Stev'nn Hall Canadian, b. 1966

Stev'nn Hall grew up in rural Ontario juggling a 35mm camera in one hand and a paintbrush in the other. He studied film, painting, and photography at Concordia University in Montreal and continues to draw influences from these disciplines.

 

After working as the director of a non-profit film co-op, as well as a director of indie music videos and as an international award-winning television producer, Stev'nn Hall decided to return to his roots with his photography and mixed media landscape series; Skylight. 

Exploring and blurring the boundaries between painting and photography, the artist takes us on a back-seat tour recalling his past which is highly romanticized through his creative imagination. The transformation of the image is a process that combines colouring, scraping and embellishing it with brush strokes and raw colour, creating a new world before our eyes.  The series was made during Stev'nn Hall's frequent travels to his hometown to take care of his parents sick with cancer, and to finally bury them; this episode marks his work with an emblematic sorrow. The light falling on the bruised land is beautiful but also bitter-sweet. Life, love, and mourning are intertwined.

 

Poets and visual artists of the Romantic period of the nineteenth century had an attraction to clouds. The circus, the stratus, and the cumulus imposed themselves in the paintings of John Constable, Turner and raised the psychological drama of the isolated figures of Caspar David Friedrich. Like Stev'nn Hall, Romantics contemplated nature and its potential for The Sublime, and time permeating a landscape holds emotional experience. The awesome beauty of the world can act as a catharsis, and Stev'nn Hall's works are like epic postcards from a pilgrimage into our consciousness. In each, there is an opportunity for a deeper experience. In the active imagination of the artist, a skylight becomes a door to personal liberation. No matter what life brings us, Stev'nn Hall believes that we are free to change over and over again. Just like a cloud.

 

His work can be found in the public spaces of the Residences of the Ritz-Carlton in downtown Toronto and in the lobby of the Fallsview Casino in Niagara Falls. Stev'nn Hall has been represented by Galerie LeRoyer since 2012.