Justin Carl Hurty currently resides in Little Rock, Arkansas with his partner and children. Hurty works in installation, performance, video, sound, and printed matter. He is generally concerned with noise, obfuscation, the tenuousness of technologies, gradual decay, outright loss, the astrolosociopolitical processes of destruction that will crush our civilizations, the oxford comma, and flashing lights. Hurty is an emerging artist whose exhibition and performance history includes The Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, The Visitor’s Center on Angel Island, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and Jack Hanley Gallery [SF & NY]. He has earned a B.A. [political science] from Augustana College, an M.F.A. [studio practices] from California College of the Arts, and is currently an adjunct professor in the department of art and design at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
Based on an agreement formulated between myself and the space, I choose materials and organize them. Historically my work has included ceramics, photography, installation, printmaking, telepathy, painting, food, drawing, video, sound, and collaborative actions. This utilization of variegated mediums has helped me develop an aesthetic viewpoint which has been nurtured and shaped to function as my internal guidebook on principles of organization, a logic of object hegemony.
I construct environments which attempt to challenge the typically quiet spaces reserved for art, to set the tone of a given space and to offer a wide set of variables to a visual landscape that is often dominated by two-dimensional works and discreet objects.
The content of this work is mediated through channels of human/technological interaction, which leaves interpretation to the intersubjective, and seeks not to explain phenomenon using theories, but to confound and amaze through a purposeful misuse of the ordinary. Material choices, chaos, flashing lights, and organizational intuition create for the audience a visceral and/or intellectual experience.
“By taking aesthetic responsibility in a very explicit way […], the artist reveals the hidden sovereign dimension of the contemporary democratic order that politics […] tries to conceal.” [Boris Groys]
I take the pieces of an ill-defined puzzle and convince them to function together in producing order.