Prison: Peter Halley

January 21 – February 25, 2012
Photos by Mark Stein

Peter Halley created a site-specific installation at Disjecta entitled Prison. The show represents Halley’s first solo exhibition in the Pacific Northwest and continues his decades-long interest in architecture by creating a seductive, continuous image that wraps around the perimeter of the gallery space. Halley unites visual and architectural systems to create an immersive experience that weds the “geometry of the social” with the mall-level transcendence of saturated fluorescent color. The result is an exhibition that creates tension between silence and noise that resonates long past our presence in the physical space.

Peter Halley was born in 1953 in New York. Along with a studio practice that includes the production of paintings, prints, and drawings, Halley also served as the director of the MFA Painting program at Yale University from 2002-2011. Additionally, in 1996, he and curator/writer Bob Nickas co-founded index magazine, a publication featuring in-depth interviews with people in diverse creative fields. Inspired by Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, Halley ran index out of his studio, which became a meeting place for writers, photographers and people who were interviewed in the magazine.

Halley’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently Judgment Day, an installation of digital prints for the exhibition Personal Structures at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011. Other venues have included Tate Modern, London; the Museum Folkwang, Essen; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul; the CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, France; the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, Turin, Italy; among many others. In 2011, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, acquired one of Halley’s seminal paintings, Red Cell with Conduit, 1982.