Seldon Hunt as Graphic Modifier of all that is Real by Ray Ogar

>>> COPYRIGHT 2009

A short essay about the work of Seldon Hunt. This was published in the Baum Gallery's Emerging Artists 2009 Brochure/Catalog.

Do I weep? Or should I cringe with fear? I stare transfixed into the worlds of graphic designer and artist Seldon Hunt. Is this what cyberspace looks like flattened...? Are these slices of our own world the onion layer of reality, or peeled husks of some Earth extrapolated into pure data...? I question these accretion disks of contrast... How they reveal animal or skeletal forms atop and inter-levered with cascades of color, vector and complexity. We stare into these spaces, these singularities like matter caught by a black hole; we draw into some un-dimension, some compression or hi-rez 1D holographic shard of the mind.

Could it be that Seldon Hunt captured stars of great mass (and therefore much gravity) and lassoed them to paper so they could then draw to them specific kinds of information, images and form? Each of his prints, posters and design is a hoard of vectors. I stumble near the promotional band piece, "Isis, These Arms are Snakes", then "Japan/Australia". My eyes glue to each of these visions before me. In any one work I examine a mesh of mathematical primitives and organic forms corralled into layers... A strata of enveloped color and razed emotion... What does this mean? How should I read this? The insides of my belly mire with a dark mood; is it that while I am viewing these posters, I am also listening to the sound of the band's music? Will I feel this way when I hear the true sound of Isis? After-all this is graphic design, this is a work that communicates visually the expression of its client... But I feel that what I am experiencing is much more primordial. That perhaps, maybe, possibly, I am experiencing not only a poster and a design and a sound, but a collaboration between the visual and the aural. Seldon interprets, culls and conjures this and other bands' vast sounds into flat form. I cannot even speak of the massive triptych "Swarm" with its counter-stare skeletal face mesmerizing my core... This is sublime, a doom-beauty that purifies me with paralysis. Ultimately a quality that populates Seldon Hunt's other work as lesser demons of chaos and order.

Though Seldon Hunt is his own creature I must ask if he was born in the Designers Republic via genetically modifying the ovum and spore of artist Sarah Sze and graphic designer Martin Woodtli...? True we are all star stuff, but could it be that Seldon Hunt was originally such a tiny bright mote who, not unlike the alien prince in video game Katamary Damacy, slowly collected the details of the world into his very being and thus became, was, and is a visual amplifier of what it means to live in a globalized culture. Hunt's work is the reflection of a being bent on the assimilation and repositioning of small accumulations of the macro as well as the micro aspects of life around him...

My final analysis can only reveal that the work of Seldon Hunt and his attention to hyper-symmetry could easily reveal the origins of the Universe through the confluence of all the laws of art and graphic design. I remain stunned.