For this, her first, solo exhibition the entire show consists of pencil drawings on paper. The 40-inch sheets curl around push pins that tack the pictures to the walls. She obviously doesn't need to shoot the works the first time out. Then there is the draftsmanship, which is something of a throwback style to the kind of baroque-modernist expressionism associated with Rico Lebrun or John Altoon. Line and tone are pushed around with something between an emotive charge and an all-out frenzy.
Marks wrap around the figures and forms, which emerge into palpable physicality.
The residue of the artist's hand and decision-making is left in, but the graphic quality is convincing enough to translate into sort of an underground comix look for the '90s. These drawings distance themselves from a strain of comix-related gallery art that has been around over the last decade. Most of it has been intentionally derivative or wan in quoting its source, relying on literary or philosophical content to carry the weight. Another strain merged directly out of the underground comix artists themselves, upping the ante of the original material while standing defiantly against the intellectuality of avant gardism. Hale's images are too robust to fit comfortably with the former, and too embryonic as storyboard narratives to align with the latter.