Mockingbirds / Relaxeder by Phil Hale
08.23.06 By Collin DavidPhil Hale’s painted figures explode from the canvas, but against their will. Caught in awkward mid-motion, it’s more like they’re being shoved and broken as they get forced outwards, angry and stumbling from their reality into ours. It’s like a Tom Waits song in motion; charred, gritty, blind and twisted characters getting together for a ritual that we can barely understand, and this is why I love the man.
Hale is a mysterious figure. Where many modern artists, especially those who dabble as illustrators, have websites and biographies and make themselves as public as possible, he remains an enigma. Even his recently assembled website, which seems to be his first personal foray into the world of the digital, is serpentine and hard to decipher, with icons flashing and evading the cursor, more often than not leading you somewhere that you didn’t intend to go, and when you get there, you’re still not entirely certain what it is that you’ve found.
His most recent print release is called ‘mockingbirds/relaxeder’, published by Donald M. Grant, is a two-book set meant to accompany a recent pair of gallery shows by the same name. He’s only had two books previous to this, entitled ‘Double Memory’ (with artist Rick Berry) and ‘Goad’. The rest of his work, which is prolific, graces comic book covers and magazine articles, but often remains uncollected. The set retails for about 45 dollars, are jacketless and dark green, and are bound to each other by a single band of paper. They’re fairly narrow volumes and they don’t explore a very wide variety of Hale’s work, but they’re impressive in what they explore conceptually.
Affixed to the inside back cover of ‘mockingbirds’ on a small foam disc is a CD of music which accompanied the gallery shows, as performed by Golden Phone. Normally, these art book CDs are snooty and abstract compositions without any standalone attractiveness, but the 8 song album is beautiful - an echoey mix of Elysian Fields, Medeski Martin & Wood and Calexico, and worth the price of admission alone.
‘Mockingbirds’ is a deep exploration into a single image of an old and shirtless man, captured from many angles, many of the images simply titled ‘mockingbirds’, perhaps a reference to repetition or each image mirroring the previous one. The summation of all of these images, all of them slightly different and from various perspectives, sometimes with added or subtracted details [like the man’s head, or an item in the hands], gives the impression of someone walking through a dim room and blinking while reality betrays them. It’s as if Hale snapped a roll of film as he walked from the center of the room and out the door, every exposure on whatever his eyes settled on. It’s vaguely ‘horror movie’, and completely engrossing when viewed in rapid succession, almost as an animation. There’s plenty of time to go back of inspect each image more carefully. As the series progresses, we enter the more violent and familiar territory of Hale, but the references to the earlier ‘mockingbirds’ works are still revisited.
‘Relaxeder’, the second volume, explores Hale’s sketches and found-object photomontages. His sketches are torn and covered in tape, missing cut-out segments, and all in thick pencil lines. There’s an energy to them, all of them capturing action and motion in broad, general strokes. Hale’s photographs, subsequently, are completely static depictions of objects, which are usually small machines that are completely of his own devising. Disjointed, effectively useless, and really convincing. Perhaps most unnervingly, there’s an image of a severely truncated typewriter that only retains a few keys, cut and reassembled as if nothing’s wrong at all.
The two books comprise a fascinating exploration, and are a great addition to any art book collection. Once things like this sell out, their first editions usually skyrocket in price, so get them while they’re more common. Check out Allen Spiegel Fine Arts for more info and ordering information.
---
Article Tags: Phil Hale================
Gotta Collect? Then You Gotta Connect - Join our Collectors’ Community!
