THE KITCHEN PRESENTS GORDON HALL: HANDS AND KNEES, MAY 1–31, 2025

Newly Commissioned Body of Work Foregrounds the Dynamics of Withholding, Anticipation, and Action while Pointing to Emancipatory Futures, as Performers Interact with Hall’s Sculptures at Varied, Unannounced Intervals on May 9, 10, 17, 24, and 31, between 12–6 pm

The Kitchen presents Gordon Hall: Hands and Knees, May 1–31, 2025 at The Kitchen at Westbeth (163B Bank Street, 4th Floor Loft). Animated by a transgender politics that questions the norms that govern embodied life, Hands and Knees extends Hall’s investigation into the politics of vulnerability and corporeal support. Performers demonstrate possible uses of the sculptures in weekly performances that emerge from Hall’s inquiry into the paradoxical interplay of dependency and liberation in moments of waiting. Gordon Hall: Hands and Knees is organized by Matthew Lyons, Curator.

In Hands and Knees, five sculptures wrought from pairs of existing chrome cantilever chair structures stand in impermanent positions throughout the sunlit loft in The Kitchen at Westbeth. These abstracted chair sculptures are bridged by platforms that support reclining bodies in specific and unexpected ways. As they wait for bodies to reshape themselves around them, viewers also wait for the possibility of performance. When a body prostrates on one of the horizontal structures, they may likewise wait. Hall describes the powerlessness and pleasure in this act: “an erotics of anticipation, hope, following the Muñozian question: ‘what do we do while we’re waiting for a liveable world to arrive?’”

Stripped of seats and backs and reshaped into new geometric structures, the hardware of the Breuer-popularized and mass-reproduced form is both recognizable and abstract. The snaking metal forms once designed for support now assert themselves anew and open themselves to unexpected uses. In each performance, the sculptures create a sense of physical strain and demand, and by the end are rearranged in space. They rest in their new positions—static but animated with potential —until they once again encounter other constantly transforming objects: human bodies.

Hall, who rigorously trained as a dancer and choreographer as a young person, found themselves increasingly interested in the props and costumes they were creating. They describe, “the objects in my performances got more and more elaborate until I realized I was making sculpture, not props. From the start, I was thinking about our bodies as incredible objects that can be trained and transformed and changed—not in a degrading way, but in a way of respecting the fundamental power of material objects, our bodies included. I make sculpture as a way of exploring these embodied possibilities.”

For that reason, Hall’s sculptures always come well before their accompanying choreography: they are generated by the objects’ forms, and those forms’ desires, with structure dictating human interpretation rather than the other way around. Ultimately, Hands and Knees imagines bodies emancipated from their prescribed uses. “Part of what I love about objects is that they always exceed what we might hope for them, even as the maker,” says Hall. “There's a politics of taking materiality seriously on its own terms, not as a mere tool for our own goals.”

Gordon Hall: Hands and Knees Schedule

Gordon Hall: Hands and Knees will be on view at The Kitchen at Westbeth (163B Bank Street, 4th Floor Loft) May 1–31, 2025 (Gallery Hours: Wednesday–Saturday, 12–6 pm, Free), with performances at variable, unannounced times during gallery hours on May 9, 10, 17, 24, and 31 (Free). An Opening Reception will be held Saturday, May 10, 2025, 4–6 pm.

About Gordon Hall

Gordon Hall (1983, Boston) is an artist whose work encompasses sculpture, performance, and writing. 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. Gordon Hall is represented by DOCUMENT in North America and Hua International in Europe and Asia, and is an Assistant Professor of Art at Vassar College.

Funding Credits

The Kitchen’s programs are made possible in part with support from The Kitchen’s Board of Directors, The Kitchen Global Council, Leadership Fund, and the Director’s Council, as well as through generous support from The Amphion Foundation, Inc., Bloomberg Philanthropies, Cowles Charitable Trust, Jerome Robbins Foundation, Ford Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, The Harkness Foundation for Dance, Marta Heflin Foundation, Lambent Foundation Fund, a fund of Tides Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Mertz Gilmore Foundation, New Music USA, The Royal Norwegian Consulate General in New York, The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, Teiger Foundation, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts; and in part by public funds from the Manhattan Borough President, the National Endowment for the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. This project was supported, in part, by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant.

The Kitchen acknowledges the generous support provided by the Collaborative Arts Network New York (CANNY). As a coalition of small to mid-sized multidisciplinary arts organizations, CANNY is committed to strengthening the infrastructure of arts nonprofits throughout New York. For more information about CANNY, please visit https://can-ny.org/.