About

Hail Holtzclaw is an artist based in Atlanta, Georgia, who primarily works in oil paint and charcoal. She is currently an MFA candidate in Studio Art at the University of Georgia, and holds a BFA in Drawing, Painting, and Printmaking and a BA in Art History from Georgia State University. She completed a two-year research fellowship funded by the Mellon Foundation and was featured in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for her most recent debut solo show, GLOSS. Her work has been exhibited at galleries such as The End Project Space, Swan Coach House Gallery, and the Marietta Cobb Museum of Art.

Holtzclaw’s work examines the entanglements of mass-media conventions, image circulation, and the process of subjectivity formation as an aesthetic experience. She investigates this aesthetic experience by exploring the flatness of images on both conceptual and material levels, embracing images’ inherent instability and their proneness to projections and semiotic drift as a generative source of disruption. A central question in Holtzclaw’s painting practice is why realism and what it can accomplish now. By visualizing the unstable layers of signs and signifiers, Holtzclaw treats painting as a recursive space where mediated subjectivities are constructed, stretched, and refracted beyond recognition.

Holtzclaw explores subjectivity formation as constructed through a process of repeated, highly mediated encounters with objects, accepting doubts and distortions as an opportunity for conceptual inquiry.