AMNESIA SALON DINNERS///
a living installation of cross-pollinating stories.
A CROSS POLLINATION OF PEOPLE & A CATALYST FOR GROWING CONVERSATIONS
My name is Marlon and I make tables to make meals as an art practice. Made of reclaimed doors and native wood from the communities I find myself in, I hope to shape tables as social sculpture that makes space for our humanity.
In 2017 I reimagined my relationship with my wife (got divorced), and it was traumatic. My daughter’s pain, my disappointment, and our family’s shame loomed in the loft I lived in. It was thick like smoke making it hard to see myself. I had lost my family and it was hard to remember who I was without them. I asked friends and fellow mess-makers to help me turn some reclaimed wood from my grandmother’s house in Homer, Louisiana into a long table for traditional salon dinner parties series to unearth beauty from brokenness.
During these gatherings I bring a cross-pollination of 16 people at a time to the table to remember the beauty of being human. It is a renegade anthropological study I am doing about human connection and purpose memory. Original musical composition, rich culinary art, and intentionally designed conversation drives a night of wonder shared by people who are different and share a heart for the city. In this room they can not talk about what they do, only who they are and why they exist.
The Anthropology of Story : Houston Museum of African American Culture
This is half of the door Marlon fabricated in Nairobi, Kenya during his recent residence with Kemane Art Residency in collaboration with The United States Embassy.
He unearths beauty from brokenness by digging through piles of doors as a source of spiritual archeology.
Marlon believes dinner tables are not just horizontal surfaces on which we eat. They are also vertical portals through which we connect and learn from each other. A doorway that accesses our humanity one meal at a time.
Marlon makes tables to make meals of culturally and cognitively diverse people who grow together in ways they can not grow alone.
The doors exhibit in galleries as vertical art for the walls and floor spaces as well as horizontal art for meals as social sculpture. These are human hopes guests placed in one of the archival doors that serve as tables in Nairobi.
“Between Two Worlds”
Nairobi, Kenya 2023
A table made of reclaimed doors that hang as wall installations.
This is a table made in Tulsa, Oklahoma where Marlon was a Tulsa Artist Fellow who conjured the phoenix rising from the ashes of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre with meals that brings people together. The design is consistent all over the world with two 6 feet pieces with a door that connects them in the center and triangles on either side. Connecting people who were divided through the triangular hope of mind, body, and spirit connection.
Marlon uses reclaimed materials from the communities he lands in as a resource for wholeness through the power of art.
Hall inherited his passion for functional art making from his father who is an upholsterer and artist in Houston, Texas.