Sandra Hall

 

‘Amygdala' – is a collaboration between Sandra Hall and John McQueen. The central theme to the project is fear. Through in-depth conversation with local people, we've been identifying and interpreting key fears people live with. We have chosen, through photography, to represent these images as closely as possible.

Questions we are posing – are there images that exist in our heads that act as a backdrop to a complex set of feelings? How, through conversation, drawing and collage cane we frame these together? ‘Amygdala' attempts to focus and frame these untold stories.

 

‘Amygdala'
An almond-shaped mass of gray matter in the front part of the temporal lobe of the cerebrum that is part of the limbic system and is involved in the processing and expression of emotions, especially anger and fear.

Sandra Hall originally trained as a physical theatre performer and has journeyed from this to more awkward live art, interventionist, installational and ephemeral public art work over the last 14 years. She is interested in people, conversation, mapping (emotional, geographical, sociological), altered and ruptured histories; navigating communities.

 

Whilst conversation-traces are at the heart of Sandra's work, she is not prescriptive about the artform used to express thoughts and secrets to the audience. Largely the work is disseminated in awkward and unusual places in the public domain; from allotments, canals, bootsales, to open top buses, brothels and bus shelters. The work is often pervasive rather than invasive.

 

Sandra is process orientated, endeavouring to reveal elements of this process in her work – e.g. phased, ever-growing installations. The quality of the outcome or event has to reflect the same level of commitment, intention and quality of the process. The outcomes can and have been; performances, ephemeral public art pieces, publications, installations, multiples, performance lectures; using a variety of media.

 

Sandra has worked in the USA and Europe and recent project have included;

Dead Media, an artwork , an archive, a solution to a problem. Disposing of 2000 analogue mater videotapes of films created over 30 years creatively, Dead Media was a farewell to the analogue age. Several seconds were taken from each original tape and edited to crate an hour-long montage film. They were then shown in a shop in a mall and created a ‘fake' exhibition of video-based art. The audience travelled through a catalogue of distilled research, including viewing the ‘dead media?' film on sofas, as it was projected onto the ceiling. Visitors and audience over 8 days, inter-acting with the exhibition, staying for conversations about time, loss, memory and change.

Peepshow a large scale intervention and a series of installations in a four storey disused warehouse, Custard Factory, Birmingham . Collaborating with ‘Fix Film' to produce a site-specific event investigating surveillance. Contributors and collaborators included Robert Pacitti, Roland Miller, Ivan Smith (Fine Rats). The event sought to blur the boundaries of looking, being looked at, audience engagement and assumption. There were over 12 installations throughout the building, 6 intervention/performances, included audience members making films in three locations, edited and shown on the night.