilitating exhibitions and events at IGCA, Hall also created two large murals in Alaska, including one at the Anchorage Museum, and taught Painting and Design courses at the University of Alaska Anchorage.
Now based in Savannah for a second time, Hall is the Dean of the School of Fine Arts and the School of Visual Communication at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).
Hall graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design with an MFA in Painting in 2014. During her MFA candidacy, she was selected for a solo studio fellowship at the Elizabeth Foundation in New York, NY in conjunction with the SCAD Painting Department, and was selected to hold her thesis exhibition in conjunction with SCAD’s annual de:FINE Art event. Since her return to SCAD in 2017 as a member of the faculty, Hall continues to exhibit her work at SCAD. She has produced two murals for the university’s Savannah campus, and her artwork is featured on SCAD busses in Savannah and Atlanta.
Hall has held artist-in-residence positions in Savannah, Georgia, Richmond, Virginia and New York, New York and has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across the United States and abroad. Her paintings appear in several public and private collections.
Hall is a member of the Friendship Magic Collective, an ongoing two-person art and music project for which she paints and plays cello. FMC’s most recent exhibition, Homecoming, was reviewed for Art Pulse Magazine #33.
