THE CONTINGENT OBJECT

by Kelly Lindner

Ben Hunt is a virtuoso of materiality. Blurring boundaries between the real, the remembered, and the imaginary, his sculptures and photographic works appear as familiar objects and “things”, yet they are wholly something new. The recognizable individual elements are the focal point that draw the viewer in. There is a credenza. There is a ladder, a bottle, a chair, a dolly, a tree branch, a suitcase. In their ordinariness we are led into believing what we see is what we know. Yet…

The Ladder

Hunt’s sculptures are familiar through their replication and repetition of everyday objects. French philosopher Jacques Derrida posited that repetition and difference are related if not reliant on one another. While difference implies divergence and decentering, repetition is associated with displacement and disguising. In tandem, repetition and difference create a generative space of possibility. It is in this liminal space that Hunt displaces the familiar with the unfamiliar. Fabricating objects through recycled and repurposed materials and displaying them in such a way that the individual elements generate new associations, Hunt points the viewer towards the subtle shifts in difference.

In the piece Winter Reveal, a ladder is no longer a utilitarian object, nor is the bottle on the lower step or the container just above. The branches, stripped of their leaves and set atop the ladder, resemble nature, but not fully. Exacting in form, the ladder is fabricated from translucent acrylic while the additional elements from cast aluminum. In their sequencing, Hunt first undermines the familiarity through the shift in materiality then pushes the work towards the uncanny in his assembly of the various elements. In his essay The Uncanny (1919), Sigmund Freud defined the idea as the instance when something can be familiar and yet alien at the same time. Even as the individual objects resemble their everyday counterparts, the sculptural forms deny their illusion. The bottle placed on the bottom step seems intentionally casual. The ladder itself has an otherworldly presence. Yet it is the bare branches emerging from the top rung with the fragments of a toy caught in its upper limbs that give pause. It’s as if the sculpture is a moment of suspended time, playing out in a dream.

Hunt explores these types of uncanny moments throughout his work. Sideboard (2014), also fabricated from acrylic, appears as a ghostly facsimile of a piece of furniture. Placed on the sideboard’s surface are a series of framed photographs that are familiar through their arrayed display. Here Hunt introduces found family photographs, albeit layering images to create a blurred subject. This out of focus perspective permeates the entire piece. The face of the sideboard recalls simulated wood grain and cabinetry hardware, still the details are elusive. Like trying to remember the particulars of a dream or a distant memory, the various elements in the work are both present and absent.

Memory plays an important role in Hunt’s work. Only memory allows the mind to retain the past, however imperfectly, with reference to the reality of the present. Carefully choreographing the various components through his material choices in each sculpture, Hunt evinces how the mind, when it relies on memory, engenders change and loss even as it accumulates, filters, and distorts.

The Valise

Nature is a recurring motif in Hunt’s work. Clouds and sky, treetops and sky, tree trunks and branches appear in various forms.

Untitled (Sky) is a series of photographs printed on transparency film. Like the acrylic sculptures, the translucency of the film, hung just off the wall with cast acrylic clothes pins, gives the objects an otherworldly appearance even as we recognize an ordinary sky framed by changing clouds. Paired with the photographs is an open acrylic suitcase with a detailed handle and lock. In this suitcase sits another of the photographs—a box for memories, a container for remembering. In 1935 Marcel Duchamp began a limited edition of valises all containing small replicas and reproductions of his most important works to date, along with one hand-colored “original” affixed to the inside of the lid. Titled La Boite-en-Valise (Box in a Suitcase), Duchamp described the piece as a “portable museum.” Hunt’s suitcase serves a similar purpose, not as a celebration of his artistic endeavors, but as an homage to nature. Will our memories of nature outlast the impact of humans on this earth? Can we ever capture the beauty, the tranquility, the inspiration that nature affords our daily lives?

In his sculpture, Hunt deftly juxtaposes nature with the industrial, creating tension between his choice of materials, his fabrication process, and the subject of the work. Hunt’s is often an unnatural nature, constructed from recycled and repurposed materials that are distinctly man-made. The photographs of clouds and sky in Untitled (Sky) and trees and sky in the triptych Oculus offer a softer approach tinged with nostalgia. Nature is presented as memory—real and imagined.

The Photograph

To take a photograph is often described as capturing a moment. In her 1973 essay On Plato’s Cave, Susan Sontag described photography this way: “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” In his Grey Area series, Hunt mines family photos embedding images within fabricated acrylic frames. Layering and merging successive photos into a single image, the artist plays with time, extending the image beyond a singular moment. In Homewood, a young couple poses on the sidewalk in front of their house. One image shows the couple closer together, the woman’s arm draped inside her husband’s. The second image shows the couple farther apart, the woman’s hands now clasped in front of her. But it is impossible to know which moment came first. In this work, Hunt literally “melts” time and the superimposed images become a singular moment. Homewood and similar works propose that a photograph can reveal the deceptiveness of recollection while also regenerating a memory preserved by an image.

The Stool (and back to Duchamp)

As an artist working post-Dada, post-Surrealism, post-Conceptualism, post-Minimalism, one can only imagine the artistic influences that can percolate into new ideas. And so, it is true for Ben Hunt. Graft incorporates an ordinary stool form into a restrained composition of three elements. However, it would be remiss to think a stool is just a stool in the hands of a craftsman who can recreate an object in a new material, which somehow retains the essence of its objecthood while also generating newfound associations. The stool may or may not reference Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel. Or the stool may or may not allude to the numerous seats occupied by students in the sculpture lab where the artist works. Or is the stool from the artist’s own studio? Like Bicycle Wheel, an unexpected object sits atop the stool—here it is a defoliated branch pinched at the ends with clothes pins. It is both quirky and unsettling, a nod back to Surrealist and Dada concepts. And still, the stool remains a stool.

Once again, Hunt deftly balances form and materiality with subtle juxtapositions that lead to contextual references. However, the sculpture never strays far from an object’s true representation—they are contingent objects.

Kelly Lindner is the Art Galleries and Collections Curator for the University Galleries at Sacramento State.