Nodes of Crossing
Oakley Tapola and Hannah Lee Hall's collaboration was born from a recognition of a kinship between their work. Since 2021, they have been making paintings, sculpture, and animations through a call-and-response structure under the sole directive that nothing be considered too precious to undo.
Often utilizing failed, broken or discarded remnants from each other's studio practice as points of departure, the artists trade work back and forth, making proposals and responsive gestures. What unfolds is not unlike a science experiment. Forms are sliced open, dissected. New shapes propagate, sprout off, multiply, transform.
Borrowing a term coined by Paul Stamets in “Mycelium Running” which describes nodes of crossing as “…the branchings that allow the mycelium, when there is a breakage or an infection, to choose an alternate route and regrow,” Hall and Tapola lean into collaboration with an adaptive mindset. Like the fungal threads that transform dead matter into nutrients, the artists mine discarded material and work together to forge new pathways from dead ends.
What began with perceived similarities has taken both artists to wholly new and unfamiliar terrain. The resulting hybrid works shrug off rigidity and seek to destabilize versus define. Delineations of authorship are muddled. Individual pieces slip in and out of focus and blur with the environment they playfully inhabit. Boundaries are suggested, then punctured or obscured. These are new propositions born out of necessity, existing on their own terms, asking only, where to next?
About the Artists:
Oakley Tapola lives and works in Minneapolis, MN. She received her MFA from NYU in 2019.
Hannah Lee Hall is a visual artist based in St. Paul, Minnesota. She holds a BFA in painting from Rhode Island School of Design. Through her layered, highly textural abstractions she explores themes of decay, dormancy, and regeneration. She also co-runs Dog Eye Press, an independent Twin Cities based publishing project focused on innovative small-run books that “revel in the messy corners of an artist’s practice”.