Bryan Hutchison

Region: MFA Annual

Much of my work is grounded in my religious upbringing and a previous generation’s experience with a kind of mystical spiritualism. It is common to find passages within Mormon religious texts of wilderness as holy, mountains as sacred grounds, or the desert as a spiritual refuge. Allegories and parables of seeds, plants, and the growers that raise them are frequent tools for teaching doctrinal concepts. I revisit some of these passages through art, and work to reinterpret them from a contemporary context. In moving from Utah to New York and back again, my access to land, wilderness, and nature shifted. This shift, along with current political climates and changing climate itself, provides me an urgency to preserve and examine— even if merely in absurd and pathetic gestures—my changing connection to wilderness and our ability to access nature. These specific works are a body of gestures toward that end, studies in presences and absences that eye our proximity to nature.