Blooming in Bumfuck Nowhere: On the Work of Appalachian Artist Dustin Hall
Dustin Hall is an artist working in Neon, a former coal town tucked deep into the folds of the Appalachian mountains. His practice is rooted in regeneration: transforming found materials into layered, living compositions that grapple with the land, memory, and the rural queer experience. What struck me in emailed correspondence with the artist was his vulnerability. And since he was vulnerable with me, I’ll be vulnerable with you.
I miss my mamaw. I miss the way her accent made her pronounce popular like poplar. I selfishly and gluttonously miss her cornbread recipe which we’ve never quite figured out how to recreate despite having the recipe. What I may miss most though is sitting with her in garages, flea markets, and the mess of her workshop, piled high with discarded objects. I would watch in awe as she plotted new futures for things people once cherished but had left to gather dust.
Hall, too, traces something back to his grandmother. He says, “My work began in 2017, with discarded makeup on watercolor paper. My favorite medium was Orange Zing by Avon, circa the 1970’s. My grandmother wore it. Liquid eyeliner featured heavily, too. I guess John Waters influenced that.” My mamaw was born just thirty minutes from where Hall now paints, and like her, his work centers around reimagining what others have cast aside. His paintings refuse to be clean slates but are born from a layered process of accumulation and memory. Writhing in the slow, compost pile of becoming, the figure’s wedged within Hall’s reclaimed frames tussle with their own vulnerability and the land that holds them.

“The Conception of Ishmael; The Visage Fantastic of a Dirty Man, Clean” (2018)
In the work titled, “The Conception of Ishmael; The Visage Fantastic of a Dirty Man, Clean” (2018), shower curtain becomes canvas, and rather than stretched tight it is draped reverently onto pillars of scrap wood, resembling a makeshift flag. Stark white and thickly outlined in black, a couple turns to face each other with appendages outstretched. One gestural figure peers down at his offering of conception as he leans back, bracing himself against a backdrop of large fleshy looping mounds. Like the Wizard of Oz, just beyond the pair we transition from the simplicity of black and white to the wonder of lush, primary color.

“The Red Tulips” (2018)
In “The Red Tulips” (2018), color continues to wash over the landscape while figures are relegated to spectral white. A frame that once held a childhood poster of the perennial darling Marilyn Monroe is recycled, now bearing ghostly faces in every stage between root and bloom. Against a spiraling green background, heads float like masks unmoored from the anchors of their bodies. The faces and land bend together, not in static beauty but in a pained process of emergence—a reminder of queerness not as fixed identity, but as a continual becoming. “I get really attached to perennial flowers. I get really depressed in April when they all die,” Hall said in a recorded interview with educator and historian Maxwell Cloe. “Tulips specifically will always come up at the wrong time.” Perhaps too early, frostbitten, or bent toward light that may never come, we are reminded of an eternal, insistent return.
Hall’s work sidesteps notions of a quaint hero’s journey to paint this Sisyphean ache of trying—again and again. The artist’s figures struggle, not to transcend the gravity of the landscape, but to live inside of it, even when it presses in. They twist and turn within the grasp of that which both holds and harms. In “Corn Boy” (2020), space bears down to flatten with both color and form, pancaking a bubble-gum pink body beneath bulbous, protruding corn husks.

“Corn Boy” (2020)
Here, as in “The Red Tulips,” there is tangled urgency. The figure, Hall mentions in one audio clip, is meant to resemble a rabbit. He recalls as a kid knocking peppers off the vine while frolicking through the fields, only to watch them be eaten by these “scavengers”. One’s ruined harvest, another’s feast. A sense of compression which seeps into the composition and the figure’s indifferent countenance weighs heavy. Here, the figure is not quite at rest but endures where it can, pooling at the base, leaking out under a vibrancy of green, blue, and yellow earth.
Forced to carry the mountains on our backs, over and over again we roll up the hill, not toward something new but in continuation—in a longing for a here, that the artist refers to lovingly as “Bumfuck Nowhere,” and an anywhere else. It isn’t about making do. Through what is scavenged there is a gesture of belief that what’s discarded matters, still. Not erasure toward a clean slate but a layered process of re-remembering. Sitting like fragile pieces of china on a fold-up table in someone’s garage, Hall’s paintings find a way to peel off the fifty-cent sticker.
In his conjuring of new material timelines lies a practice of queer resistance. Not one that is shiny and new, fresh out of the package, but a story told best through living, imperfect objects that have been once around the block. Here, there is something that only the ruin of experience can offer. Hall’s paintings trace the cyclical nature of becoming, with each piece staging a persistent confrontation between body and land. This is what queer resistance can look like: the refusal to move out of frame, to discard the broken thing. A belief that even frostbitten blooms and cramped bodies may hold space.
Hall’s work invites us to stay and find our place in the mess. In the artist’s own words in my inbox, “Anymore, I don’t really know what I’m doing. Or who I am. Or what I want. Or how to be a person.” Neither do I. And while perhaps out of sync, peppers knocked loose from the vine, maybe it’s enough to return to what’s already here, to believe that even when pressed into the rigid seams of the world, our very tenderness—our vulnerability—will help us take root.