On a blessedly moderate summer Sunday, I am driving over to Trulee Hall’s studio in the industrial backside of LA to participate in the filming of her newest project, Ladies’ Lair Lake, by getting nude and air-brushed green from head to toe. This project will be the latest of Hall’s phantasmagoric videos that combine live action, claymation and CGI to create a provocative world in which Hall’s imaginative take on female archetypes and unabashed sexuality reigns supreme. Ladies’ Lair Lake is a surreal musical piece that distorts the myth of Adam and Eve, devising a feminist take on creationism and subverting the male-centric art historical perspective.

This is the second time in July that I’m making the trip to Hall’s studio. The first time was earlier in the month for a face-to-face interview, when Hall was gracious enough to indulge me with answers to all my questions. As a multi-media artist, Hall starts by making her large-scale paintings which serve as the visual inspiration for the later video and installation works. Her wildly colorful and expressive paintings are populated with playful female figures, hints of domestic decor, and suggestive shapes and symbols. As she says, “Why limit yourself to what’s realistic when the imagination is ripe with craziness?”

Still from Ladies’ Lair Lake, Gossip and Goddess Plans, 2021, photo by Davey Clarke

In her sculptural and video pieces, the figures and shapes from the paintings come to life. Akin to an act of God (or Goddess in Hall’s case), she breathes life into her ideas, animating what started as an idea or a vision. Hall tries to not overly edit herself. “My work doesn’t have to be logical or make sense,” she explains.

While hanging out in her studio with her cats, Rufus and Leroy, and her dog Willee, Hall shows me the work on display and describes her process for each piece. Hall refers to her artistic abilities as her “superpowers.” She tackles issues of binary thinking and our society’s obsession with perfection head-on, offering alternative spaces of inclusion and acceptance. Her finished bodies of work—with titles such as “The Pleasure Principle” and “The Other and Otherwise”—combine painting, sculpture and video to create distinct and insular dreamlike worlds. She explains that with claymation and CGI “you can make anything happen. So I just push the limits of what I can do visually.”

Still from Ladies’ Lair Lake, 2021, photo by Davey Clarke

In contrast to the highly saturated colors in the work, the studio walls are painted black and Hall herself is dressed fully in black. Hall has a few visible tattoos and looks like she could play in a rock band, although the paint on her pants give her away as a painter. In the early 2000s Hall moved from Georgia to LA to attend CalArts and got her MFA there in 2006. Since then she has shown her work both nationally and internationally, and is represented by Maccarone Gallery in Los Angeles.

“I think it’s better for me to not conform to any label specifically, although I do consider myself a feminist,” says Hall, who is now in her mid-40’s. When she was younger she used to reject her femininity and, as a tomboy growing up in the ’80s, always found herself in the middle of the gender spectrum: “I didn’t want to be identified as a ‘female artist.’ I just wanted to be an artist. I was really anti-label.” Hall often felt uncomfortable about attracting too much unwanted attention from her large breasts and thought about cutting them off. “Now I’m really happy for people that the trans movement is so huge,” she says. “I probably would have transitioned if that had been available to me at the time. I didn’t identify as a female.”

Femininity has historically been represented in deeply problematic ways (i.e., madonna or whore). “I used to make fun of different female archetypes,” said Hall. “I would dress up as a princess or country girl, for instance, and I would make fun of that.” Hall uses humor in her work as a way to toy with the absurdities of how women are represented. “I got into the idea of femininity as an abstract concept while researching art history and the way women were portrayed, as well as how gender is represented in religions from other cultures. I started getting into that as a way to explore my own sexuality.”

Trulee Hall, photo by Emily Babette.

Now I’m back at Hall’s studio, ready for my turn to be airbrushed green. Quite a few performers were already painted when I arrived and were strutting around like otherworldly humanoid creatures, waiting to be filmed by Hall’s camera crew. Apart from a wig and merkin (pubic hair wig), all my collaborators were nude and painted blue or green; these elements seem to enable the performers, myself included, to prance around the immersive hand-painted set of Ladies’ Lair Lake in an almost altered state of being, lip-syncing to the music Hall had us memorize beforehand.

As researcher Brené Brown has written, feelings towards body image continue to be universal shame triggers; thus, we find ourselves living in something akin to a Twilight Zone episode where parallel universes exist. On the one hand, there are grassroots campaigns for the acceptance of “real beauty” (i.e., #bodypositive, #HAES), while on the other hand, mass media and the next fad diet continue to pervert beauty expectations.

Thankfully, we also live in the time of Trulee Hall, who uses her visionary imagination to build new worlds where feminine sexuality can come out to play in a phantasmagoric space of safety and acceptance. With LACMA’s recent purchase of Ladies’ Lair Lake, Hall optimistically notes, “I feel like women are really coming into a new realm of potentiality in society. I’m very excited and proud.”