Showcased will be a creative display of Hutnick’s surfaced-based abstract ‘paintings’ varying in scale and incorporating elements of the locale: rubbings of cinder block walls, dried flowers, plucked live foliage, and other site-specific elements. Hutnick highlights scale and repetitive patterns within Elijah Wheat’s current architecture. Visiting the gallery space within the last year, the artist’s marks have been carefully printed on an expansive raw canvas prior to the paint’s application and eventual stretching. Weaving in and out of recognizable leaves and wall rubbings are undulating gradients creating radically surreal landscapes. Hutnick’s distorted linear mark making in his paintings, or “topographical relics,” nods to a queer ecology and disrupts the binary worldview. 

Hutnick emphasizes “in this new, queer, futuristic landscape, nothing is as stable as it seems.” As an avid fiction reader, the artist investigates personal artifacts and stories through a traveling line: following, bending, leading, straightening, winding, fading, saturating and impacting its environment—and the canvas. Hutnick executes various printmaking processes on unprimed canvases. He also references a world in these paintings that emerge through idiographic mark making providing a time-stamp of place. 

A critical questioning of identity-based logics of representation, sociality, and sexuality, seen in Hutnick’s titles, is also a means to redress this work in architectural and spatial theory that lives under the title of “Queer Space.” This discourse of spatial identification — in a flat but radically vibrant playground of surface-based often monochromatic depth — is incapable of attending to those moments and places which defy the impulses of representation, and are worthy of being rendered precisely because of this defiance. This is where a minor architecture emerges, presenting the fictional yet permeable locations that queers have had to fabricate for joy, for safety, and for mental health. 

Hutnick is also an avid runner, practices mindfulness and has actively played the cello since grade school. These co-practices embed the endurance for the ambition of playing with scale, a fine-tuned focus of self-reflection and a visual lyricism to his skillfulness in painting. Hutnick’s most recent works record and reinvent physical and sensory surroundings, alluding to an ethereal view of the sky with ideas of steadfast constellations and elusive cloud formations inferring movement to a spiritual, or mindful view of space. Diving into these reinvented abstractions, and ‘queer landscapes’ one is enraptured. For, as he states: “In this new, queer, futuristic landscape, nothing is as stable as it seems. The internal logic of each painting slowly unravels if you let it.”