Gordon Hall’s Hands and Knees Reimagines the Power of Stillness at The Kitchen

It begins with silence. A rare, reverent kind. The kind that presses pause on the manicness of New York, replacing it with a loaded question: Has it started yet?

In Hands and Knees, presented at The Kitchen’s new Westbeth location, artist and sculptor Gordon Hall doesn’t give us answers. Instead, they give us time—palpable, aching time—and the space to feel what it means to wait. This isn’t your average gallery performance. It’s a living sculpture. A social experiment. A gesture toward stillness that slowly unravels into revelation.

Throughout the airy loft space, five pairs of steel sculptures—mutated descendants of chrome cantilever chairs—stand like minimalist relics of a future past. At first glance, they feel almost cold, industrial. But as two trained performers lift, recline, and carry these custom-made forms (and each other) with ease and confidence, they reveal themselves as delicate vessels of intimacy and trust. The movement is slow, intentional, and unannounced. No curtain rises. No music swells. It just happens. And the room follows.

Some viewers sit cross-legged on the floor. Others begin to quietly picnic, pull out sketchpads, or lean in closer to examine the quiet bodies resting, almost prayer-like, on the sculptures. This atmosphere of not knowing—of not being told where to look, when to clap, or how to behave—generates an almost electric tension. Are we part of this? Can we speak? Should we?

That uncertainty, Hall suggests, is the point.

“I was thinking about our bodies as incredible objects that can be trained and transformed—not in a degrading way, but as a way of respecting the fundamental power of the physical world, our bodies included,” Hall says. “I make sculpture as a way of exploring these embodied possibilities.”

Here, performance is sculptural, and sculpture is performative. Each piece is a prompt, not a pedestal. And the choreography—emerging organically from Hall’s physical constructions—unfolds like a slow conversation between material and muscle.

The tone of waiting often inflicts a sense of purgatory—especially for the overstimulated mind. Yet Hands and Knees suggests that waiting isn’t passive. It’s potent. Within that in-between lies vulnerability, reflection, and even liberation. This isn’t dead time. It’s charged. The performers, suspended mid-motion or laying prostrate on these transformed chair frames, embody a kind of intentional surrender. The gallery becomes not a place of spectacle, but a field of potential.

As Hall explains: “Part of what I love about objects is that they always exceed what we might hope for them, even as the maker. There’s a politics of taking materiality seriously on its own terms, not as a mere tool for our goals.”

The act of coexisting with these objects—whether you're lifting them, laying on them, or simply watching—feels like a kind of communion. One where the line between dependency and agency is quietly blurred.

Curator Matthew Lyons, in his first exhibition project at The Kitchen’s new home, notes the spatial awareness baked into the installation’s DNA:

“My curatorial practice reflects the interdisciplinary ethos of The Kitchen. Even in an exhibition context such as this, I approach the working process through a choreographic lens, attuned to the space and how one moves through it. Being that this is my first exhibition project at our new home at Westbeth, I thought deeply about how the space behaves. I then felt that Gordon would respond to and engage the architecture creatively–in a way that would offer new possibilities for their own practice as well.” - Matthew Lyons

That choreographic lens is clear. You don’t walk through this exhibition—you drift, hover, float.

Hall’s Hands and Knees is animated by politics that challenge prescribed uses—not just of bodies, but of time, space, and expectation. The sculptures—stripped of their Breuer-style functionality—invite new uses. They become sites of suspension, of reorientation. Of rest.

The performers don’t perform for us. They move with us, through us. In the shifting quiet of the space, even our own stillness becomes a kind of participation. We become witnesses not just to motion, but to the possibilities of presence.

In a city obsessed with velocity, Hands and Knees offers an antidote. A tender, rigorous invitation to reflect on what it means to pause. And in doing so, it delivers a brighter realization: that waiting isn't a waste, but a way in.

Performances of Hands and Knees continue at The Kitchen through May 31, free to the public. See more of Gordon’s work here.

Writing and photo by Josh Sauceda