Rena Bransten Gallery is proud to present Doug Hall’s most recent video, And So It Goes. The video consists of thirteen short episodes organized around a male narrator’s descriptions of fictitious exchanges between an imagined couple, identified only as “He” and “She.” The third-person account describes the two reflecting on a range of subjects, from the comparative speeds of light and darkness to the relationship between progress and catastrophe. In another exchange, “She” comments on the pleasure her garden provides while “He” responds with laments about the degradation of urban life. And so it goes…

One of the interesting, almost magical, aspects of Hall’s video is that the dynamic between the narration (spoken by an invisible, AI avatar) and the accompanying images (gathered from various online sources) is, while puzzling, simultaneously reconcilable. Rather than confounding, this discontinuity between spoken word and image excites the viewer’s imagination to resolve the ambiguity between what is said and what is seen. Instead of closure, And So It Goes celebrates our freedom to think for ourselves, providing a poetic antidote to forced conclusions that are dictated to us through advertising or political slogans.