Cosmic American Art - a generous mix of Pop & Folk Art - examines the search for that mythic & ragged "American Dream." Full of emotion and color, the work reflects a place somewhere out there in the post modern mind, a rest stop halfway between the dream world & the waking life.

The work is made from naturally felled, California Redwood & Spanish cedar or recycled from signs. Images are sandblasted into the wood and painted with acrylic colors which vary from intense & vibrant to simple & earthy, subtle & faded.

 Artist Michael Hunt was conceived at the Woodstock Festival in Bethel, NY & born in Honesdale, PA -the birthplace of the American Railroad. He lives with his wife, Suzanna Cramer, a playwright, near Woodstock, NY.

Artifacts 1-4, 2006, decopodge on sandblasted redwood

Artifacts 5-8, 2006, decopodge on sandblasted redwood

Artifacts 9-11, 2006, decopodge on sandblasted redwood

Artifact 13, 2006, decopodge on sandblasted redwood

“The Artifacts” are made on recycled sandblasted redwood. The

decopodged images are from a photo series of out-of-focus brake

lights on one rainy Catskill summer evening at dusk, cruising on

17B in Sullivan County, NY very close to the site of the 1969

Woodstock Festival, thinking of these modern times, dreaming of

people lost in time, stuck on a muddied & ragged dream of yester-

day, wondering how far out are we until all that we know becomes

a future archeological dig.

Artifact 12, 2006, decopodge on sandblasted

redwood

"Here Michael Hunt has taken images of vases, urns and casks and exhibited them again in his trademark platform of sandblasted iconology. This imagery is akin to an archeological discovery, as if discovered through a slow process of relief. Hunt takes what appears to be standard images and brings them back to their origin, concept; creating a display of history. Artifacts are lined together and highlighted as if rediscovered. There is a certain phenomenology to Hunt's work, simply viewing an image as it exists within our consciousness. These works are anthropological and in their greatest efforts a commentary similar to Samuel Beckett's metaphorical relationship between the human body and the urn. Otherwise, from a distance they are simply images, or icons of images as old as bread."

  --Andrew Paul Wible