September 2020
Colleen Hargaden at Hunter Shaw Fine Art
Colleen Hargaden’s “Strategies for Inhabiting a Damaged Planet” at Hunter Shaw Fine Art gives us just that. In the first gallery, the artist presents two “capsules” that offer the viewer practical survival skills (growing your own sprouts) and herbal remedies (making your own herbal tinctures and salves). Each capsule is a solar-powered kit that presents a how-to video and includes supplies and a PDF manual. These art objects break down barriers between artwork and utility, offering a more fluid and generous relationship…
Find out more »May 2021
Sessa Englund at Hunter Shaw Fine Art
At Hunter Shaw Fine Art in mid-city, Sessa Englund has set up a kind of hollowed out interior space. Bare wooden shelving (which the artist calls “skeletons”) anchor the gallery while filigreed sheets of amber-hued latex splay across the structures. One drapes from a hanger like freshly made pasta hung up to dry. Englund’s skin-like proximities are made more fleshy via the addition of carefully applied bodily adornments like stick-and-poke tattoos and piercings. Glass “hearts” are embedded into a series…
Find out more »July 2021
Rollin Leonard at Hunter Shaw Fine Art
At Hunter Shaw, Rollin Leonard’s “About Face” takes the medium of self-portraiture to new heights. In his “Flat Face” series, the artist photographs himself or his subject with an ultra-high resolution camera from three angles and then flattens the images to form one long, extruded face. Two of those works are on view in the gallery, printed out on a large scale that towers over the viewer. Each pore, hair, and blemish is enlarged and rendered crisply, so that the…
Find out more »September 2022
Dustin Metz: The Fruit at Hunter Shaw Fine Art
At Hunter Shaw Fine Art, citrus takes center stage. Dustin Metz’s paintings feature enigmatic, low-relief limes, lemons, and oranges that float with painted and dappled chartreuse surfaces. Using modeling paste, Metz builds up smooth mounds on the surface of his paintings that he then carves to create delicately cafted tangy peels. The fruits glow with an almost Biblical gravitas: The perspective in some paintings make the lemons appear to be hovering over you like an angelic muse. Other small paintings…
Find out more »November 2023
Brody Albert at Hunter Shaw Fine Art
Intrigued by an array of broken windows that line the side of an abandoned building near his home in Lincoln Heights, Brody Albert investigated the site further—the abandoned lot is filled with rocks that passersby chuck through the glass windows, creating an ad hoc communal action drawing. For his new show at Hunter Shaw Fine Art, Albert went about dutifully recreating the windows from the building through an involved process of mold-making and casting. Once the windows were cast in…
Find out more »