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Jackson Hole News and Guide
By Tibby Plasse
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Kate Hunt combines newspaper, baling twine and steel to construct her Torrington sculptures. Pictured here at 51” x 77", Hunt’s Six Part Torrington piece shows off the everyday materials after they have been stacked, cut, glued, wrapped and burned.
Douglas Schneider’s approach to expressionism captures the artist’s many influences in one canvas. The master draftsman balances abstraction with bold colors that render like raw brushwork and narrate a living story.
Douglas Schneider’s “Belle-Mére” and Kate Hunt’s “New Perspectives” will christen Diehl Gallery’s new space for Fall Arts. Two distinctly different shows, a sculptor driven by the details of texture and shape and a painter informed by a mission to celebrate the positive actions of a world alive are paired up to discover wonder in primary materials and illumination in a common flower.
Hunt is a Montana native who has recently moved to Mexico. And, Schneider recently moved from northern California to just outside of Los Angeles. For both artists, their new locations have informed new directions in their work.
Hunt has rediscovered a new relationship with paper, her long-time medium of choice that she sculpts and patterns into sacred pieces that reshape what’s been left over: bailing twine and archives of the Jackson Hole News&Guide shaped around steel and sealed with epoxy and encaustic. The result of her repurposing is fiercely dramatic.
“More and more places are not publishing print paper anymore and the paper quality is also changing,” Hunt said. The artist said after moving to Mexico her art form changed entirely after having to seek out new paper sources.
“It’s a more expensive commodity right now and though I had access to heavier, really high-quality paper, it was causing my work to get blocky and it definitely influences the way the work comes out,” she said.
Hunt said her work is driven by what if.
“I just build the work and the work visually speaks to me. I think what if is a big question ... that’s where all my work comes from is just looking at it having that conversation asking what if you know, the materials have a language to them,” she said.
For Schneider’s exhibit, the change in direction evolves from a need to celebrate environmental concern with positive imagery to create efficacy.
“I started realizing that I wanted to do something about beauty, the beauty of nature,” Schneider said.
Schneider has lived in Alaska and said he’s more than cognizant of how much control we have over nature — that is to say, none — and simultaneously curious about how humans strive to control nature.
“The whole world has devolved into this place where we’re destroying the very thing that we need,” he said.
Schneider’s regular foray into abstraction practices has focused on popular culture with images of Audrey Hepburn, but in this new work, abstraction is the angst and anxiety of survival, not the confluence of history and art form.
“Morning glories are really aggressive and they take over where they can. We do everything we can to create human structures and nature can still take over. These plants are surviving in Chernobyl’s exposed areas; they’re thriving,” the painter said.
Schneider said he loves the Venus fly trap qualities of the wild vine, but that really his objective is about painting something that celebrates instead of creates more anxiety.
“Making something beautiful that people don’t see as beautiful makes it highly accessible but allows this body of work to move past negativity and see something that we don’t think about and view it as precious.”
The dialogue the two artists create on opposite walls brings a modern tone to many themes of Western art during Fall Arts Festival. The opening reception for both shows will occur in conjunction with Palates and Palettes, complete with pairings from Hatch Taqueria.