Art Review: Glen Coburn Hutcheson’s ‘Solo Group Show’

Many hands make light work. That’s usually said to mean a task will be made easier with more people. Reinterpret it, and you might catch a different message: Many hands make more work, but it’s airier, more joyful and less predictable.

That definition befits Glen Coburn Hutcheson‘s “Solo Group Show,” on view this month at the Front in Montpelier. The exhibition includes a few works Hutcheson created on his own and many made in collaboration with other artists. The gallery, which Hutcheson started out of what was once his studio in a small storefront on Barre Street, is marking its 10th anniversary this spring, and this unusual approach to a solo exhibition fits the occasion perfectly.

The Front is a collective owned by its artist-members — there are currently 23 — who divide rent and other costs, contribute their skills to everything from patching drywall to filing taxes, and display their work in alternating monthly group and solo shows. Fifty-eight central Vermont artists have been members, each for anywhere from a few months to the full decade.

As a member of the gallery for six years until 2022, I saw firsthand much of its evolution from a loose bunch of artists to a more formal business. It is still essentially a volunteer effort — art sales, Hutcheson said, can’t fully support costs, and members don’t expect them to. But it is also remarkable that a consensus-based effort run by individuals with strong personalities has managed to sustain itself this well for this long.

“We haven’t made any internal enemies,” Hutcheson said, “and we haven’t bounced any checks. All of that feels like a complete win.”

Hutcheson’s work has always straddled a line between traditional artistic forms — figure drawing, landscape — and something more process-driven. And he’s been fascinated by collaborations of different kinds. In art school, Hutcheson tried drawing by holding someone else’s hand, he said, but it was a frustrating experience: “It was like, This is an interesting idea, but let’s never do it again.”

During the pandemic, Hutcheson conducted a different experiment, teaming up with Scrag Mountain Music cofounder Evan Premo. Building on the central Vermont chamber music organization’s successful Zoom performances, the pair live streamed Premo playing upright bass while Hutcheson made paintings in oil stick. Hutcheson felt like Premo’s presence and music imbued the paintings — they were still his, but different. Two of those are on view in the exhibition; they are abstract, loose and exuberant.

In 2024, Hutcheson started making a series of works on panel with 12 other members of the Front. To begin, he scored and snapped each panel in half, keeping one piece and giving the other to his collaborator. They each worked on one part at a time, swapping back and forth every month or so for a year. The artists didn’t discuss any plans or add notes but responded instead by altering what they were given, each person finishing the other’s work. The pairs of 9-by-12-inch panels are displayed on plexiglass shelves, leaning against the wall almost as though they’re still in progress.

The results are unpredictable, even knowing many of these artists’ styles and sensibilities. “Glen-Kate panel” and “Kate-Glen panel,” both with Kate Ruddle, have political undertones: Ruddle covered one panel with a mesh fabric sleeve, painted to reference the American flag. It also sports a spiky cartoon hedgehog; that may be why, in response, its twin has what looks like a Statue of Liberty, pointy crown toppled and sticking out of the earth à la Planet of the Apes.

Other iterations are more abstract, though they still speak to each other. Ned Richardson‘s pixelated images and geometric forms peek through on one panel; its neighbor looks like a window exploding with blobs and sweeps of spattered ink.

Hutcheson teamed up with Sam Thurston on two figurative pieces, one a double portrait and one that seems to reference classical Roman sculpture. Though both artists’ sense of proportion and technical skill come through, their compositions are strangely jumbled. Both paintings feel destabilized, causing the viewer to question what’s going on.

Hutcheson’s collaboration with Elisabeth Mazzilli, who typically works in hooked rugs, includes collage, text, googly eyes and a figure reminiscent of Francisco Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Son.” The panels are at once haunting and funny, deeply layered and lighthearted.

These mesh well with three sculptures Hutcheson included in the show. “Clown Plinth 1: Home Tree” combines old clothes, a shoe, a broken chair, a pot of geraniums, blue paint and a string of deflated balloons into a remarkably coherent form. There’s a single, gestural movement to the work, like the swirl of a brushstroke, starting with the arm of a T-shirt and unfurling to the point of a squashed sneaker. The almost-hovering broken chair doesn’t seem capable of holding up the flowerpot, yet it does.

In this and in “Clown Plinth 2: Puss in Boots,” on display in the window, Hutcheson said he’s experimenting with the idea of a plinth — of what it takes for an insubstantial sculpture, such as the ones he’s been making with clothing for several years, to hold something up.

Hutcheson’s use of his own old clothes puts something from himself — his history, his body — into his sculptures. Nowhere is that more apparent than in his “Self Portrait,” painted on a stretched linen shirt. Immediately recognizable, it falls into place as the key to the show, asking the viewer to question the idea of “self” in the portrait.

In art and in running a small business — both enterprises that traditionally put individuality and originality first — placing yourself in a position to abide by others’ choices is a novel approach. Hutcheson said it’s a way to integrate different conceptions of oneself. By checking his artistic impulses against someone else’s, he has to think about what’s valuable in an alternative way.

Or as he put it: “All of the things that my collaborator does are these weird mysteries, or roadblocks, or revelations that continue to befuddle or illuminate me.”

Alice Dodge was a member of the Front from 2016 to 2022.

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