PHYSICAL SOMETHING

September 26, 2025-November 1, 2025

The paintings in Calhan Hale’s exhibition “PHYSICAL SOMETHING” play with the flatness of the picture plane and the familiarity of objects, as images emerge into the viewer’s space, pressing against any notion of a binary between visual and experiential. While traditional collage tends to smooth various forms into a single plane, Hale’s works play with foreground and background, using color, shadow, and lines to create unexpected arrangements between the two.

The world of this show sits somewhere between two- or three-dimensional, an unknown point along the spectrum between Flatland and Spaceland, or even beyond, weightless and weighted at the same time, populated by object-images, unfamiliarized. Though the works are ambiguous, Hale’s choices are intentional, pulling images and material from her immediate surroundings. She juxtaposes photorealistic representation with streaky brushstrokes, familiar images with abstracted shapes, challenging conventional dichotomies between genres, media, and realities. Bright colors draw the viewer in, only for them to find themselves off balance, confronted with otherwise mundane objects that mix the abstract and the representational in surprising ways; unfamiliar formal orientations also convey a sense of gravity. All of these elements become building blocks in a strange land.

Deeply somatic in nature, Hale’s paintings thus comprise a sculptural experience, in reverse. Rather than traverse a sculpture in the round, the viewer, post-viewing, traverses the world in the round, the paintings having cast the surrounding world into a space of new recognition, though one that still evades definition: that the material world is always already faced as picture planes and sculptural protrusions—image and object, in one.

Calhan Hale (b. Houston, TX) is a visual artist based in New York. She received a BA from the University of Texas at Austin in 2016 and an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University in 2025. She has exhibited work at Martha’s, Austin; Wrong, Marfa; Casa Lü, Mexico City; Frisson, New York; and the Wallach Art Gallery, New York. She is the recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant and a forthcoming fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center residency in Provincetown, MA. Hale works primarily in painting.

Writing by Grace Sparapani