NEW FAVORITE PERSON %E>PB*>II]P'KAIBPP0Rb@B American Cowboy , 30” x 24”, acrylic and coffee on cotton canvas. Words Evan Litsios Art Chase Hall IN 2021 , two men connected at the intersection of fine art, snow-boarding, culture and outdoor adventurism: action sports icon Selema Masekela and artist Chase Hall. They met at Hall’s ex-hibition in Brooklyn, NY. Chase, a lifelong snowboarder, grew up watching Selema commentate the X Games, absorbing the example Selema set as one of the few Black faces in action sports at the time. Selema left the gallery with his mind set on doing a project with Chase in the future. He wrote about his experience of Chase’s artwork, saying, “The depth of power and the regal storytelling of Black existence in the world, hit me at a DNA level.” Chase’s artwork spans mediums, from painting to printmak-ing, sculpture, photography, video and beyond. He engages through his work with both his personal history and American history, exploring race, class, nuance and mixedness. His recent work includes a solo exhibition at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, GA, and a large-scale commission for the Metropoli-tan Opera House in New York City (not to mention various solo and group exhibitions, commissions, residencies, and inclusions in permanent collections at numerous world-renowned muse-ums of fine art). Chase was born in Minnesota to a single mother. He moved often, from Minnesota to Chicago, Las Vegas, Colorado, Los An-geles and, finally, New York at the age of 20. Now 30 years old, Chase credits snowboarding as a fundamental building block for his approach to life and the outdoors. “Snowboarding became more serious as I got into fourth to eighth grade, when I was living in Las Vegas,” Chase explains. “We’d go out to Lee Canyon, Mount Charleston at the time, which is like 50 minutes north of the strip.” Chase grew up riding with his older brother, Justin, who had some sponsorships with his local shop and companies like 686 and Salomon. Chase moved to Los Angeles before entering high school, and often drove to Big Bear to ride with his brother and friends. It was during this time, living the lifestyle—meeting all kinds of new people, and exploring his new autonomy—that Chase unlocked many of the fundamental benefits of board sports. “There’s a courage and a bravery in snowboarding,” Chase explains, “kind of getting the clip, being a part of the team, ex-ploration, representing this shared greater goal. And that readi-ness… Like, you start to build this rubric that I see so obviously now in my life. A lot of these things I learned from snowboard-ing, from style to getting up early, how people could be modest and kill it in such a beautiful way, and how you carry yourself.” Beyond snowboarding, Chase found inspiration in cartoons, mu-sic, movies and role-playing games like World of Warcraft and Pokémon. He had lots of time to himself and used it to fully en-gage with activities that ignited his curiosity. “I didn’t go to college or art school,” he says. “A lot of that just started from trying to do the next thing. I just love that idea that you think about your skills and who you are and your level and your experiences and they all just grow. And you fail, fail, fail, and you grow, grow, grow. And when you give it a solid chance at life, it’s like, the agility or the intellect or the stamina, like literally plus five horsepower type of shit. It’s like that classic cliché-ism of ‘new levels, new bosses.’ I tell myself that all the time.” 032 THE SNOWBOARDER’S JOURNAL
The Snowboarder's Journal The Snowboarder's Journal 22.1: Page 32
