McDonough Museum of Art (Youngstown, OH)

QUEER HORIZONS

January 21 – February 28, 2025

Will Hutnick queers the landscape and creates topographical relics that record and reinvent his physical and sensory surroundings. Through a collage-like sensibility and wonky handling of various materials, tools and processes, Hutnick’s work vibrates at the intersection of the natural environment, digital spaces, and queerness. According to the artist, the disruption of a heteronormative sense of time – and by extension, sense of place – is inherently queer, oscillating in a present tense that is not fixed. We’re moving at a pace that is becoming ridiculously challenging to keep up with, which, it seems, has little hope of slowing down anytime soon. The present is right now and just out of reach.

Hutnick begins his work by pressing found flowers and leaves – discovered around his home in Sharon, CT – onto a paint roller that has been flooded with paint. As the paint roller travels across the unstretched canvas, images of the flower and/or leaf are repeated, dispersed, obscured. This process is intended to reference analog technological tools and processes, along with their inherent fallibility. (Ferns are a recurring motif in Hutnick’s work; their intricate, complex network of lines allude to infinite spaces, as well as mathematical principles such as the Fibonacci sequence.) The weight of the artist’s hand and body as he presses the roller onto the canvas dictates how much information is transferred onto the surface. While the flower or leaf is repeatedly “printed”, it is purposefully not a perfect, one-to-one transfer; the magic happens when the image dissipates and becomes increasingly hazy, almost to the point of being invisible, unrecognizable, letting go of rationale and perfection.

In an attempt to capture a single moment and record an individual leaf, and perhaps, a futile attempt to slow down time, Hutnick is interested in how these moments ultimately signify hiccups in time. We’re granted slivers into windows of another realm that is non-linear and purposefully not straightforward. QUEER HORIZONS invites us to hold hands, fall down the rabbit hole, and experience an anxious, vibrational present together. Let’s drool over glitchy disorientation. Marvel at spaces that simultaneously stretch, recede, expand, collapse. And finally, let’s stand firmly in those spaces. Maybe we can’t actually exist in the present in a conventional sense; that in modes of dependency and survival we need to have one eye towards the future at all times. But we can at least try, right?