View Hunter Fleming’s online exhibition here
Artist Statement
I am interested in the capacity for painting to simultaneously summon, (re)define, and represent both the elemental and the imaginary.
It serves as a means to capture and crystallize fleeting glimpses of a past recalled and an immediate and currently unfolding “familiar.” The contents of memory are known but not readily “seen” until the moment of recognition.
A recasting of the “ordinary” (or recognizable) sets into motion an alchemical relationship between each work with the viewer. The unique outcome of this process is due to an unfolding of experience with the work as well as its shifting meaning over time.
This process is frequently influenced by the use of archaic and elemental subjects as well as by incorporating the inherent power of symbols and signs. The visual residue follows a lengthy process of engagement with the act of its making.
It is about the experience and the depiction of impulse and obsession, of obliteration and engendering. The work is initiated most frequently without preconception, as to topic or endgame. Each effort is a unique ritual of revealment, transformation, and perhaps transgression that follows its internal unfolding logic. This plays out until a work exhausts itself to completion, and so, acquires autonomy.
It is about exploring the inherent power of “mark-making” (and the fine difference just barely setting it apart from writing) and its interplay (above, between, and below) with layers (strata; membranes). The interplay of color, opacity, edge, and implication propose a visual narrative and utility. The “evidence” of making (the gesture; the stroke) is variously presented or obscured so that there is, in effect, a deal struck between the immediacy of craft and the slipperiness of “the natural” (as found/discovered).
They are but paintings, but perhaps they are seductive and strangely familiar. Occasionally they step forward, of their own volition, to draw one in.
–Hunter Fleming
QUESTIONS+ANSWERS
Could you tell me a little bit about your background, and how you came to the creation of this exhibition?
The work is fulfilled or completed with and by the engagement of the viewer. It then becomes whole and selectively (and sometimes randomly) meaningful. The producer ideally disappears entirely and the work becomes an autonomous agent. My earliest memories are of drawing. There is a commonality from decades later to the present - a disappearing into the making and subsequent full departure at its completion.
What were some of the key inspirations when creating this body of work?
Memory and its "traces" driven by impulse and obsession are recorded/incised/recounted on an ongoing basis by embracing impulses and then denying motivations.
In your artist statement, you mention an “internal unfolding logic,” I’m curious to know exactly how you discern this logic and transfer it to the canvas?
The statement is intensionally vague. There is however a thread that extends through all of the work as a whole. There there is a dialog with and against the contents of experience in the working and memory as it fades/changes in time. I find making to be elemental and essentially performative. There is a moment of arrival and a moment of departure.
Recognizing the “inherent power of symbols and signs”, how do you feel your works align themselves in this deep history?
The alignment you reference is basic from the first mark-making (of 70,000 years hence) to more recent thoughts about a signifier as a vessel or carrier of meaning(s). This extends easily to the inevitable tendency for the viewer to "read" or make sense of what she sees. The traces/marks work as autonomous and hollow signifiers - hence are available for a multiplicity of meanings or recognitions that shift over time and circumstance. The producer is independent of this process and cannot comment on the details of that seperate exchange with the work by the viewer.
You describe the conception of these works as a “ritual”, could you describe your artistic process in conjunction with this series?
The process is mediumistic wherein the artist carefully stays out of the way of the work as it unfolds as in the case of automatic writing etc. The "ritual' evolves as the thread unspools. It is in fact a Black Box, a space of ongoing interest.
What impact do you hope your paintings have on individual viewers and the greater Memphis community?
The hope is for fostering an occasionally authentic recurrent exchange between the viewer and the work. It is not unlike cloud-watching. The greater side effects, if any, beyond the individual, are not a consideration. The work is the creation of a series of doorways or opportunities that may be accessed (or not) by the individual that may expand awareness or trigger sensitivities. "Community" as a concept that is separate from the operations of individual experience is frankly not that interesting. I have no expectations for "community" per se.
Visit here for an online exhibition of Hunter Fleming’s newest work.