Lee Hunter: Hermetic Drift
01.19.2024 – 03.30.2024
Opening Reception: Friday, January 26, 7-10 PM
Lee Hunter’s exhibition, Hermetic Drift, is a continuation of their worldmaking project Cosmogenesis. Over the past eight years, Hunter has been building a speculative fabulation, or science fiction, around a transdimensional travel cult based 200 years in the future. After the collapse of capitalism and the culmination of the climate crisis, followers of this imagined cult learn to travel between times and dimensions to acquire the resources necessary for the continued inhabitation of the earth.
As Hunter builds a loose narrative around this project, the objects they make populate our future’s future: it exists as an archive that looks back at this mysterious group of travelers, giving us clues about them and about ourselves. Similar to the many misconceptions and uncertainties we bring to bear on objects from ancient societies, the functions of these objects, their context in their worlds, can’t be fully known to us. Instead, Hunter leaves it up to each viewer to try to understand this group of transdimensional travelers through their material culture. Obscure maps, secret messages hidden in domestic objects, and mysterious photographic landscapes come together to help us form our own narratives about our future and our past: what have we chosen to hold dear, what knowledges have we deemed necessary—or unnecessary—to pass on.
In addition to their highly varied studio work—this exhibition includes ceramic sculptures, gouache paintings, digital photography, quilting, and needlework—Hunter’s art practice also includes a significant component of research into alchemy, witchcraft, and the occult; pre Christian religion and pagan belief systems and symbols; and critical theory, philosophy, and anthropology. They are interested in epistemology itself; that is, the study of knowledge, or how it is that we come to know what we know. Much of their work is inspired by or based on objects, illustrations, and concepts drawn from their historical research; it is a project spans the ancient past and the distant future, and this play with time inspired the exhibition’s title. In his book, The Limits of Interpretation, the Italian medievalist, philosopher, and writer, Umberto Eco, defines “hermetic drift” as “the uncontrolled ability to shift from meaning to meaning, from similarity to similarity, from a connection to another." In Lee Hunter’s exhibition, each work is inspired by the material culture of the past, between knowable and unknowable periods of time, inviting the viewer to draw their own speculative conclusions.
In addition to their exhibition, Hunter will give an artist talk on Saturday, January 27 at 12 pm, and work with BICA School planning field trips to visit the University at Buffalo’s Special Collections to look at their Rare and Special Books Collection to share their research process.
About the Artist
Lee Hunter is a multi-disciplinary artist focused on how humans think about nature. Since 2015, they have been working on a durational worlding project called Cosmogenesis that includes photos, videos, sculptures, textiles, found objects, and writing. Hunter is a lifelong learner and enjoys reading across disciplines, their research is usually focused on nature, belief, and complex adaptive systems. Their work has been exhibited at John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Wisconsin; The Luminary, St. Louis, Missouri; Vox Populi, Pennsylvania; Berkeley Art Center, California; and Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Florida. They have been an artist in residence at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, Nebraska; Illinois State University, Bloomington, Illinois; Palazzo Monti, Italy; ACRE, Wisconsin; and I-Park Foundation, Connecticut; and Vermont Studio Center, Vermont. Hunter earned a BS in arts & letters from Portland State University and an MFA in new genres from the San Francisco Art Institute. Hunter lives and works in Champaign, IL.
