WILL HUTNICK | Time's a Goon

High Noon is pleased to present Connecticut-based artist Will Hutnick’s New York solo debut, Time’s a Goon. The exhibition borrows its title from Jennifer Egan’s novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, in which time is personified as a thug that steals indiscriminately from everyone. Egan’s nonlinear narrative, in which characters’ lives collide, fracture, and reconcile across decades, provides a parallel to Hutnick’s visual language and his engagement with pattern as both motif and metaphor.

 

Hutnick’s paintings are rooted materially in their immediate environment. Each work begins with rubbings of local flora gathered in and around the artist’s studio, rendered in wax pastel directly onto raw canvas. These imprints anchor the paintings in place and gesture toward a “bloom where you’re planted” sensibility, suggesting that lived geography is its own generative force. Hutnick does not preserve the forms in their original state, but instead organizes the rubbings into grids and sequences, imposing an artificial system onto organic matter.

 

This patterned ground becomes a generative surface. Acrylic paint is applied in response to the initial patterns, sometimes reinforcing them, sometimes obscuring them. Intricate wax pastel linework creates waves of stratified layers that bridge disparate patterns, allowing the paintings to read as geological cross-sections. Rather than blending, color gradients are applied sequentially, optically merging at varying distances to create movement and spatial ambiguity.

 

The resulting push and pull between order and disruption establishes a dialogue between learned and inherent patterns. Within this framework, Hutnick’s work operates as a metaphor for queerness and its negotiation of social superstructures that are collectively constructed yet presented as biologically ordained. By beginning with organic source material and subjecting it to imposed frameworks, Hutnick mirrors the ways identities are shaped and regulated by external systems. The painted disruptions assert their agency within these constraints, suggest that identity, like pattern, is neither wholly innate nor imposed, but continually formed/forming.

 

From these established patterns, Hutnick seeks alternate readings of movement and space. Several works appear in small sequences with compositions that repeat with variation, emphasizing how small shifts accumulate into meaningful divergences. The paintings read almost cinematically, like adjacent film frames. The slowed viewing they encourage disrupts our tendency towards pattern recognition, suggesting time as something experienced through comparison and duration rather than linear progression. In doing so, the paintings open space for thinking about simultaneity— events unfolding independently but in parallel, and the minor shifts that set divergent outcomes in motion.

 

Time’s a Goon treats its title role as both subject and structuring device that shapes identity and continually disrupts the illusion of permanence. Whether singularly or sequentially, the images are depicted not as isolated, but as moments within a continuum. Resolved but not static, they remain attentive to change as it occurs.

 

Will Hutnick (b. 1985) is an artist based in Sharon, CT. He received his M.F.A. from Pratt Institute in 2011 and his B.A. from Providence College in 2007. Hutnick is a 2021 New York Foundation for the Arts Artist Fellow in Painting, as well as a grant recipient from the Berkshire Taconic Foundation in 2017 and 2023, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2016. Solo exhibitions include: McDonough Museum of Art (Youngstown, OH), Geary Contemporary (Millerton, NY), Pamela Salisbury Gallery (Hudson, NY), College of Charleston (Charleston, SC), Elijah Wheat Showroom (Newburgh, NY) and The Java Project (Brooklyn, NY). Selected group exhibitions include: Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art (New Paltz, NY), High Noon (New York, NY), Hollis Taggart (Southport, CT), TECHNE Art Center (Oceanside, CA) and 1969 Gallery (New York, NY). Hutnick has been an artist-in-residence at Yaddo, Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency, Vermont Studio Center, Interlude Artist Residency, Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences, Soaring Gardens Artists’ Retreat, Stove Works, and the Wassaic Project. He has curated numerous exhibitions at SPRING/BREAK Art Show, Ortega y Gasset Projects, Trestle Projects, Pratt Institute, Wassaic Project and Standard Space. His work has been featured in The New York Times, New American Paintings, and Hyperallergic, among others. From 2015-20, Hutnick was one of the Co-Directors of Ortega y Gasset Projects, an artist-run curatorial collective and exhibition space in Brooklyn. He is currently the Director of Artistic Programming at the Wassaic Project, a nonprofit organization that uses art and art education to foster positive social change.