Cody Robert Hook Bluett — MFA 2024 Exhibition

he/him

Cody Robert Hook Bluett

My artwork focuses on the relationship between landscape, narrative, and memory. I make paintings using traditional oil landscape techniques layered with contemporary material explorations. These images are composed using various types of frames and vignettes, investigating the lens of the viewer’s experience and exploring formal relationships of edge, texture, and atmosphere. With a high cultural value towards craft and the handmade, three-dimensional elements continue to complicate and abstract the dreamlike narrative qualities of my work. These works imbue slowness and emptiness in order to express the beautiful, absurd, and ominous boundaries between fiction and reality, creating a unique American folk horror aesthetic and atmosphere.

My practice also includes sculpture installations that encourage slow interaction and close attention to detail. Many of these works use various visual and audio technologies that focus on the mechanical aspects of their operation to enhance the viewer’s experience. These objects present visual engagement and tactility without clear function or instruction for the viewer, further expanding the dreamlike and supernatural elements of the work. My sound work focuses on electronic musical experimentation to create slow and meditative compositions informed by my paintings and amplified in tandem with sculptural objects.

My practice invests heavily in themes of working-class life experiences and relies on the aesthetic qualities of my coming of age in Pennsylvania. These themes portray the idea of American blue-collar beliefs and disbeliefs that are the undertones of social and political contemporaneity. My landscapes are still and liminal, experienced by the proletariat during moments of respite, repetition, and reminiscence. These places allow for imagination and creativity to flourish, for they are the dreamscapes and nightmares of an economic class whose culture is being systematically eliminated. I represent these ideas in honest and transparent ways while continuing to honor their ambiguity.

Bill’s Big Transcendence, 2023.
Oil, shellac, pastel, graphite, tape, and various hardware
on canvas, 36 × 80 in.

Catching in the Kingdom of Frogs, 2023.
Oil and spray paint on canvas, carved wooden frame,
33 ½ × 41 ½ in.

Where are the Sleeping Fish?, 2023.
Oil and spray paint on canvas, carved wooden frame,
33½ × 41½ in.

Highway Hieroglyphs, 2023.
Oil and shellac on panel, carved spruce, 20 × 37 × 6 in.

Clues at Kezar Lake, 2023.
Oil and shellac on carved wood panel, 15 × 24 in.