Paula Cooper

Laura Hunt

15 Nov 2018 - 12 Jan 2019

Laura Hunt, Installation view
LAURA HUNT
15 November 2018 – 12 January 2019

NEW YORK—Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Laura Hunt. The exhibition in the gallery’s vitrine space at 529 West 21st Street will be up from Thursday November 15, 2018, through January 12, 2019. There will be an opening reception from 6 to 8pm on November 15.

Hunt’s new works explore the synthesis of painting, photography, collage, and poetry. Engaging notions of infinite reproducibility and transcoded states, the artist uses fabric (nylon, velvet, silk) hand-stitched and stretched over metal frames. In one work, a photograph taken by the artist of a television screen at a laundromat is replicated in a gently distorted grid. Frozen on the TV screen in the photo is a hand reaching out to grip a sequined garment; while the hand on the screen is caught in this perpetual gesture, the implied tactility redirects one to the surrounding fabric of the work, a lush velvet dotted with orange and green light.

In another work, printed parallel to a glowing green stain, the opening lines of Hunt’s poem “America” state: “To be born there, I’d like to go there... but get to say I was born.” The slippery syntax calmly calls out issues of migration, identity, and voice in our country. The artist reinserts subjectivity into the hyper-proliferation of mediatized imagery: edges become central, screens are rendered flexible, and each module has its own warped charge.

Laura Hunt (Brooklyn, NY) recently had her first one-person exhibition in Brooklyn, “Motorcycle Covers,” at 321 Gallery. She has exhibited in group shows at Team Gallery, Shimizu Brand, Eli Ping Gallery, The Emily Harvey Foundation, Essex Flowers, Dotory, and US Blues, (New York, NY); What Pipeline (Detroit, MI); Redling Fine Art (Los Angeles, CA); and Galerie im Regierungsviertel (Copenhagen, DK). In 2017, as part of the three-part exhibition “Billboard on Bowery,” Hunt’s work occupied a billboard at the intersection of Canal and Bowery streets in New York City. Hunt has performed at White Columns, Small Editions, and Shoot the Lobster (New York, NY). Hunt’s exhibition at Paula Cooper Gallery marks her first one-person show in Manhattan.