Hail Holtzclaw

Hail Holtzclaw was born in Augusta, Georgia but has lived most of her life in Atlanta, Georgia. She primarily works in oil paint and charcoal. She earned her B.A. in Art History and her B.F.A. in Fine Art from Georgia State University in 2023. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Studio the University of Georgia.

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.