Geary Contemporary (Millerton, NY)

SATELLTE

February 24 – April 7, 2024

Hutnick’s paintings read like historic artifacts – a topographic map of time and what remains constant throughout it. Hutnick sources and uses flora and fauna from his immediate surroundings as stencils, pressing the plants onto a paint roller and applying them to the canvas. The immediacy of this act is apparent: the ghostly layers are both grounding and disorienting, as our memories often are. What is captured and what is lost is kismet.  

As Hutnick works into the layers, more patterns emerge. Somehow both natural and artificial, they do not compete with one another for attention, but rather orbit around one another; sometimes behind, sometimes parallel, most of the time at different speeds, vibrations and perceived moments of time, without following a binary system. Though completely hand drafted, the glitches read almost as digital static, a bright contrast to the natural forms that ground Hutnick’s process.  

The work in SATELLITE is not fixed; it is ever-changing and moving as both our real and digital worlds are, revealing what we try to grasp onto and what we lose in the process. Hutnick states: “There is something inherently queer about these glitch-type spaces that seem to be filled with potential; they’re shape-shifting, constantly reinventing themselves, not tied to the present but rather circumnavigating both the past and the present.”