Mayor's Gallery - January 2020: Benjamin Hunt evokes fragility of memory

In an effort to promote and showcase the work of artists in Sacramento, Mayor Darrell Steinberg’s office displays artwork that rotates monthly. Below is a description of the January exhibit.

Benjamin Hunt’s work explores growth, nostalgia and memory through ordinary objects. The Sacramento-based visual artist and fabricator was born in San Diego and earned both a BFA and an MFA in Spatial Art from San José State University before moving north. In Sacramento, Hunt works as a technical staff member in the Sacramento State University Art Department, is an active member of the Axis gallery and received the 2015 Leff-Davis Fund for Visual Artists from the Sacramento Regional Community foundation.

Hunt’s work is magical realism made tangible: a collision of natural and synthetic, everyday life paled to surreal dissociation and plexiglass lanterns fabricated to look like houses with mirrored bottom halves.

The four multi-layered pieces from The Gray Areas collection that are on display in the Mayor’s Gallery for January of 2020 are fantastical portraits of mid-century homelife – blurred in imitation of our own fickle memories. One image recalls Grant Wood’s American Gothic: a woman in a white dress and a man in plaid stand before a blue door, their figures framed by columns of ivy. In two of the images, Hunt presents women in the act of mothering – one with her head tilted down toward her children and the other a muddled overlay of woman and infant hovering in self-eclipse. The final image, and the only one sepia-toned rather than in hazy color, is a portrait of a boy in a field, his head thrown back and forth, freeze frames of perpetual laughter.

Taken together, these transparent para-holographic photographs represent what Hunt calls “the fragile and seemingly deceptive nature of photographic memory and recollection.”