Deb Hall

Inspired by nature and digital communication, Deb Hall’s images reflect our highly caffeinated, constantly moving, technological culture and its impact on our perception and environment. Her work has been exhibited widely in national juried exhibitions, galleries and museums. She is the recipient of a NYSCA grant and the Fellowship at The Center for Photography in Woodstock, New York. Her work is also included in the permanent collection of the Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon,The Adirondack Trust Corporate Collection in Saratoga Springs, NewYork, andThe Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, in New Paltz and in many private collections throughout the United States.

Deb Hall, is an Associate Professor of Art, at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. She received her BFA in Photographic Illustration from Rochester Institute of Technology and an MFA in DigitalVisualArt fromVermont College.She also studied at both the Art Center College of Design and Kent State University in design and typography. She currently teaches courses in Communication Design.

Artist Statement

As both an environmentalist from Oregon and an artist who uses digital technology, Deb Hall’s work interrogates the division created by the use of technology and our natural environment. Screens that engross us also distance us from nature with profound implications in experience and policy. Our all-consuming distraction with digital technology impacts our interactions with the environment–and each other. We are lured by the bright colors and sounds we find on screen and become less able to appreciate the subtlety and sensorium of nature and the joys of direct observation–or the unexpected places conversation may take us. We are transfixed and transported by the immediacy of this small window on a virtual world of our own making. We revel in the perceived level of control we have but, as we spend less time in face-to-face communications, and more time–alone–communicating through mediated text, memes, emoticons, symbols and images, we may have less. At once, com- municating more while sharing and experiencing less. The odd relationship of these distinct worlds inhabits the work.