Bridgehampton-Based Gallery To Offer A Look At The “Wild Life”

Life as we know it may have been put on pause last March, but The White Room Gallery wants gallery-goers to revel in the wild of the past through the work of Stephen Hall and Chad Night.

“When you think ‘wild life’ several images come to mind, first off there’s Keith Richards,” Andrea McCafferty and Kat O’Neill, The White Room Gallery Co-Owners and Directors, said. “You don’t need to interview the fly on his wall to know his life was about as wild as a life could be. Truman Capote lived the ‘wild life’ through observation, Hemingway through action. Mae West said, ‘You only live once but if you do it right, once is enough.’ Therein lies the inspiration for this exhibit.”

Wild Life will debut on Friday, March 12 and remain on view through Sunday, April 11.

“One artist shoots the world from a helicopter. Another went from professional skateboarder to digital artist whose work is so wild it looks like a 3-D fantasy,” the duo added. “Add to that a painter whose wild imagination creates a scenario that features Tide and an Astronaut with the title, The Search For Intelligent Life On Earth.”

Hall, who was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, moved to New York in 1978. A few years later, his work was showcased in the East Village, and since has been highlighted in exhibits throughout the US, India, Japan, Korea and Mexico. Hall’s pieces can also be found in corporate and private collections, as well as in major motion pictures, music videos and magazines.

“There are no digital prints, photographs, collage, airbrush or projections involved in my work. The subjects and ambiguous light sources are hand painted rows and rows of acrylic colors or tones, going from dark to light in countless layers,” Hall explained. “All the patterns are drawn first around a cardboard template upon the background field color and then painted tonally to match the background. Each painting can take anywhere from three to six weeks to execute, depending on the size.”

“I am interested in showing the relationships we all have, whether in time or place. I also try to show the pattern in chaos and, perhaps the overload of information that we are bombarded with in our modern times,” he added.

Chad Knight’s Seismic, Digital Art. (Courtesy Photo)

Knight, a freelance artist and Head of 3D Design at Nike, was a professional skateboarder for more than ten years. He shares his talents with the world daily via Instagram @chadknight.

“I think that ever since I was young, I was the kid who would get ‘mysteries of the unknown’ type books. I’ve always been very intrigued by things we don’t have any answers to. When I was younger, I was interested in going into a career like astronomy or deep sea exploration,” Knight noted. “As I got older I realized that’s because those were the two areas I knew at the time as areas where there was still much to be discovered. And then, as I got older, I took an interest in philosophy and psychology; kind of transforming my interests from the external world to how it relates to me, how the brain works, and things like that. There has always been something that intrigues me about there being more to life than what we see.”

He continued, “I just don’t think there’s any chance we could know, see, and sense everything. I believe there’s a much more interesting world or universe that we’re a part of, that maybe we are just too busy to take the time to kind of look at and see. I’m very interested in how thought works; how we get certain ideas from the unconscious to the conscious; why some people are created and some aren’t; and geometry. I think it all ties to things we just don’t know about. The 3D medium is so immersive and limitless: you are not bound by the laws of physics, you can be like a magician. In my art I’m trying to capture in a physical form our universal feelings of compassion and motivation. I want people looking at my work to realize that they are powerful and capable of every thing, regardless of what they look like or what other people classify them as.”

Works from Mr. Brainwash, Craig Alan, Russell Young, Nelson De La Nuez, Lynn Savarese, Keith Ramsdell, Dinesh Boaz, and Martha McCaleer will also be on display at The White Room Gallery.

“And, of course, there is no ‘wild life’ without the femme fatales of Bardot, Taylor and Monroe,” McCafferty and O’Neill concluded. “Our Wild Life exhibit is meant to inspire because life on a La-Z-Boy is far from wild. Unless, of course, you own the stock as 2020 sales were 1.7 billion.”

The White Room Gallery is located at 2415 Montauk Highway in Bridgehampton. For more information, visit thewhiteroom.gallery.