Handwerker Gallery at Ithaca College is pleased to present Where Things Grow, a solo exhibition by Julianne Hunter. The show will be on view October 23rd – December 9th, 2024, featuring an artist talk on November 13 at 5:30pm. This exhibition will be accompanied by a companion catalog with essay by Isabelle Ackerman '25.
Julianne Hunter is a printmaker and arts professor based out of Ithaca, NY. Her work is material-focused, concerned with bringing out the innate properties of her media in ways that simultaneously elevate and ground the work in natural, collective, and emotional planes.
WHERE THINGS GROW was influenced by Hunter’s experience of walking through Ithaca’s natural areas — famously, its gorges — each a monumental testament to the passage of time. Carved by glacial forces over thousands of years, sedimentary walls of rock rise and crest to support the area’s magnificent waterfalls. On a visit to Buttermilk or Taughannock Falls, you can reach out and run your fingers across rock that has been present throughout the entirety of human history.
These sensory experiences allow us to comprehend the magnitude of our existence and helps us situate ourselves amongst the whole of time. This temporal oscillation is present in many daily occurrences that we might overlook: glancing ahead at the road in front of us and behind in the rearview, flipping through an old photo album, revisiting childhood memories. We cannot truly untether ourselves from the past, and yet we remain firmly rooted in the present. Hunter’s work engages with this dissonance, embracing preservation of memory in hopes of better knowing ourselves as who we are: right here, right now.
Constructed from recycled paper, reused prints, and fabric scraps collected over the course of eight years, Hunter’s sculptures act as record keepers of life and environment, and bear great visual and functional similarities to tree rings. Each part of the whole has its own unique history: embedded words, artists’ marks, and visible wear from human touch are all contained within a single piece, smoothed and warped by careful manipulation. And, just as tree rings bear proof of a dry year or long winter, Hunter’s work is innately interested in the recordkeeping of life experience. Hunter’s prints are phosphenes, impressions united through an alchemical mixture to allow us to peer back through time. Though the imagery is tied to a certain place, the feelings held are collective hauntings, pressed petals of persistence.
Julianne Hunter (b.1986) is an artist and educator, working primarily in printmaking, sculpture and papermaking. Hunter’s work investigates themes of memory, growth, decay and personal and shared histories using meaningful materials, sculptural works with paper and her own photographs. She currently teaches at both Cornell University and Ithaca College, serves as president of the Ink Shop Community Print Center and is a co-founder of Show Pony Studio, in Ithaca, NY. Hunter has held artist residencies at Scuola Internazionale di Grafica, Venezia, Penland, and Zea Mays’ Printmaking. She has shown nationally and internationally at Williamsburg Art and Historical Center (Brooklyn, NY), Manhattan Graphics Center, Woodstock Artists Association and Museum, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, Ann Street Gallery (Newburgh, NY), Limner Gallery (Hudson, NY), Saratoga Arts Center, Del Mar College (Texas), Hatton Gallery (Colorado State University), and Galerie de la Ferme du Mousseau in France, among others. She has been the recipient of numerous grants and prizes, including the Watts Prize for Faculty Excellence at Cornell, Cornell Council for the Arts Grant, Sojourner Truth Diversity Fellowship and Creative Research Projects Awards (SUNY New Paltz).