Henry Gunderson

In Henry Gunderson’s pictures, there are subjects that deviate, clash and contradict, yet co-exist with one another. A slithering snail takes on the form of a framing device overlooking an expressway. A checkerboard platform shoe covered in chess pieces morphs together with a dragster to create a hybrid consumer object with the buttons of a video game controller embedded into it. A reptilian sunglass model gazes ominously in our direction. A school of camcorders are entangled in plastic six-pack rings. Various colored lamps light up a rave. The inner workings of a computer system reveal a cybernetic union of mushrooms, wires, and ants complete with hippie photo memorabilia. Gunderson’s subjects are deliberately dissonant and anti-formulaic. The image of a knotted bolt on the cover of a diagnostic statistical manual of mental disorders that is covered in oil fingerprints and titled ‘The Mechanic’ sets a tone. Does this image depict a literal entanglement of the mental process suggesting that disorder needs to be straightened out? Or, does Gunderson counteract this thought and instead ask does the ideal mind exist? Does our obsession with order and normalcy prevent us from effectively navigating the rich chaos of our experience?

The eight pictures operate idiosyncratically within their own rules and regulations, each playing its own distinct role in an arena of absurdity. Together they create a volatile dynamic like that of a dysfunctional family at a dinner table. Each one expressing distinct themes such as, time, speed, technology, excess, surveillance, psychology, branding, and conspiracy, in a democratic fashion. All these individual disparate, but coherent viewpoints have a validity and a poetry of their own. An evolutionary process fluctuating in a 24-hour cycle of progression and regression is pictured on a business card composition, ‘Same Time Tomorrow’. From ape to man and back to ape again, Gunderson provides us with no answers, only presents us with a survey of questions needed in order to analyze the chaos and absurdity of the world around us.

Text by Water McBeer