THE FILE: Interview with artist Lee Hunter

Lee Hunter, Trading Station; North East Quadrant; E00066, digital c print, 2017.

Daniel Samaniego interviews New York City-based artist Lee Hunter about their multi-disciplinary art practice focused on our relationship to nature and their ongoing Cosmogenesis project. They discuss the diminishing gap between apocalyptic fiction and the reality of climate change and the potential of speculative fiction to create space to dream of new futures.

As a native of Southern Nevada, a region rich in open land, geological landmarks, Indigenous lands, and an evolving legacy of desert artworks such as Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (Overton, NV) and Ugo Rondinone’s Seven Magic Mountains (Las Vegas), I’m intrigued how your work is rooted in the relationship between humans and nature. How did you arrive at engaging issues of the natural world as an artist?

When I was an adolescent, I lived in Alaska and I spent a lot of time hanging out in the forest. Most of that time I was alone. I’ve always been a loner and felt like an outsider, it was around this time that I started smoking cigarettes. So I would take old cigarette butts out of my mom’s partner’s ashtrays and take books with me into the woods. I’d sit in an old hunting perch and smoke ancient half smoked cigarettes while reading science fiction books. And when I wasn’t reading, I’d just watch the forest. So in many ways, maybe not much has changed since then. 

My intellectual interest is for a couple of reasons. First, the term nature itself is so highly contentious and used through-out history to justify slavery, genocide, colonization, and other unspeakable horrors. Nature also functions as a resource in the global economic system that we recognize as neoliberal capitalism, both in the labor and abuse done to humans in the name of growth and development, as well as the ongoing extraction and industrial processes that are consuming the Earth as material. We are seeing the effects of these processes in climate change, mass extinctions, and climate refugees. In many ways it is more important than ever to think about how humans engage with the natural world, because the habitat is being decimated by the consumption of very few at the expense of the whole. My interest in the natural world is a response to trying to understand how humans have created the vast complex systems that we navigate through on a daily basis and oftentimes don’t even notice. 

At heart, I’m a landscape photographer and I really enjoy being in the outdoors. I lived on the west coast for 18 years in three different states and my father has lived in Colorado since the late 90s. I have been fortunate to have spent a lot of time in the western landscape, and I love the diversity of the bioregions. The western landscape is a very unique and precious resource.

Lee Hunter, Keys for E00066 set 1; look for bird species to find exact location, ceramic & acrylic paint.

Can you contextualize the Cosmogenesis project? How did your prior studio work about nature evolve into an ongoing project about future world-building?

I was working on an iterative project called Tracing Oblivion. This project was inspired by the hyperobject, a term created by Timothy Morton who was looking for a way to describe the vast complex system of climate change and connect that to object oriented ontology. I wanted to approach the landscape as a hyperobject, a collection of many objects that is difficult for human perception to fully comprehend.

I did two iterations of the project, one at The Luminary in St. Louis and the other at Solo(s) House Projects in Newark. I started on the project at the Luminary in early 2014, doing research on the social, economic, and political conditions that contributed to the development of St. Louis as a Midwestern city. I also looked pre-colonial/colonial Native American history which is very complex in that area, there were seven tribes of Missouri, and St. Louis was also on the route of forced Native American migrations west. And prior to that history, there was the Mississippian culture that built the Cahokia Mounds. I also looked at the environmental history and basic geology of the area to understand the industries that would eventually develop. I was working on a research methodology that could be applied to any site and give the researcher a broad understanding of the history & culture of the place. During the residencies, I used my research as a conversation starter with people that lived in the area. I would also do this during the openings, providing context and historical information about the city.   

A few weeks before I arrived in St. Louis, Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager was shot and killed by Officer Darren Wilson. . .the Black Lives Matter movement was in full swing, and it seemed like white liberals were starting to understand that police violence was real. This was all happening, and I was attending a lot of protests, thinking about the deep injustices people of African descent face in this country and reading about antebellum US history. I was starting to feel hopeless and that society would continue to reproduce white supremacy, capitalism, and environmental doom forever. 

Then, I started thinking about creating a project like Tracing Oblivion, that could have the same research methodology [used in past projects] this time, about the future. And instead of seeing the future as an apocalyptic nightmare, I could focus on how speculative fiction can critique the society we live in and create a space for dreaming new futures. I’m from the sort of old school radical left, where dreaming is a necessity for change and not a place to distract yourself from reality. To be able to change a complex system, other viable futures have to be available and it is very difficult to dream of a world without capitalism and the last 600 years or so. 

How did you decide that this world would be revealed by an archivist?

It was about a year ago, when I was getting ready for an exhibition at Doppelganger Projects in Ridgewood, Queens. I was struggling with how to present this project to the public. I knew that the project was an archive of objects, but up to that point I had been in this discursive conversation with the objects that I was making. I am a very intuitive maker, I don’t usually start with a clear idea. Sometimes I do, but oftentimes my ideas come through a process of making, reading, interpreting, and repeating. My ideas often change throughout the process and eventually, when I am done, I have a clearer understanding of the project. I think it’s safe to say that I have an iterative process both in making and exhibiting work.  

I was explaining this to my friend Erica DiBendetto, an art historian, who pointed out that the discursive process is interesting, but it might be easier to explain  if there was a character in the project that provides that information, like a librarian or archivist. And suddenly things clicked for me and I decided that the project would have a narrative character that served in the form of the archivist. So now when I’m thinking about the objects, I try to think about the things an archivist would look at to catalog the work. 

Luckily, I have a friend that is both an excellent artist and archivist, Janine Biunno. I asked Janine for advice on how to approach this project as an archive and she has been super helpful. She has walked me through the process of how to set a collection up, create keywording, and organize the objects in an archive. Talking with Erica and Janine was really the inspiration because between them, you have a researcher and an archivist,the two professions that spend the most time in special collections. I’m really thankful for feedback and practical advice that I have gotten from them both, the project would not be where it’s at without them.                              

Lee Hunter, Transit Portal; Mineral Trading; E00066, digital c print, 2016.

Within Cosmogenesis, how do you define The Travel Cults? What is their purpose, and why do they skip between dimensions?

The travel cults are groups of transdimensional travelers that specialize in transporting different materials through parallel dimensions, selling the items they smuggle through a series of semi-legal markets. The travelers use a system of objects and portals to move between dimensions, in search of minerals, keys, maps, and other precious materials to trade in. Each group specializes in different trade items. Each group generally has a unifying ideology, so for instance the transhumanist group or the gene hackers. Different groups have different motivations, the one thing they all seem to agree on is earning an income of their wares. 

The Cosmogenesis archive is comprised objects from the time period of 2030-2165, which spans approximately three generations of travel cults. Calling the groups travel cults is a derogatory term that was created in the 2150s by a journalist that was convinced that the cults were the result of group dissociation and a fraud. This was at the height of the publicity about the travel groups, the media was a part of the eventual crackdown on the parallel travels and by the passing of a global bill in 2163 prohibiting all travel, nearly all practitioners had been arrested or gone underground. The objects started to surface in the early 2260s and by mid 2163 the official Travel Archive is opened. 

You described Cosmogenesis to me as a future world that had averted environmental and social collapse. What do you hope your audience will learn or take from the archive?

Well honestly, there will probably be some collapse in the future. With any luck, the collapse of capitalism, but in terms of social and environmental questions, I think it’s impossible to tell what will happen. I think the main thing for me is avoiding apocalyptic thinking and realizing that the processes of technology, capital, and population growth will have a significant impact on our future and from what scientists are saying, the prognosis is not great. I think that in a best case scenario the future will be very different from this one, but hopefully won’t include the extinction of humans. Which is why this project thinks about environmentally different futures, like what will be the result of the chemicals, plastics, and other damaging processes that are happening? Ecosystems are incredibly resilient, they change in response to environmental changes and in the end, Earth will win. So I guess I just hope that this project leaves people with questions about how we look at the future and that our environment is an important part of that future. 

Does the archival coding system used to document and classify the future relics have equal, lesser, or greater weight as the objects themselves?

Everything in the archive is of equal value. I have probably read too much Object-Oriented Ontology to think of the objects as not equal. Hahaha. In the long run, the archive will also have all of my project notes and my own working files in it as well.

Lee Hunter, Font from Parallel E08339: Print Material from Learning to Travel, pigment print.

I was really curious about the font that you are developing in concert with the archive. What are the possibilities for the font?

I made a font a few years ago, the project is supposed to have five or six fonts. The idea was to use the fonts to create ephemera from some of the parallel universes. Archives are often filled with old paper ephemera, flyers, letters, playbills, etc. So when thinking about material culture from parallel dimensions, I figured there would be a little overlap with this world--which means print materials. The font was really fun to make, it’s full functional but needs a little kerning. I did have someone at an open studio tell me that they thought the font would be good for tattoos, which I thought was great. 

The space between apocalyptic science fiction and the reality of climate change appears to be in closer alignment now than in the past. What is your opinion on the current state of science fiction? Where is the genre headed? Looking outside your practice, are there narratives in the fine art world, or literary world you believe offer more than entertainment?

Science fiction is such a diverse genre it’s hard for me to say what the current state of it is, but it seems to be vast. I am drawn to authors that could also be called speculative fiction as well, like Octavia Butler, Nalo Thompson, Ursula Le Guin, and Jeff Vandeer Meer where the story is not necessarily bound by technology or hard science and instead is looking towards other ways of living or being in the world. 

I’ve been reading scifi & fantasy since I was about 12. The stuff I have really loved over the years falls into the cyberpunk category, but ya know the future is now. And I was just reading an article about cyberpunk and how we’ve hit the bench marks or the future, timewise, in quite a few of the books. In many ways, the predictive futures by William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and Bruce Sterling have happened.  Many people are living in the internet, have hand computers, and predictive algorithms to sell you consumer goods. Or also, the Black Mirror television show. That show is so creepily insightful, that sometimes it’s hard to watch. 

Which goes back to this idea that science fiction can be a really powerful tool for working out ideas about the future. The authors that inspire me the most address the profound inequalities in the world and create worlds where the social, economic, and political problems of today can be reworked. And I think that’s really important. 

Lee Hunter, Organelle ID Card; study cards; E00372, photo-collage, 2017.

Lee Hunter is a New York City-based artist born in Charleston, South Carolina. Hunter is a multi-disciplinary artist focused on the human relationship to nature. Recent exhibitions include Cosmogenesis at Doppelganger Projects, Queens and Sweet Lorraine Gallery, Brooklyn. In 2018, Hunter was a Visiting Artist, Illinois State University, Normal, IL, and part of a public design team at Leroy Street Studio Architecture that completed a project at the Interim Sunset Park BPL. They recently participated in artist in residence programs at Palazzo Monti, Italy and Holiday Forever, Jackson, Wyoming. In Fall 2019, Hunter will be visiting faculty at Montclair State University.  Hunter received a BS from Portland State University and an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute.

Artist’s website
Follow Lee Hunter @leehunts
All images courtesy the artist.

THE FILE The file is open: studio visits, conversations and issues in new painting and drawing. An ongoing Settlers + Nomads interview series curated by Queens-based artist Daniel Samaniego.

Daniel Samaniego’s hyper-detailed drawing installations are a meditation on queer persona. He received his BFA in Painting and Drawing in 2007 from the University of Nevada Las Vegas, and an MFA in Painting in 2011 from the San Francisco Art Institute. Samaniego has been an Artist in Residence at the Vermont Studio Center (2014). 

Posted by Wendy Kveck on December January 7, 2020.