If you look up anything written on Phil Hale a single word keeps coming up over and over again: fragmented. His unsettling images are mashups of car wrecks at night and military hazmat teams at work. The narratives are not familiar ones; we have to take the fragments and construct our own ideas of what’s happening in these scenes. Here we see men in drab uniforms tying up a horse on the side of a deserted highway at night. The gold car jarring reflects the only light source (where is that light coming from anyway?) and it seems damaged. Did it just hit the horse? What was that horse doing there? Why are these men tying it up? It all feels wrong. Many critics have commented that Hale’s work reflects the instability and uncertainty of our times.
