Installed in the windows of University Galleries, Gina Hunt’s Stereo Vision is a project dedicated to the artist’s use of hand-dyed theatre scrim as a filter and mediator of natural light. The gauze-like scrim fabric, which Hunt notes, “has the magical ability to become either translucent or opaque, depending on the light source,” is hand-dyed red, green and blue by the artist, layered and stretched across frames, then placed over each window in the gallery. Not only are red, green and blue the additive primary colors of light, but they are also the colors that comprise the illuminated digital screens through which we receive most of our visual information.

The diffusion of daylight through this site-specific installation manifests in ever-changing waves of color. As Hunt describes, “in Stereo Vision, the layering of colored scrim creates interference (moiré) patterns which appear to flicker as the sunlight passes through and into the gallery, allowing for a completely unique experience each time the work is viewed. I am collaborating with the sunlight to create this work.”

Hunt’s experimentation with the play of light on surfaces began in 2012 with This-has-been, a series of cyanotypes (photographic blueprints) on rice paper, whose lightning-like white flashes disrupted blue color fields. Her optically-intense Chromascope paintings in 2014-15 were her earliest forays into the layering, twisting, and weaving of brilliantly colored canvas upon canvas, and are the forerunners of her current layering of painted or dyed translucent materials like scenery netting, screen mesh, PVC mesh, and theatre scrim. The wood-framed, four-sided Suncatcher for the Badlands, installed temporarily in Badlands National Park in 2016, with “windows” of stretched nylon, window screen mesh, and theatre scrim, is essentially an outdoors analog to Stereo Vision.

Gina Hunt received an MFA in Painting from Illinois State University in 2015, an MA in Painting from Minnesota State University in 2012, and a BFA in Painting, Printmaking, and Art History from Minnesota State University in 2009. She was the 2015-2016 Fellow at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar, where she was a practicing artist and instructor within the Painting and Printmaking Department and exhibited a solo exhibition of paintings and sculpture. Her most recent one-person exhibition was Transmitters, at 65GRAND in Chicago. She has participated in recent group shows at DEMO Project, Springfield, Illinois; E. Tay Gallery, New York City; Hoffman LaChance Contemporary, St. Louis; Front Room Gallery, Brooklyn; and The Soap Factory, Minneapolis.

Hunt’s work has been featured in Gulf Times, Doha, Qatar; Salt Hill, Syracuse University; New American Paintings; and Studio Break, a contemporary art podcast. In 2016, Hunt was awarded residencies at Hinge Arts, Fergus Falls, Minnesota, and the Badlands National Park, South Dakota, where she created temporary, site-specific sculptural installations integrated within landscape and architecture. The artist lives and works in Chicago.

The artist’s lecture and installation are sponsored by the Harold K. Sage Foundation and the Illinois State University Foundation Fund. The exhibition reception is co-sponsored by Hyatt Place Bloomington/Normal.

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Tags: Gina Hunt, Normal, Stereo Vision, University Galleries of Illinois State University