I ventured further in, almost unable to focus on any one piece, seeming as they did to blend into one another, the dividing lines between one artwork and another becoming as blurred as the near indecipherability of an individual piece as I attempted to get a “fix” on it, to pin it down, as it were (ha ha). I bet this is going to be a mess to clean up, I thought to myself, and it was, somehow, not at all an ungenerous thought. The word that came to mind after WOW was painstaking. I looked more closely and noticed pins, tiny pins, like the ones that a seamstress might use to stitch together a garment, everywhere, holding in place tiny scraps, thousands upon thousands of tiny images, some bigger, some smaller, at varying lengths from the foam boards fixed to the walls, the images seeming to float, the bits and pieces thrown around but obviously carefully placed. Surely this center could not hold, but I still got sucked into the maze of colors, shapes, images, objects … Colors, shapes, images, objects-everything seemingly suspended in air, floating, leaning in, leaning away, almost moving with the ecstatic density of millions of tiny bits set spinning around an unseen center. Walking into his exhibit Echo, hosted at Regen Projects from January 14–February 19, 2023, the first thing I felt was WOW! I was overwhelmed. This tension, one of many, defines, for me, the push and pull of Hundley’s work.Īn example of the artist’s work will help unpack what I mean. They offer a profound comment on disparate contemporary bodies looking for a harmony-or, if not exactly a harmony, then a thingness, a suchness, greater than their parts but one that still finds a way to honor those parts, in all their individuality, as precious. artist he might be, Hundley’s works, and his aesthetic practice, are much more than a synecdoche of a city. as itself composed of a multitude of disparate bits and pieces that still somehow come together as L.A.īut however much an L.A. The intensity of his collage aesthetic, the density of it, brings together wildly disparate bits and pieces that nonetheless seem to cohere into their own particular beauty, much like we might think of L.A. artist I have yet to encounter-not necessarily in terms of subject matter, which tends to pull from the classical world and literary sources, but in terms of form. I’D BEEN HEARING more and more about Elliott Hundley, the Los Angeles-based artist who creates works on a grand scale but almost all composed of the smallest bits and pieces, collaged into magnitude.
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