Will Hutnick’s lively creative practice uses a range of traditional formal and technical approaches that result in a decidedly nontraditional body of work. Radical juxtapositions and repeated patterns abut color bars, gradients, and stenciled forms alluding to digital artifacts we have seen flicker past the many screens ubiquitous in daily life. Hutnick’s works further disorient through ambiguous figure/ground relationships and jarring transitions which remind us of the competition for our attention happening on screens. Hutnick has described his work as a queering of the landscape, leaving us to question whether the glitch is a bug or a feature in his dynamic mixed media paintings.
Currently on view at the James J. Whalen Center for Music
I Half Remember a Sky Could Look Like This, 2024
House paint
48 x 8.5 feet (curved wall), 36 x 8.5 feet wrapped around six columns
Created over the course of only a few days, and with the help of a handful of Ithaca College art students, Hutnick’s expansive mural I Half Remember a Sky Could Look Like This encompasses a 48–foot curved wall and 6 columns that hug Diva Lounge. The plant and floral imagery are stencils – of sorts – from actual floral and fauna discovered on Ithaca College’s campus, minutes before they were used. Inspired by the cacophony of overlapping music rehearsals and performances throughout the space – which spanned genre and instrumentation, individual and ensemble, and which constantly filled the air – the work is also a nod to ideas surrounding queer futurity, disorientation, and the passage of time. I Half Remember a Sky Could Look Like This is dedicated to the extremely devoted music students who are most likely practicing their craft right now.
