The Capital City Arts Initiative’s exhibition, For Detail View, by artist Jeff Hantman, continues at the CCAI Courthouse Gallery through May 25. The Courthouse is located at 885 E Musser St., Carson City. Admision is free; the gallery is open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays.
Jeff Hantman creates his wood sculptures using found wood objects and printmaking techniques. Rather than removing paint and sanding for smooth surfaces, Jeff keeps the old paint, shelf paper, scratches as a history in each piece of wood he finds. He alters it with additional wood pieces, images, and color to enhance the story as he builds a new sculpture.
Jeff described his artistic process: “It is not until I chip a molar that I become aware of how my teeth rest against each other. It is discomforting and unsettling but I cannot help explore the broken tooth with my tongue. My work has evolved because of a similar curiosity. I constantly gather materials from piles of garbage discarded on the side of the road and beneath freeway underpasses. I am especially drawn to plywood and explore the possibilities of working with it in an unconventional way. As I travel I am drawn to structures and places that have been neglected and left to deteriorate under the sun and their own weight. As time passes and memories fade I try to recall places I visited once, the feeling of scraping a knee on the sidewalk or the pattern on the ceiling of my bedroom. If I could capture these places and objects my paintings would be a small collection of remnants from these journeys.”
Jeff received a BFA in print making from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1995 and has been living and working in the Bay Area for 20 years. His studio is packed full of weathered objects, plywood scraps, 2x4’s, and broken furniture that he found on the street. In his studio, he disassembles these collected items and reconfigures them into large sculptures that resemble objects that may or may not be obsolete. He combines woodworking, printmaking and painting to create his sculptures.
In 2009 Jeff attended Djerassi in Woodside, CA, where he refined his use of bent plywood techniques. The following year he received a fellowship from the KALA Art Institute in Berkeley, CA. It was during this time that he created large format 4-color separations which he then incorporated into large scale mixed media works on wood. In 2012 he attended the Artist in Residence [AIR] program in Krems, Austria, and the Recology AIR program in San Francisco, CA. At Recology he fully dove into scavenging every scrap of wood, plastic and metal he encountered.
His studio is now part of Lost & Foundry in Oakland, California, which houses 12 artists who all share a similar love of hoarding/collecting and building.
CCAI commissioned Chérie Louise Turner to write the exhibition essay for Hantman’s show, For Detail View. She is a Bay Area–based freelance writer and copy editor. Her writing has appeared online at Art in America, The Huffington Post, and Visual Art Source, and in art, ltd., ArtNewsletter, ArtNews, and Tahoe Quarterly, among other publications. She has also written exhibition catalog essays and runs her art-focused blog, artbeatbayarea.com. She lives in San Leandro, California.
In February, Jeff gave a talk about his artwork to students at Douglas High School in Minden., Nevada.
The Capital City Arts Initiative is an artist-centered organization committed to the encouragement and support of artists and the arts and culture of Carson City and the surrounding region. The Initiative is committed to community building for the area’s diverse adult and youth populations through art projects and exhibitions, live events, arts education programs, artist residencies, and online projects.
CCAI is funded in part by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, Nevada Arts Council, City of Carson City, U.S. Bank Foundation, Nevada Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the John and Grace Nauman Foundation.
For additional information, please visit CCAI’s website at www.arts-initiative.org.