Art in Isolation
with Hunter Shaw

Art in Isolation with Hunter Shaw

In the coming weeks, Carla founder and editor-in-chief Lindsay Preston Zappas will be hosting chats with members of the L.A. art community via Instagram Live on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. 

The following was edited for web from an Instagram Live conversation on April 8, 2020 at 5:30 PST.

Lindsay Preston Zappas: There he is! Hunter, how’s it going?

Hunter Shaw: Hey, I’m good. How are you? Good to see you?

LPZ: Loving this hair — that looks amazing.

 HS: Thank you. That’s about two days old. You know, quarantine looks.

LPZ: Nice! Quarantine looks… I’m wondering if the hair dye might come out myself, and I never dye my hair, so… inspiration.

HS: Do it.

LPZ: I’m really happy to have Hunter Shaw here. He runs Hunter Shaw Fine Art gallery. So, how have you been doing? What have you been up to the last couple of weeks, and how are you personally staying centered and calm? What’s going on?

HS: Well, maybe a week or two weeks ago, I was saying day-by-day. But these days, I’m saying I’m taking it hour-by-hour. I think that’s really a productive and healthy mindset, because it really gives you the opportunity to change directions and reset multiple times in a day. I think we’ve probably all experienced opening our phones and seeing something shocking or overwhelming, and [you] can have the tendency to get caught in that or dwell in it a little too much. So trying to keep an hour-by-hour mentality—

LPZ: — I love that. I’ve been getting a little frustrated when I set up my day and I have this overambitious to-do list, and then those notifications come up, or something triggers me emotionally… I’m battling my own ambition to get things done and what I can personally deal with in a day with everything that’s going on.

HS: I can relate. I think that everyone in the L.A. art world can relate to that, because we’ve gone from working 110% of the time, and being out and social all the time, to the exact opposite. I know artists forever have been practicing social distancing: it’s called the studio—

LPZ: [Laughs]

HS: —But other than that, I really miss the social aspect of the art world—even the things I would complain about. I would complain about the pace of going to twelve art openings a weekend, but I would love to go and see everybody and be at an art opening this weekend.

LPZ: I know! Me too. You understand that it’s a way that we all check in with each other, but I feel like I’m also just missing those chance encounters, and people that you always see out and get to have a five-minute catch up with those people. I’m missing hugs, and I’m missing that kind of connection with our community as well.

HS: Absolutely. It’s such a paradoxical experience to at once feel so isolated, yet so connected to everyone—to be reaching out, to know that everyone’s experiencing the same thing in different ways. Everybody’s alone, but very much reaching out right now. It’s bittersweet, I guess you could say, but everyday, I’m focusing on the rewarding or fulfilling things that are happening. So my creativity, not from myself, but from a lot of my friends and my community. 

I have been drawing—that’s been one of the ways I’ve been trying to productively spend time. Probably not many people know that I [have a] making practice in addition to the gallery. That’s how I arrived at curating, through my own practice as an artist. With the gallery, I’ve had less and less time to do that, and a very unexpected but nice use of my time to get back into the studio and do some painting.

LPZ: I love it. So, you opened an exhibition: was it shelter-in-place quite yet, or maybe right before you opened a two-person show at the gallery?

HS: Right. The show is a two-person show with Tammy Nguyen, who’s based in New York City, and Adam de Boer, who I’ve shown at the gallery a number of times. The show opened March 15th, which was basically the weekend right before the shelter-in-place order took effect. There was already talk about social distancing, so the opening was a very small affair. We didn’t call it an opening; we extended the hours to be a full-day preview. Mostly, it was a family attendance. Adam’s family came out and a few friends, but sadly, it was put on hold shortly after that. 

It’s still hanging, but I haven’t been taking any appointments. I’m just extra cautious and follow the CDC guidelines and everything, but I’m happy to say that the show will reopen when the time is right. I was very fortunate to have flexibility in my program this year, so I was able to keep this one up indefinitely, and I look forward to sharing it with everyone when it’s safe.

LPZ: I’ve been wondering how larger institutions or even larger galleries are going to deal with that, because often they have exhibitions slated throughout the year, and the loans already in place, and things like that. That speaks to the agility of someone like you—that’s a smaller operation and you can really shift to the circumstances, which is really exciting.

HS: I’ve felt very fortunate to be in that camp. Being a one-person operation, I have a much smaller overhead. With the programming, it was just coincidence. Usually, I try to have at least 6-8 months planned out, but earlier this year, things were a little more nebulous, and coincidentally, it worked in my favor to be able to keep this terrific show up indefinitely. 

I think it will be a great show for people to come out and see when they’re out of quarantine because the subject matter coincidentally is about human resilience and fortitude and solidarity in the face of difficulty and ever-changing circumstances. So it’s a very timely show. It’s a very optimistic one that I think people will find very moving when they’re able to see it.

LPZ: You sent me an email this week talking about how galleries are adapting to digital. In your email, you were like, “It wouldn’t make sense to have a painting show online.” Can you talk about that?

HS: I don’t mean that as any dig at any other gallery. I certainly understand the programming and the financial constraints that everybody’s under. But for me, just as a viewer, I find the online viewing rooms that are featuring sculpture and painting to be an unfortunate compromise for pretty much everyone involved. It’s even a compromise for the gallery because, of course, you want people to come in and see what experience [the painting or sculpture] provides in physical space, you know? 

These are objects meant to be experienced IRL, and I’ve had that problem even pre-corona, where the digital viewing experience is so normalized, that people think that seeing a JPEG of a painting is the same as seeing it in person which, to me, is not adapting at all. 

In adapting to a virtual platform, it was important to me to showcase works that were digitally native, that would work well streaming or being seen on a computer screen. Video, really, was the obvious medium to look at, but I’ve always been a major fan of moving-image works, and thought it would be a great opportunity to put together a group of works that I had seen in the last few years that I had felt were highly entertaining, but also had a critical perspective that might be very appropriate to our current circumstance, and it might be thought-provoking given what’s going on.

LPZ: Yeah. And critical toward…? Can you expand on that a bit, some of the overarching themes in the videos?

HS: The online exhibition is called Reality is Canceled—

LPZ: Which feels true.

HS: —It really looks at the network of forces creating what I would describe as the “consensus reality” in the contemporary world, or at least, within the neoliberal world. In a short list, that could be defined as corporations, the media, markets, politics. So these four videos take a specific subject matter but take a critical look at the pros and cons of some of those forces.

LPZ: So this is on your website, and it’s streaming at the moment, so anyone can go on and watch these three videos. Was this something [that came from] thinking on your feet to adapt to the digital interfaces we’re in right now? I’m curious about the parallel exhibitions: you have the one that’s in the gallery, and this one seems more responding to our moment and to that digital interfacing.

HS: Absolutely. I think that because of the timing of everything—having Tammy and Adam’s show unexpectedly close right after the opening—it has not been seen at all, and in my opinion, really needs to be seen in person. For me, for all intents and purposes, that show is unfortunately on hold at the moment. 

I wanted to have something that people could engage with, but I think in the first few days of being isolated and the first few days of COVID hitting L.A., my mind was in hyperdrive, and I was really thinking about the situation, [and] in my opinion, some of the forces or decisions that may have led to the situation.

LPZ: Also using your skill as a gallerist and curator to make a show out of it, and position these [four] artists in conversation with each other.

HS: I might as well throw it out there—who they are. Four films, and each are, more or less, long-format. They range between twenty minutes and an hour, so it’s a nice program. You can sit down and watch for two hours. 

In any case, the films are Nina Sarnelle’s Big Opening Event (2019), which looks at the mega-deals struck between corporations and governments, such as Amazon and their fulfillment centers—they have been proliferating all over the country. There is Maura Brewer’s Jessica Manafort (2018), which looks at a film made by Paul Manafort’s daughter and reimagines that film as a film about money laundering—which it potentially was financed by laundered money. It’s really fascinating; I don’t want to give too much away. 

Don Edler’s The Production of Information (2019), which I showed earlier in 2019 as part of his exhibition Two Minutes to Midnight. That’s a feature-length, experimental documentary-hybrid political satire that is about the way that ideology is packaged through the media. The final piece is Nicolas Grenier’s Vertically Integrated Socialism (2017) which, of the four films, is the only fiction, and it imagines a fictional housing project that combines a Libertarian free-market system with an inclusive socialist housing program. It kind of creates this very paradoxical moral dilemma for the people who live there. [Laughs]

LPZ: Right… right. I’ve seen clips of that. That video is really interesting.

HS: It really is. I’m happy to be friends with Nicolas, and we’ve collaborated in the past. I’m also very grateful to Luis De Jesus Gallery for giving us the permission to include that film. Nicolas is represented by Luis.

LPZ: I’m curious, looking around at other galleries, if there are other digital transitions that you’ve seen that you feel like you really responded to, or [are] speaking to how our community might be shifting to that reality for a while moving forward? Do you have any thoughts or advice on what we should be looking at or how we can stay connected digitally in this time?

HS: I don’t know if anything comes off the top of my head. I think that what I said earlier is that for me, as a viewer, I am more interested in seeing digitally native content right now. I think that’s difficult for some galleries because everyone is stuck within financial obligation right now to sell and to make money. 

I would like to say that showing video right now—it’s a great time to show video because you can host it, you can put it online without the financial constraints or pressures of showing moving image in a commercial gallery setting, which often doesn’t get shown because—

LPZ: There’s a whole other set of physical concerns as well in a gallery space.

HS: Certainly. Buying or renting the technology to show videos is prohibitive. It’s very difficult to sell—more so than painting or sculpture or photography—so often, it doesn’t get shown in galleries for that reason. But I think this is a great opportunity to show some of those works because it’s a very contemporary and current medium, and I think that it’s potentially relatable to people outside the “hardcore art world.” 

Not to draw more attention to, or to plug my program, but I do feel that films like what I’m showing have almost the potential to cross over, and they’re all, more or less, essay films or experimental documentaries, and I could see, in a couple of years, content like that being on more mainstream platforms like Netflix or something. Hopefully, maybe I’m fucking crazy. I don’t know. [Chuckles]

LPZ: No! I mean, we’re all at home watching stuff, so it’s interesting to see how some of these more art-driven films might work in that context, when we’re all at home, on our couches, watching stuff. But still making space for the culturally enriching things that are so important to you and I, and to all of our community.

HS: Absolutely. I’m excited to see how artists—I mean, I know for a fact that great work is being made right now. I hope that people respond to the opportunity to create work that does shift the paradigm or opens new possibilities of being seen virtually or more democratically. But I don’t know. As a gallerist and as an artist, it’s a really hard time because I believe that physical, object-based work needs to be seen in person, and I fundamentally believe in that. In the meantime, all we can be is creative and resourceful, and try to platform the things that are made to be seen in this type of environment.

 LPZ: There’s this pressure of “we need to be productive, we need to be making, we have so much time” We need to make quarantine art or something, like it’ll be special in the future. But I don’t know man, it’s tough in the studio these days.

HS: Certainly. Like I’ve said, I’ve been taking it hour-by-hour, or day-by-day, and sometimes, you just can’t—you know? I definitely understand that. I don’t think there should be a pressure or an expectation that if you did not come out of this with a brand-new body of work you’re irrelevant. 

That’s ridiculous, and that’s just the U.S. capitalist machine taking a hold of your mind. If you are inspired to be working right now, and being productive is therapeutic and healthy for you, do that. But if you need to rest, if you need to binge-watch whatever, do it. Whatever works for you right now, as long as you’re not endangering yourself or others. [Laughs]

LPZ: I love that. I love that you’re drawing too. Your drawings feel very meditative and calming.

HS: This was not a preplanned segue for all you streamers, but that is exactly what they are about. I’m glad that you picked up on that. The technique that I’ve been working with for a few years was an active attempt to try to unite my meditation practice with my painting practice. You may notice all of my paintings are made up of individual strokes that are separated, so when I’m making my painting, I try to unite my breath with mark-making.

I really try to make a stroke on an exhalation, and so I try to make the process of creating it a breath practice. So that’s been good. My wife and I have been spending a lot of time meditating, and that’s been another way of staying more centered, obviously, but trying to really feed the mind, body, and soul during this time. I know I’ve been needing that just to cope with the day-to-day.

LPZ: Yeah, yeah. Hour-by-hour, man.

Lindsay Preston Zappas is an L.A.-based artist, writer, and the founder of Carla. She is an arts correspondent for KCRW. She received her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2013. Recent solo exhibitions include those at the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art (Buffalo, NY), OCHI (Los Angeles), and City Limits (Oakland).

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