Daata launches NFT of film 'Two Heads, Two Ways'

2022-04-26 00:00:00

Daata proudly presents Trulee Hall’s Two Heads, Two Ways, (2020) now available as an NFT.  Originally commissioned by Daata in 2020 and finally available as an NFT, the work speaks to the alchemy of Hall’s established practice, spanning video, sculpture, painting, audio composition and choreographed dance. Artist Trulee Hall says "I’m delighted to be working with Daata to release my first NFT. The marriage of art and blockchain is absolutely brilliant, totally practical, and based on core ideologies I agree with." Using the metaphor and physicality of a two-headed body, Hall explores how multiple personalities and possibilities of self are visualised. A dark onanistic fantasy of sex dolls and self-love unfolds by means of an out-of-body experience. The central character divides, seeing her body as a disembodied object. Her body parts separate and multiply as her other self – her alter ego – becomes her lover. She is at once monstrous, sexy and utterly wonderful. The work will be released for general sale on 5 May 2022 at 10amEST. Collectors can purchase the work as an edition of 8 NFTs exclusively via Daata - on our website or at our booth (C11) at NADA NYC. In celebration of the work's release, Hall will speak with Daata Curator Olivia Bright to a live audience about the work's evolution on Friday 6 May 2:30pm at NADA. This event forms part of the NYC art fair's cultural programme of events. As its name suggests, Two Heads Two Ways embraces a variety of manifestations. It began life as a painting, which has been exhibited in major institutions such as the Zabludowicz Collection in 2020-1. Its next iteration as a film, presented online via the Daata website and now on the blockchain, speaks to Hall’s experimental practice and improvisational methodology. In an interview with Olivia Bright, Daata’s Public Programme Curator, Hall explained “For me the fun is in the experimentation. I start each artwork with a basic idea, jump in headfirst and then end up in a totally new place through trusting the process.” Each version is like a vignette, offering multiple representations of a non-narrative visual subject, replayed through painting, sculpture, and video amalgams of CGI, claymation, and live action performance. This shape-shifting quality makes its presence felt within the piece. The film begins with a 3D-rendered animation of a young, nude and light-skinned female body - the archetypal western beauty - revolving against a dark expanse. Set to an eerie score of high-pitched wailing, the woman appears, with her eyes closed in a dream-like state. As the viewer’s gaze is directed into her mind, the format shifts into claymation, a medium Hall has worked with throughout her career. The ‘barbie doll’ figure multiplies and begins to caress herself. Over the next eight minutes - incidentally, the average time it takes a woman to masturbate - the character grows a second head, and continues to morph in and out of mediums, reflecting the character’s fluid mental state. However Hall’s fantasy takes a dark and twisted turn, with the lovers’ tongues eventually turning into snakes that writhe and slither away, pulling the heads off their body. Hall’s imagery has ancient roots; in Greek mythology, the amphisbaena (two headed snake) was a monster said to have been born from the blood that fell from Medusa’s head after she was killed by Perseus. Throughout the history of art, the gorgon has stood as a symbol of the dangers of female sexual virility yet to the Ancient Greeks, an amphisbaena was traditionally worn by women trying to conceive. To Hall, the multiplicity of semiotic language is as multiplicitous as female sexuality itself. In Hall’s words: “As a creator or worlds, the excitement for me is in altering reality to make something new. It's a constant process of birth, death and rebirth. I love to create new versions of old ideas, riffing off of art history, mythologies and pop culture to reinvent my own revised, personally perverted and updated alternate interpretations of these multifaceted cultural references.” The artist’s work is also informed by her childhood growing up in the Southern state of Georgia, her current home of Los Angeles, and a background working on film sets, in artist studios and as a technician for major theme parks. Building on this experience, the worlds Hall creates are enchanting and enticing, yet retain an underlying uneasy seediness that permeates their experience – inviting the viewer to question if the discomfort they feel is warranted or is a result of their own internalised prudishness.  Two Heads, Two Ways is a classic example of Trulee Hall’s mature work, carrying the weight and experience of some of her largest and most ambitious projects. This includes her immersive solo exhibition the Other and the Otherwise (2019) at Maccarone Gallery (LA), and Infestation (2019), a sprawling serpentine installation within a New York City set at Paramount Pictures’ backlots. A work of this breadth firmly places Hall in the canon of LA-based artists whose sense of the theatrical teeters towards revelling in the darker underbelly of our pop-culture psyches; with roots in Edward Kienholz, through Paul McCarthy and Kaari Upson. Trulee Hall's Two Heads, Two Ways (2020) drops at 10am on 5 May 2022 - <a href="https://nft.daata.art/">online</a> and at NADA (booth C11).