Bryan Hutchison
Region: MFA Annual
Much of my work is grounded in my religious upbringing and
a previous generation’s experience with a kind of mystical
spiritualism. It is common to find passages within Mormon
religious texts of wilderness as holy, mountains as sacred
grounds, or the desert as a spiritual refuge. Allegories and
parables of seeds, plants, and the growers that raise them are
frequent tools for teaching doctrinal concepts. I revisit some of
these passages through art, and work to reinterpret them from
a contemporary context. In moving from Utah to New York and
back again, my access to land, wilderness, and nature shifted.
This shift, along with current political climates and changing
climate itself, provides me an urgency to preserve and examine—
even if merely in absurd and pathetic gestures—my changing
connection to wilderness and our ability to access nature. These
specific works are a body of gestures toward that end, studies
in presences and absences that eye our proximity to nature.