PRESS RELEASE

During the month of February and into March, the Rena Bransten Gallery will present an exhibition of large-scale photographs by Doug Hall. A ten-year survey catalogue with text by Andy Grundberg will accompany the exhibition. For the past ten years, Doug Hall has explored the impact of constructed space on the individual. His investigations have led to photographic series on the architecture of state buildings in California and the now defunct GDR, the University of California at Berkeley, ribbons of highway in the vast American West, archives and display spaces, and theme parks. Hall's newest photographs consist of leisurescapes, cityscapes, and landscapes in Europe and Asia and continue to demonstrate his interest in public spaces for social gatherings.

In Asia, he has chosen the cities of Tokyo, Hong Kong and Hanoi and their surrounding environs to show human experiences within urban and rural settings. Public spaces in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Hanoi and Rome are compared, and the interactions become more intense as Hall moves from Vietnamese market places to the hyper-industrialized downtown section of Tokyo. While not an anthropological study, the viewer is asked to recognize both the similarities and differences of human interaction independent of the industrialized state of the location.

The images of Europe are centered in Italian cities within recognizable tourist locations. The focus however is not on each specific site but rather on the perspective of the individuals interacting within each space. He has loosened the tight centrality of earlier work and reintroduced people as a point of focal interest. Andy Grundberg describes these urban landscapes as ones "which signify a global high tech culture rooted in the fluidity of capital on the boundary of todays spatially overdetermined world."

The catalogue will include these new works as well as roads and roadsides in the American West, corridors and non-places in California, works shot in East Berlin for his GDR Project, and storage and display spaces in Naples and Rome.

Hall studied and holds degrees from the Rinehart School of Sculpture of the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in Media Arts, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, the Gilmore D. Clark & Michael Rapuano Rome Prize in Visual Arts, and most recently a Flintridge Foundation Award for Visual Artists. He is a professor at the San Francisco Art Institute.