Doug Hall’s exhibition at Rena Bransten Projects is titled - with purposeful ambiguity and irony - Love and Architecture. Taking an eponymously titled group of photo-based works from 1991 as a starting point, Hall has made a series of variations on the theme by drawing from his archive of earlier photographs, using found images, and by creating new works specifically for the exhibition. Also finding inspiration in two books, Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence and André Breton’s Nadja - both centered on obsessive love and the related compulsion to fetishize objects and spaces touched by the body of a lover - the work in Love and Architecture suggests that love is made, challenged, and celebrated within constructed spaces.

Love and Architecture is on view concurrently with SFMOMA-on-the-go’s presentation of Doug Hall’s The Terrible Uncertainty of the Thing Described (1987). This landmark work from SFMOMA’s media arts collection is exhibited for the first time since 1989 at SFAI’s Walter and McBean Galleries from March 28-June 6, 2015.

Hall’s artistic accomplishments span 40 years with numerous pioneering contributions in performance, photography, video, and media installation. An exhibition and monograph on Hall’s career is in development for 2017-2018.  Hall’s works are collected by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, California; Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; the Contemporary Art Museum, Chicago; the Mildred Kemper Lane Art Museum, St. Louis; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Vienna; Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund, Germany; Tate Modern, London; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and The Whitney Museum, New York. He has received numerous awards and fellowships including from The Guggenheim Foundation, The Fulbright Foundation, and The American Academy Rome Prize. He is Professor Emeritus at the San Francisco Art Institute and visiting faculty at California College of Art. He lives in San Francisco, California.