To make his drawings, Hunt scours flea markets for discarded snapshots and then borrows elements from these anonymous pictures-a figure, a bit of architecture, a family pet or lawn ornament-and invents a new narrative around which he constructs the drawing. The casual and found nature of Hunt’s source material allows the artist to imbue the drawings with intensely enigmatic and mysterious subject matter. The viewer encounters a vision of America that is at once sympathetic, humorous and apocalyptic. Hunt’s influences are diverse: Edward Hopper, Charles Addams, Henry Darger, Balthus, Joyce Carol Oates and Robert Frank among them. Say’s Hunt:

Having attempted to tame and harness nature, we (especially we Americans) mistakenly believe we are its master. At the heart of this breathtaking arrogance lies a wealth of bitter and hilarious irony that I’ve tried to tap into in many of these drawings.

The exhibition of charcoal-on-paper drawings in “The Tender Land” reflect Hunt’s preoccupation with the ways in which humans have become increasingly divorced from the natural world and the ways we create facsimiles of nature that conform to lives increasingly lived in the sanitized sprawl of suburbia and cities. The title of the exhibition, is borrowed from the Aaron Copeland opera of the same name and, according to Hunt,

suggests the fragility of the ecosystem that sustains us and the tenuous thread that ties our future to its survival. It also reflects the idea that the human spirit is similarly fragile and that the landscape of our emotional lives can be forever altered and reshaped by our experiences and through the behavior of others.