FINE ART STUDIO VISA1151_115 STUDIO ART 1-2 SEMESTER 1/2008 Unit Coordinator - Paul Trinidad |Guest Artist Page | Welcome to Mike Hunnewells' page.   Mike Hunnewell is a professor at Miami Dade College in the USA. He has collaborated with students in past projects and has agreed to answer any questions you may have regarding his mixed media (alternative media) paintings, assemblages. If you go to the bottom of this page you can read more about Mike and his work.   |Do you know what a painting is? How would you define painting?|     Building in South Beach just prior to renovations. 2003       What Makes Hunnewell's work relevant to this semester's projects? Concepts Investigation into colour and collage, assemblages oli paintng, mixed media works. Outcomes – Objectives Gain confidence to work on a large scale with colour and spontaneous image construction based on prior research with collage and other image construction methods.       Mike Hunnewell's Studio Miami 2004 Exhibition at Kendall Gallery Miami Dade College USA "Michael Hunnewell: Matchbox 6316," This is a selection of paintings and views from Mikes current exhibition July augaust 2004 ...................... The exhibition of works not only displays the paintings but interrupts the passage by which the viewer must move around the gallery. Many of the works are constructed from left over building materials, plywood, mesh, cement and industrial paints and coatings. There is no doubt the viewer feels the industrialized building site ethos that Hunnewell wishes to reference just as his old mentor Tapies did with, the wall.   Although the work is tough and un-relentless, attention to detail is essential to balance the wilderness evoked within the works. Here the artist is removing a small section of wire mesh for a textural interchange. These perspectives indicate the transition from run - down to glitzy and glamorous, a key feature of the trend in Miami architecture today. They also indicate that the viewer should be careful in the gallery just as they should be when viewing the spectacular, though perhaps superficial, results of the renovations.               Page 8 catalogue from Mike Hunnewell: Matchbox 6316,     You can find more information about Mike Hunnewell as you scroll down this page or you may like to visit his web site by clicking on his name. Top end of Washington Street - South Beach Miami

Hungry Like a Dingo

In this brief synopsis it would be remiss not to mention at the beginning, one name, Tapies, an unashamed datum for Hunnewells physical and psychological artistic investigations. Tapies an outsider in his time, he himself, referred to poetry and art as being the outpost, undoubtedly because it moves with the greatest range toward the greatest abstraction.1 The essential integrity of Hunnewells work is absolutely relevant to Tapies treatise of being in an unknown zone with its wild, un-relentless and often discordant diversity in appearance and in subject.

The subject of this work is Miami. Miami is known to visitors and onlookers, as a place of glitz and glamour but equally and more potently Miami is known for its grit and grime. Miami is fast moving, racey and rich. If you are talking South Beach, the psychological epicenter, Miami is hip and very, very sexy. This strip is a beautiful pastiche of what was and more recently, what is, a hypereal meeting place of the rich and famous whooping it up with non-Cuban cigars, (smoking real one would be unpatriotic) champagne and exotic cars. All of this alongside residual, residential-old and neuveau hobo’s, contemporary beatnicks and the like who, smoke grass, get drunk, sleep in the street and thank christ, never did and never will “get it” or “on with it”.

Mike Hunnewell’s work grapples with this social and architectural nexus physically, psychologically and spatially in a tormented onslaught of grit and guts. The resulting works with sometimes ungainly combinations of steel and wood, with protruding screws and semi entangled and concealed wire, visually rasp like skeletal fingers on corrugated iron. The look of the makings will raise the heckles and probably ire of those viewers looking for polite works, reflecting on romantic lost voyages, and homesick sunsets or dreams of mystical journeys.

Hunnewell’s constructed works are made with the decorum of a dingo tearing apart its prey, an antipodean metaphor make no mistake, but just as Mike hunts his homeland - the decaying and reconstructed Miami suburban sprawl for artistic inspiration with all of the instincts of this wild untamable Australian desert dog, he assembles them with the same savagery of intent. The clashing juxtaposition of dismembered tech screws, with staples and wire, manic patterns and daubings of paint and wet building materials. It all screechs at times like a freight train running off its rails. The work shows Hunnewell is vigilant and adaptive to his native environment that is evolving rapidly from the idyllic days of his youth. His work resonates his temperament, it ascertains just as it is for the dingo in its Australian wilderness, the hunting ground, Miami is getting tougher.

There are other predators to be considered as well, politicians and bureaucrats, greedy business deals and patched over renovations that with a bit of stucco, some concrete (conkers), and with a coat of paint belie hereditary truths, and mask scents of what was. The pickings are often already ravaged carcasses residual architectural upheaval. MIke's work resonates an attitude, he is wary, cagey, and searching (at some points), for shamanistic reason. All of this amidst foggy ruins of betrayal, the ineptitude of the system 2 and the with the uneasy feeling of his splintery building material, of being the hunted (like the Dingo) in one’s own natural environment. The works, with their concrete smearings, ruthless marks and colours, jagged shards and terrifying spikes reflect a sense of oppression, dislocation and a stealthy twitchy, busting aggression, a growling snarl, that the dispossessed and the hunter knowingly respects.

…examine Hunnewells pickings carefully, he is on a scent.

Miami is gritty,
the Dingo is hungry
….and Mike Hunnewell is out there.

Paul Trinidad
Lecturer University of Western Australia
Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Visual Arts

Dingo: Canis familiaris dingo tawny yellow in color, with erect ears, a bushy tail and distinctive gait, a call resembling a howl or yelp rather than a bark.

1. Georges Ralliard 1988
2. From a conversation with the artist Feb 2002