Marc Hundley

When you live in a city with eight and half million people a majority of your experiences (and a lot of your psychic energies) end up contained within the four walls of your apartment, your friends' places, or your favorite out of town hang outs. We take to these spots in the hopes of occupying a less chaotic space. In turn they become an extension of ourselves, sitting still, ready to be portrayed. Marc Hundley's poignant and sublime portraits of experience using time, place, and text are as relatable as they are ambiguous. A few days after the opening of his show "New Music" at Canada, I walked across the hall of my apartment building to draw his studio. Hundley is not only a fantastic artist, but also a fantastic neighbor.

Familiar like a past life, and just as unearthly, Hundley's posters pluck texts from poems, song lyrics and names of places and pairs them with found and original imagery. Using direct mark making, typewriting, and repeated xeroxing as part of his process, the results are meaningfully manipulated advertisements for a more benevolent world. One printed work on paper, up in his current show, uses a photo he took of the west side of our building that he couples with lyrics by Buffy Saint-Marie, a native Canadian singer songwriter and social activist. I find myself replacing my own voice with Marc's in the time it takes to quietly read the small dark type detailing a place, a time and the author of the text at the bottom of many of the posters. For "New Music" Marc has made the space more apt for day dreaming and pondering by building a long bench that takes up the extent of one of the walls — a generous consideration for his weary city viewers. Hundley's ephemeral thoughts or gentle but nudging manifestos, be them imagined or real recollections, whisper out to the audience to pay attention to what is happening around them, often finding that "It's Beautiful."

       

It was pretty easy to get home from our visit; I never even put on my shoes. Continuing our often lengthy hall conversations in a drawing session seemed so natural, but also unusually special. Art is all around us, sometimes just on the other side of the wall. Please go see his show up now at Canada until June 6 and to see more of his work look him up on the internet.