Event details
Saturday, May 4, 2024
8 pm

Chelsea Recreation Center
430 West 25th Street
New York, New York

Free. Spaces are limited; register for the event here.

A reflection on our bodies’ intimate relationship with tools, Gordon Hall’s Tone Trio unfolds within the Chelsea Recreation Center’s weight room after hours. Complex machines of ambiguous functionality wait for us in the dark, morphing this utilitarian space into a dreamlike stage. Tone Trio is informed by Hall’s furniture-based sculptures and follows a performance script crafted from the artist’s previous event, Symposium for Experts and Amateurs. The latter, which took place on March 24, 2024, at the Center’s basketball gym, featured brief talks by community members about how to do everyday jobs and tasks.

About the program series
Activations is a series of interdisciplinary public programs designed by artists in response to civic spaces in New York. Each activation invites participants to encounter a ready-made site through the lens of an artistic practice, reimagining them as spaces of creative possibility. All are welcome to participate.

Gordon Hall is an artist whose work encompasses sculpture, performance, and writing. Their sculptures emerge from the world of furniture and are often put to use by performing bodies who test out possible engagements with Hall’s specific yet open-ended objects. Hall’s work explores our practices of looking, inviting forms of reading that defy established norms of legibility. Hall has had solo presentations at the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer, Troy, New York; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Oregon; Temple Contemporary, Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia; and The Renaissance Society, Chicago; among other venues. Their current research addresses the experience of waiting as a paradoxical convergence of vulnerability and freedom.