Dreamscapes

 By Earth artist PETER HUTCHINSON

 9 May – 8 June, 2002 at Lance Fung Gallery, 537 Broadway

 Reception for the artist: Thursday, 9 May, 6 – 8 PM

Lance Fung Gallery is please to present new works by seminal earth artist Peter Hutchinson.  With friends like Robert Smithson and Dennis Oppenheim, Peter Hutchinson set into motion an entire art movement, which he still culls from to reinterpret Earth Art and what made this movement a part of art history.  Although the artist’s work has been shown extensively in Europe, this will be his first New York City exhibition in four years since leaving the Holly Solomon Gallery.  Dreamscapes is an ambitious exhibition and will be presented in two parts.  The front exhibition space will exclusively show new collage based works.  The rear exhibition space will house a survey of rare and important works from the artist’s own collection dating from the 60’s into the early 90’s.

Following are some comments by the artist about his early works which set the tone for his new and colorful collages.  These collages are created from pictures ranging from his prized garden in Provincetown to his many trips to Europe.

“It began with laboratory tubes that I seeded with crystals and molds, ferns and moss.  They were symbolically through maquettes and photomontage, located in strategic places such as Utah, Aspen, Cape Cod, Galveston and New York City, even on icebergs near Greenland, to begin the process of evolution.  A large project took place on the heights of the crater of Paricutin volcano in Mexico.  This powerful place, still hot and steaming from repeated eruption that had lofted the cone to nine thousand feet, was given a swath of carbohydrates that quickly grew a new world of microorganisms, molds, yeast and bacteria.

Preceding this evolutionary gesture, I had placed organic works on the sea floor in the Caribbean, an unlimited gallery of no-gravity and depth of field.  Here I strung arcs of calabash, bags of bread mold and a field of flowers in the shape of a triangle beneath the waves.  I dammed a canyon with sandbags and redirected water flow, not Benguela, Humboldt or El Nino, but current ideas. “

“I investigated a certain philosophical point, if not place, that place/time where life began.  This energy nexus may have been in stellar clouds or in mud.  Proteins formed that were crystallized.  Crystals reproduced and grew.  Somewhere, sometime, something started this interest I found in crystals and molds, the simple forms of yeast and bacteria, half-live viruses, the half-life of minerals, the organic-inorganic polarity that formed together.  Rocks and bacteria, rocks and molds, rocks and flowers.  I threw a rope of rocks and bacteria and made a living wall.  It was a concrete expression of a frozen gesture, a chance the universe took that succeeded.  It was a gesture of help.

Yes, I suppose I was grandiose at times, and wallowed in hyperbole, a hippopotamus galloping out of the mud translated into fully evolved sentences to float serenely in an alpine sky.  And it was worth it.”