Mitchell Squire: Whatever it is I wish to see

The Cecille R. Hunt Gallery Opening Reception
Mitchell Squire: Whatever it is I wish to see, I steal
Friday February 11th from 5:00pm to 7:00pm
Artist lecture is scheduled for 1:30pm February 11th in Winnifred-Moore auditorium at 470 East Lockwood, 63119, like all Hunt Gallery events, it is free and open to the public.
In Mitchell Squire’s Whatever it is I wish to see, I steal, the artist questions his role as a self-portrait photographer with an “ill- tempered” relationship to the medium. Having returned to the practice during the pandemic after a nearly 25-year hiatus, and bracketed by theories that helped guide his sculptural practice utilizing found objects, Squire situates his recent photographic work, as he writes, “somewhere between Jane Bennett’s ‘assemblage’ and Tiffany Lethabo King’s ‘fungible flux’, then self- disappeared into the Blackness of Fred Moten’s ‘underground’”. His driving question as he re-enters the picture-making fray is how might he become a mode in a process, subject to the chance, magic, and contingency intrinsic to his encounters?
Showing for the first time at the Hunt Gallery at Webster University, Squire’s exhibition is built around new self portraits and historic portraits from his inherited archive from the 1940s. Together with a recent trilogy of self-published zines and an array of self portraits from the 90s, this exhibition speaks to Squire’s current relationship to photography, and how that relationship increasingly fuels his contemplation of themes regarding imaginaries, racialization, sexualities, ageism, and the “what” of what it is he wishes to see.
Please visit the Hunt Galley website:
https://www.webster.edu/art/hunt-gallery.php.