Spotlight: Oh the Places We Will Go

Artist Statement

Oh the Places We Will Go

Our world is constantly being reloaded with data, images, opportunities, options for reinterpretation, and fleeting impressions. In a continuously evolving world, the paintings in this series of work act as a snapshot of this maelstrom of information overload and show a scene apparently caught in limbo between reality and a dream. By using the everyday as a departure point to escape into abstraction, I am able to create a world where thoughts and a physical reality are concurrently at odds and interconnected. In blurring the bounds of figuration, the everyday, and abstraction, I create claustrophobic compositions that hint at the internal space of a dream, thought, memory, or fantasy. The emotional stock of my abstractions is in constant flux, seeming to denote feelings of the flesh, form, nature, machine, energy, architecture, good/evil, sex, life/death, etc. Rules are being broken, bent, and ultimately distorted to meet my needs of creating a space that buzzes, vibrates, compresses, expands, and feels charged with the energy of a changing environment. Time in these images could be a fleeting memory or seconds away from becoming reality; the specifics are not important. I am interested in creating paintings that challenge our perception of a realistic time and place.

The work is first a response to the world, and then a reaction to what it has to offer. With these paintings, I want to use personal narrative as a means of composing, but it is important to know that they are only a starting point for a composition of destruction and the ecstatic within nature, life, and memory.

Autumn Hunt received her master’s in painting from Indiana University in 2015. She is currently an assistant professor in the School of Art at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. Coincidently where she also received her BFA.  Her work has been shown as far afield as The Painting Center in Chelsea, NY, and regionally in numerous exhibitions. Further examples of her work may be viewed on www.autumnmhunt1.wixsite.com/fine-art