For Immediate Release: James Huckenpahler: Feature Length Painting
Exhibition Runs from September 6- October 1, 2011
Artist Reception- Friday September 16, 6-9pm
House Gallery
29 East 400 South
Salt Lake City, UT 84111
www.housegalleryslc.com
801-322-1027
House Gallery is pleased to present Feature Length Painting, an exhibition of photographic prints by Washington D.C.-based artist James Huckenpahler. The exhibition features a series of images with the retro, grainy appeal of vintage footage and ominousness worthy of David Lynch. The images, derived from a feature-length film the artist recently completed, tell a strange, abstracted story about progress, faith, irreverence and nature. The artist’s reception will run from 6-9 PM on September 6, 2011.
For the past decade, Huckenpahler’s work has veered toward interpretive social history, and he has worked tirelessly on an in-depth illustrated history of Washington D.C. However, in Feature Length Painting, he takes social history in a new direction. Fascinated by the raw, DIY approach reengage filmmaker Jack Smith took to both living and art-making, Huckenpahler decided to pay homage to the filmmaker, who once collaborated with Andy Warhol on a project called Batman/Dracula.
Huckenpahler saw Smith himself as a sort of batman figure—an obscure, mysterious force--and resolved to mimic Smith’s style and penchant for the weirdly cataclysmic. He proposed a feature-length movie that would probe the history of Washington D.C. by focusing on the story of the Washington Project for the Arts (WPA), as an insider of the organization told it to him. The WPA funded the project, and the resulting film pairs footage from the Prelinger Archive, a collection of corporate and institutional film, with footage Huckenpahler shot of costumed collaborators. It traces the art’s organization’s highs and lows, taking the tragic figure of D.C. outsider artist Carroll Sockwell as its batman-style protagonist.
The images in Feature Length Painting, though derived from Huckenpahler’s movie, stand alone, eerily and beautifully. They have the feeling of retro collage—it’s as if Kurt Schwitters had gotten a hold of MADD magazine—combined with the hazy, suspenseful visual language of the horror film. Strange textures and colors overlap images of refinement and sanity, and each piece relies on some kind of visual collision. The bottom half of an orange face might pop out of stoic gray clouds; or batman might appear from inside the silhouette of a contemplative young man. The aura of mystery the images give off present history as something that only becomes stranger and more opaque the deeper we dig into it.
Huckenpahler received his B.F.A. in 1990 from Corcoran College of Art and Design, where he currently teaches. Among other venues, he has exhibited at Marilyn Kiang Gallery in Atlanta, and The Washington Project for the Arts, Fusebox, and Hemphill Gallery in Washington, D.C. Feature Length Painting, the artist’s first solo exhibition at House Gallery, continues through October 1, 2011.
