User:Crhbluett

Bio:

Cody Robert Hook Bluett is an artist, musician, and educator living and working in the Boston, Massachusetts area. Cody received his BFA in Painting from the Tyler School of Art in 2016 and his MFA in Painting from Boston University in 2024. Cody lived in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from 2011 to 2022, working as the Director of the Art Department at Liguori Academy from 2018 to 2022. He was a Diamond Ambassador Scholar at Temple University, artist-in-residence for the Skirkanich Internship for Network Visualization at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Graduate Assistant to the MFA Painting Department while attending Boston University. Cody has exhibited work in numerous galleries across Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Massachusetts. Cody currently works in Art Handling and Installation and Jameson & Thompson. In his personal time, Cody is an avid baseball fan and loves to play Magic: the Gathering.

Artist Statement:

My artwork focuses on the relationship between landscape, narrative, and memory. I make paintings using traditional oil landscape techniques layered with contemporary material explorations. These images are composed using various types of frames and vignettes, investigating the lens of the viewer’s experience and exploring formal relationships of edge, texture, and atmosphere. With a high cultural value towards craft and the hand-made, three-dimensional elements continue to complicate and abstract the dreamlike narrative qualities of my work. These works imbue slowness and emptiness in order to express the beautiful, absurd, and ominous boundaries between fiction and reality, creating a unique American folklore aesthetic and atmosphere.

My practice also includes sculpture installations that encourage slow interaction and close attention to detail. Many of these works use various visual and audio technologies that focus on the mechanical aspects of their operation to enhance the viewer’s experience. These objects present visual engagement and tactility without clear function or instruction for the viewer, further expanding the dreamlike and supernatural elements of the work. My sound work focuses on electronic musical experimentation to create slow and meditative compositions informed by my paintings and amplified in tandem with the sculptural objects.

My practice invests heavily in themes of working class life experiences and rely on the aesthetic qualities of my coming-of-age in Pennsylvania. These themes portray the idea of American blue collar beliefs and disbeliefs that are the undertones of social and political contemporaneity. My landscapes are still and liminal, experienced by the proletariat during moments of respite, repetition, and reminiscence. These places allow for imagination and creativity to flourish, for they are the dreamscapes and nightmares of an economic class whose culture is being systematically eliminated. I represent these ideas in honest and transparent ways while continuing to honor their ambiguity.