"Doug Hall has been working in video since 1973, including collaborations with T.R. Uthco and Ant Farm. In 1984, his Victims' Regret, a video installation, was the subject of a University Art Museum MATRIX show. His newest video, Storm and Stress, presented tonight in cooperation with MATRIX, contains not only images of storms-beautiful haunting landscapes-but of their transformation for industry and re-creation for research purposes. These images are literally images of power; but they also refer to the power of the image (and image-making). In his earlier works, including tonight's Songs of the 80's, Hall also dealt with power-political power-and in particular with its conventionalized representation in language and images. An actor's exaggerated gestures and empty phrases are easily 'read' as authoritarian in 'These Are the Rules,' one of the five parts of Songs of the 80's. Likewise, but less obviously, Storm and Stress deals with a system of representation in its comparison of natural and re-created storm 'gestures'. And like the pre-Romantic movement which the title recalls, Hall continues the debate between an aesthetics of rationality versus irrationality, drawing comparisons and analogies between nature and industry, spontaneous and conventionalized gestures, organic and formal structures." Kathy Geritz