Skip to Content ☰ Open Filter >>

Browse the Collection

Object Results


Image of Chrysopylae

Chrysopylae
New Media

2012

Doug Hall (San Francisco, California, 1944 - ) Primary

Object Type: New Media
Medium and Support: Two-channel video installation with sound
Credit Line: Gift in part of the Lipman Family Foundation with additional funds contributed by the Acquisitions Committee
Accession Number: 2012.09

SJMA Label Text


Timelapse: Doug Hall and the Western Landscape (2013)

Doug Hall’s Chrysopylae was commissioned for the exhibition International Orange at Fort Point, San Francisco, which was organized by the FOR-SITE Foundation in honor of the bridge’s seventy-fifth anniversary.

The sound track is comprised of the ambient noises on and around the bridge, layered with the musical compositions by Jim McKee and Joan Jeanrenaud, with sound design by Jeremiah Moore. The deep, resonant sounds, in concert with Hall’s images, create a multisensory experience that is kinesthetically felt as much as it is seen.

The Golden Gate Bridge is one of the most recognized, beloved, and photographed bridges in the world. Monument Valley, Mount Rushmore, and Glacier Point define, for many people, the spirit of the North American West. In this exhibition, Doug Hall offers a perspective that enhances the way we construct and interpret the meaning of these iconic destination points. He also calls attention to the way we experience the concept of time within fleeting and static images.

Doug Hall’s Chrysopylae (2012) (Greek for golden gateway), is a video portrait of the Golden Gate Bridge and the massive international container ships that pass under it on their way in and out of San Francisco Bay. It is a bridge, landmark, portal to the Pacific Rim, engineering feat, symbol of global maritime commerce, and tourist destination. Hall filmed the activities that take place at the extraordinary interface of nature and this man-made wonder. He synched two HD cameras to create a large panorama on two screens. He went out to sea with the skilled bar pilots who guide the container ships through the rough currents of the bay, and he took his cameras to the top of the bridge’s towers. Hall edited over forty hours of footage into twenty-eight minutes that capture the scenic grandeur as well as the ordinary daily activities that take place at the Golden Gate.

In addition to Chrysopylae, Hall’s exhibition includes several monumental landscape photographs and five of his “landscape portraits,” his term for the formal portraits he has done of people intimately connected to the landscape: "Most importantly, it was what motivated me to reconsider the people who occupied the landscape. I wanted to bring them out of the background, which concealed their individuality, so they could look back at us even as we scrutinized them. The result is a series of portraits—something I had not done before—depicting individuals in the places where I encountered them."

These two modes of representation, moving and still images, offer the viewer different perspectives of their content. In each, time operates differently. In the video, time is developmental: events follow in a specific rhythm and sequence that has been determined. Time moves irrespective of us; things appear momentarily and then are gone—irretrievable except as memories. Although Hall’s video was shot over the course of several months, it was edited to create the illusion of an unfolding day: the bridge emerges out of darkness into the morning dawn and twenty-eight minutes later fades into the night. Photographs, on the other hand, represent a moment that is stilled. However, like Chrysopylae, Hall’s photographs are developmental. His still photographs are actually layered moments that are meant to be read incrementally. If we think of time strictly as a linear dimension in which events can only occur in the past, present, or future, then the work of Doug Hall is a response to Albert Einstein’s tongue-in-cheek assertion that time was invented so that everything does not happen at once.

Exhibition


San Francisco. Californian Dreams, Bundeskunsthalle (Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany), Bonn, Germany, September 13, 2019 - January 12, 2020.

Timelapse: Doug Hall and the Western Landscape
, July 18, 2013 - October 20, 2013, New Wing, Second Floor, Central Skylight Gallery, San Jose Museum of Art.

Additional Images Click an image to view a larger version
Additional Image
Additional Image
Additional Image

Dimensions
  • Installation Dimensions: in. (cm)

Portfolio List Click a portfolio name to view all the objects in that portfolio
This object is a member of the following portfolios:


Your current search criteria is: All Objects records and [Objects]Object Type is "New Media".