Kyle Huninghake | Snapped Featured Artist

Snapped Featured Artist

Opening March 4th At Spectra Art Space

Showcasing Series:

Shapescapes

“This is a series of my own photographs that I have layered and dissect according to an evolving logic that really only reveals itself to me in bits and pieces. ”

Can you give us an artist statement for the series you will be showcasing in March?

“For almost half my life I’ve been lugging around my dad’s old Nikon film camera, which came off the factory line while the Beatles were still together. It’s cumbersome and indiscreet, and it’s often anyone’s guess whether the photos will turn out. What I love, though, is the unpredictability and imperfection of shooting with film. The ghost in the machine. I like the limit to my own control: nature and chance—along with human error—all have space to assert themselves in the final product.

For this series I have taken my photographs and sliced them into a mosaic of shapes. The shapes themselves I “harvest”, typically while I am out in the world making the photos. More and more, I find them in nature: clumps of melting snow, shadows cast in a dense grove of trees, fragments of shattered stone.

The selection and arrangement of these fragments is often done more painstakingly than the original photograph. By hunting for these shapes rather than making them up, I feel that I’m chasing/tracing a kind of logic, even if it mostly eludes me. I am a receiver, if not decoder…and possibly a re-coder. While I’m out making these pieces, I have to try and see in two ways, at two scales: the landscape itself, and the shape-scape hidden within.”

Tell us about the process for the series? 

“I make my photos on Ilford HP5 film—loaded into either a 1969 Nikon F or occasionally a disposable camera body—which I have developed by the very fine people at Englewood Camera. I scan the negatives at home, and layer them in Photoshop (I’m not such a luddite after all). For my trove of shapes, I usually just snap photos on my phone when I see a good one. I trace over them, with varying degrees of faithfulness, at times adding to and subtracting from them according to my own whims. The resulting composition I trace onto the photo and slice based on this template.”

Kyle Huninghake The Artist:

Kyle Huninghake was born in Louisville, Kentucky and studied architecture at Washington University in St. Louis. Somewhere along the line he began shooting film and has found it to be a thrilling, expensive, unshakeable habit. He is a founding member of the Denver Collage Club and co-creator of “CHUM”, a photography zine and mural outfit comprised of himself and his brother Alex, based in Texas. He has shown work at Robert Anderson Gallery, Alto Gallery, and along various Denver alleyways and retaining walls as part of the Big Picture. Follow Kyles art journey on Instagram and  Facebook .