CHRISTALENA HUGHMANICK
some thing grand

October 10 - November 15, 2020
291 Grand Street New York

HOME is pleased to present the first work of the ongoing exhibition, some thing grand, by Christalena Hughmanick. This is the gallery’s inaugural exhibition at our window space.

In this ongoing public engagement work, empathetic strategies are used to create a platform for people passing by the window to articulate what they want to see happen amidst the coronavirus pandemic. The first work, To the poem, sets the prompt for her audience. She, referencing writer/poet Frank O’Hara, asks her audience if they can create something grand together. At each site, a QR code will be provided for audience feedback and will be used in future stitched quilt works as a way to record the time and place.

This work uses archeology and photography; involving dynamics between presence and absence. The image in To the poem is a 2nd century AD Roman copy of a Hellenistic sculpture that the artist encountered on a residency in Rome just a few weeks before the international lockdown. The often speculated androgynous marble subject, with atypically closed eyes, remains an enigma by historians; “Is it sleeping or is it dead?”

For these works, photographs of ancient architecture and material culture taken by the artist are translated into cyanotype fabric prints and covered with stitched poetry. Originally developed to reproduce diagrams for construction and industry, the cyanotype process used in this quilt mediates photography and fabric, making and viewing, past and present through the lens of its origin. This work aims to open a line of inquiry around what people want to see happen right now, at this decisive moment in history that calls for vast structural change.

Christalena Hughmanick is an artist and educator making textiles and sculptural installations that become activated by performance works. In 2019 she designed The Freedom Quilt Hungary project, which examines individual notions of freedom and democracy through collective quilt-making in Hungary. Recent exhibition sites include Faur Szofi in Budapest, Carriage Trade in New York, Andrew Rafacz and MPSTN in Chicago. She has been an artist in residence at the American Academy in Rome, the Moholy-Nagy Művészeti Egyetem in Budapest and Wedge Projects in Chicago. Hughmanick is a recipient of a 2018-19 academic year Fulbright Hungary Student Grant, US Department of State Individual Assistance Grant, Grainger Marburg Travel Grant and a Lenore Tawney Foundation Scholarship. She received an MFA from the Fiber & Material Studies Department in 2012, where she remains a part time faculty member since 2013.

Follow more of her work and this project at:
www.christalenahugnmanick.com - @christalenahughmanick
www.some-thing-grand.com - @some_thing_grand

download press release