Elijah Wheat Showroom presents Will Hutnick's most ambitious solo exhibition to date. Press Play & Record opens September 10th, kicking off our autumn programming in the raw kunsthalle location on the Hudson River in Newburgh, NY. 

Showcased will be a creative display of Hutnick’s surfaced-based abstract 'paintings' varying in scale and incorporating elements of the locale: rubbings of cinder block walls, dried flowers, plucked live foliage, and other site-specific elements. Hutnick highlights scale and repetitive patterns within Elijah Wheat’s current architecture. Visiting the gallery space within the last year, the artist's marks have been carefully printed on an expansive raw canvas prior to the paint’s application and eventual stretching. Weaving in and out of recognizable leaves and wall rubbings are undulating gradients creating radically surreal landscapes. Hutnick’s distorted linear mark making in his paintings, or “topographical relics,” nods to a queer ecology and disrupts the binary worldview. 

Hutnick emphasizes “in this new, queer, futuristic landscape, nothing is as stable as it seems.” As an avid fiction reader, the artist investigates personal artifacts and stories through a traveling line: following, bending, leading, straightening, winding, fading, saturating and impacting its environment—and the canvas. Hutnick executes various printmaking processes on unprimed canvases. He also references a world in these paintings that emerge through idiographic mark making providing a time-stamp of place. 

A critical questioning of identity-based logics of representation, sociality, and sexuality, seen in Hutnick’s titles, is also a means to redress this work in architectural and spatial theory that lives under the title of "Queer Space.” This discourse of spatial identification — in a flat but radically vibrant playground of surface-based often monochromatic depth — is incapable of attending to those moments and places which defy the impulses of representation, and are worthy of being rendered precisely because of this defiance. This is where a minor architecture emerges, presenting the fictional yet permeable locations that queers have had to fabricate for joy, for safety, and for mental health. 

Hutnick is also an avid runner, practices mindfulness and has actively played the cello since grade school. These co-practices embed the endurance for the ambition of playing with scale, a fine-tuned focus of self-reflection and a visual lyricism to his skillfulness in painting. Hutnick’s most recent works record and reinvent physical and sensory surroundings, alluding to an ethereal view of the sky with ideas of steadfast constellations and elusive cloud formations inferring movement to a spiritual, or mindful view of space. Diving into these reinvented abstractions, and ‘queer landscapes’ one is enraptured. For, as he states: “In this new, queer, futuristic landscape, nothing is as stable as it seems. The internal logic of each painting slowly unravels if you let it.”

The opening reception with the artist will be on September 10th, from 15:00—18:00, we invite you to join us at 195 Front St., Newburgh, NY 12550. 

Will Hutnick (b. 1985, Manhasset, NY) is an artist and curator based in Wassaic, NY. He creates topographical relics that record and reinvent his physical and sensory surroundings. With a nod to queer ecology, Hutnick’s paintings disrupt the perception of a binary worldview that eschews the inherent interconnection of sexuality, landscape and lived experience. 

Hutnick received his M.F.A. from Pratt Institute (Brooklyn, NY) and his B.A. from Providence College (Providence, RI). He is a 2021 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Painting, as well as a grant recipient from the Berkshire Taconic Foundation in 2017 and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2015. Recent exhibitions include: Hollis Taggart (Southport, CT), Soft Times Gallery (San Francisco, CA), 1969 Gallery (New York, NY), Sugarlift (New York, NY), Geary Contemporary (Millerton, NY), Soho Works (Brooklyn), Satellite Art Club (Brooklyn), Craven Contemporary (Kent, CT) and Collar Works (Troy, NY). Hutnick has curated exhibitions at SPRING/BREAK Art Show, Ortega y Gasset Projects, Trestle Projects, Pratt Institute, Wassaic Project and Standard Space, among others. He has been an artist-in-residence at Yaddo, Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences, Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency by Collar Works, Soaring Gardens Artists’ Retreat, DNA Artist Residency, Wassaic Project, Vermont Studio Center, and a curator-in-residence at Benaco Arte and Trestle Projects. From 2015-20, Hutnick was one of the Co-Directors of Ortega y Gasset Projects, an artist-run curatorial collective and exhibition space in Brooklyn. He is currently the Director of Artistic Programming at the Wassaic Project, a nonprofit organization that uses art and art education to foster positive social change.

Elijah Wheat Showroom (est. 2015) is a New York-based artist-run gallery and nomadic curatorial experience founded by Carolina Wheat & Liz Nielsen. Currently located in Newburgh, NY on the Hudson River in a 3000 sq/ft Kunsthalle. The gallery is named after their late son, Elijah, whose creative insight, righteous vision, perceptive being and stylistic voice for trendsetting embody the spirit that the Showroom honors. EWS artists are socially conscientious, politically engaged and reflective of a creative community striving to cultivate interactions and instigate conversations. We promote the diversity of artists' voices with contemplative messages while advocating for visual art’s accessibility to all audiences.