Marta Thoma

Marta Thoma Hall-To See With Eyes Closed

Anyone spending time in-person or online exploring the vestiges of long ago deep sea shipwrecks knows the world of Marta Thoma Hall. This is especially true when the investigation involves vessels located 90 feet or more below the water surface in deep lakes and oceans. Over time, the ships become nautical/maritime museums, archeological repositories, and the habitats of all manner of marine fauna and life. Hard and soft materials ranging from wood to nets to clothing and skeletons decay, acquiring patinas, textures, and deformations that introduce wonderful, surreal settings. Amid the ever-changing bones of shipwrecks are coral, sponges, barnacles, fish, mysterious gooey substances, and microbes too tiny for human eyes to see. The exact history lost and the rippling effect upon the world can only be imagined.

All of which is brought to mind while viewing the twenty-five mixed media works by artist Marta Thoma Hall’s “To See With Eyes Closed,” a solo exhibit March 1- April 26, 2025, on display at Anglim/Trimble in San Francisco. The exhibit, coming at a time when everyday life feels tension-filled and surreality is an apropos term, was in multiple ways providential.

Housed in the gallery’s minimalist white-wall-wood-floor second-floor rooms, the windows looked out on tree branches sprouting leaf buds and warehouse rooflines. The soothing scene, with its mix of human-made, clear architectural lines and organic forms suggesting spring’s arrival, embraced the art without competing for attention. Thoma Hall’s world inspires underwater, otherworldly imagining and is infinitely relatable in the 2020s. It’s not a stretch to believe that most people’s fever dreams feature hands-on “barnacle” bosses, toxic relationships that were once steely and are now cracked, decaying, or full of holes, or aging bodies and the outburst of unwanted wrinkles and lost hair. Even mysterious goos and life-threatening, invisible bacteria post-pandemic have become real and not simply the stuff of sci-fi films or hyperactive musing.

Marvelously, these human haunts can be transformed through art into things of beauty and awe, as is proven by Thoma Hall’s show. With unleashed creativity, the Hawaii- and Berkeley based artist’s seemingly endless exploration of materials and techniques leads to paintings and sculptures that instantly establish her enthusiasm for the full spectrum of color. There are tender pastels and barely-there whites, warm earth tones, purple-black shadows, muted grays, brilliant cerulean blues, soft jade greens, and more. The entire color wheel finds purchase in her works.

A second signature element arises from occasionally startling textural and conceptual combinations. Thicker-than-thick globs of paint applied in ways that occasionally resemble an artist’s palette might be slathered lavishly with a brush, dripped and scored by a palette knife, or layered thinly over fragmentary pieces of of torn paper.

Upon close examination of one work, “Walk Away,” the eye discerns a diaspora of upside down ripped paper scraps are torn from a reproduction of a Vincent van Gogh landscape. The grisaille image dominating the center of the canvas—a woman on tiptoe, whose curvaceous bare legs and derriere are viewed from behind—slides into both harmony and dissonance with its surroundings. As multiple stories rise into consciousness, the collage painting is satirical, lyrical, sentimental, theatrical, morose, ecstatic, erotic, and suggestive of associations that remain for individual eyes and minds to perceive.

In Walk Away, “Ge Danced a Goldfish,” and “Ge as Dreamer,” tufts of faux fur erupt from painted surfaces variously; appearing in the latter from a vortex of intense blue paint like thick tufts of hair that burst from the ears, lips, and armpits of human faces hands, and arms drawn sparingly with graphite. Thoma Hall appears to employ the furry explosions as a form of commentary on personal grooming or contemporary art itself by juxtaposing abstract, amorphous forms (the Minnie Mouse-like blue figure) with unexpected materials amidst realistically rendered human forms. Adorned with faux fur resembling the dull gray of un-dyed senior hair, or, in other works, reminiscent of punk, candy-colored 1970’s hairdos or shag rugs from the 60s, the textural combinations are deliberately and delightfully complex; a tangle to wrangle with or simply enjoy.

“Young Ge Jung,” made with wood, resin, and fur, is arguably one of Thoma Hall’s most striking sculptures. Diminutive in size (12’’x17”x9’’), the exuberant energy of a young woman and the wind are captivatingly caught as she runs in her swirling skirt and fur gloves, free-flowing fur hair streaming behind her, Making her way along an oversized spoon, there is movement, escape, wit and wonder expressed in every inch of the work.

Not far away, “Mystery of Ge” presents a large, slippery-looking sculpture cast in epoxy resin and entirely coated with lustrous, glossy blue paint. Here, Thoma Hall’s vision inspires immediate response, mostly due to the sculpture’s bold, arched architecture and aggressive color. Dividends are paid as individual elements emerge to eveal a piece that is both tender and turbulent. Two unicorns appear to embrace like forever soulmates at the work’s crest while other unicorns twist and collide, forming the arches that cascade down on either side of the pinnacle point. Like most of Thoma Hall’s works, the longer a person looks, the more is seen.

Other pieces in the exhibit prove impossible to erase from the mind’s eye and memory weeks after visiting the gallery and include “Implosion with Dinosaurs.” The hefty, round wood sculpture’s wood grain and cracks suggest the continents, oceans, and swirling atmospheres of globes, planets, or stars. Be it earth, moon, Mars, the sun or others, Implosion with Dinosaurs manages with a reptilian wood extension to simultaneously suggest something sinewy, muscular, biological, and gravity-bound. Animal extinction, environmental climate crisis, and the galaxy’s eternal nature press upon each other; an echo recalled long after experiencing the work.

The simply titled “Ge” introduces another chapter of Thoma Hall’s works, offering “thinker appeal” but also a clear touch of humor. Made with resin, wood, epoxy, and paint, a root-like branch emerges from where it is placed on the floor to end in what resembles a common lunch size paper bag, open and on its side. The first impressions are of a discarded bag, then a mailbox, angled and open as if begging for an object of sustenance or communication to be placed inside. It could be a sandwich, empty candy wrappers, half eaten burritos, a long-overdue letter, announcement of a birth or death, or junk mail. If someone were to place something inside, would viewers distinguish the item as that of an imposter or attribute it to Thoma Hall and artistic choice? Thoma Hall might derive pleasure and insight from either conclusion.

One last mention, of “Beloved Creature Ge,” is in no way least. The barely 12-inch tall resin cast sculpture of a woman has her floor-length skirt shredding and spiraling from hips to feet. The stranded garment resembles octopus or jellyfish tentacles, coral mushrooms, or hair thick-coated with the previously mentioned shipwreck goo. The woman holds an enormous brain atop her head, the organ’s two spheres poised to become an oversized wig. Seen up close, tiny gold flecks of paint prompt an “Oh my, yes, how gorgeously powerful this is.” Simple gestures suggest a universe of thoughts and responses in Thoma Hall’s best works.

Reflecting on the impact of experiencing mixed-media sculptures of all sizes and multiple themes and paintings unwilling to “behave” and flatten like wallpaper within frames, the exhibit’s primary impression is of work by one artist united by resistance to 2-D/3-D segregation. People familiar or becoming immersed in Thoma Hall’s work can likely anticipate she will continue to explore the paradigms and paradoxes found when real, imagined, and surreal worlds collide and co-mingle. Seen with eyes open or closed, remembered in dreams, and feeding the imagination, art—and shipwrecks—turn death and destruction into works of beauty teeming with life.