Ampersand is pleased to present a selection of new works on paper by John Hundt, a San Francisco based collage artist & painter. His work draws upon found fragments from the lives of persons unknown, such as scribbled notes, journal entries, personalized recipes, sketched drawings & stained ticket stubs. To this he adds his own hand-drawn, painted & collaged images to create story lines filled with dark humor, absurdity & insight. “Often using photographed or printed portraits as their base,” writes Deirdre Madeleine Smith in the foreword of Implications, “John Hundt’s collages are distortions of figure that aim at absurdity & disparity. He calls one of his recurring formal strategies Totems, a figure that is built up with a combination of human, machine, animal & object parts. At turns graceful, whimsical or strange, Hundt’s constructions always follow in the rich tradition of photomontage by placing heterogeneous visual materials in dialogue with one another. However, Hundt brings a seamlessness to his work in such a way that no matter the absurdity of the combination, his constructions are completely believable in their respective contexts. This is equally true of his collaged landscapes, in which a verisimilitude of perspective is maintained in spite of the impossibility of the situation pictured.” Coinciding with the exhibition, we have collaborated with Jack Fischer Gallery, who represents Hundt’s work in San Francisco, in publishing a book that features 36 of Hundt’s collages, including all the pieces shown at Ampersand. Titled Implications, the book is limited to 100 copies, the first 15 of which are signed & include an original collage by the artist.