{"id":105570,"date":"2026-09-03T11:07:28","date_gmt":"2026-09-03T18:07:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=105570"},"modified":"2026-09-14T12:02:57","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T19:02:57","slug":"western-poetry-on-hunter-baileys-wayward-machines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/western-poetry-on-hunter-baileys-wayward-machines\/","title":{"rendered":"Western Poetry: On Hunter Bailey\u2019s Wayward Machines"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Hunter Bailey’s I Don\u2019t Know God, but I Fear His Wrath<\/em> is at The Gallery at Library Square in Salt Lake City, through Sept. 11.<\/p><\/div>\n

A charcoal-grey smog sweeps across an American highway, the acrid tang of exhaust fumes so strong they snake into the cabin through the front windshield. A motorcycle, indefinitely rendered useless under a layer of cold plastic, leather, and steel. A single, perpetually parked car. The moment between calling to something or someone for help and retreating to silence.<\/p>\n

This is the experience Bailey offers throughout I Don\u2019t Know God, but I Fear His Wrath<\/em>, an exhibition of oil paintings varying in scale and composition. Calling on the bleak muses of Western Gothic nihilism and a Hopper-esque visual sensibility, the University of Utah grad (BFA, 2024) creates a distinctly cold imagining of an American landscape. Bailey’s practice draws from an archive of crowd-sourced images, photography, and vignettes of life on the American highway, transforming imagery of the West into something more intimate and reflective.<\/p>\n

I Don\u2019t Know God<\/em> reflects the anxieties of a younger generation, who, if ever called upon to jump-start a car or change a flat tire, might find themselves looking to one another with quiet uncertainty.\u00a0 \u201cMaterial culture from the \u201890s and early 2000s [marks] the end of an era,” Bailey writes in his artist statement. We drift further from a time when people could rely on themselves.\u201d Bailey\u2019s effigies of mechanical obsolescence mirror a very real and very pressing human anxiety: that of knowing one\u2019s own powerlessness.<\/p>\n

The Gallery at Library Square accommodates more than a dozen of Bailey\u2019s paintings, each of which cuts across the white gallery walls with lustrous swaths of dark pigment. Across several works, the audience inhabits a point-of-view shot; they exist behind the eyes of a phantom mechanic stumbling upon his next re-commissioning project. In these pieces, the audience encounters a recurring figure in Bailey\u2019s portfolio: the abandoned vehicle. Where wreckage might ordinarily signify complete ruin, the automotive portraits in I Don\u2019t Know God<\/em> feel unexpectedly intimate. There is something memorial about the way Bailey poses his mechanical subjects. At three-quarter turns, their open hoods akin to toothy smiles, they recall the carefully composed solemnity of Victorian post-mortem portraiture. This effect is echoed in large-scale paintings “We Wind Our Clocks” and “We Wait for Midnight or the Carnival” and “Heavy Rain on Paper Wings.”<\/p>\n

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Hunter Bailey, “Nothing Lasts Forever” and “We Wind Our Clocks and We Wait for Midnight or the Carnival”<\/p><\/div>\n