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Consider Me, Consider You, a two-person exhibition features St. Louis based artists Jessica Hunt and Emily Elhoffer. Both artists utilize sculpture to create works that relate to the body, ideas of selfhood, and our relationships to others. Whilst the artists maintain individual aesthetics and ways of making, they meet via a shared interest–to use vulnerability in their work as a nexus for dialogue about empathy, understanding, and to engage with viewers.

 

Emily Elhoffer addresses conflicts of the body and culture through sculptures. From stretching latex over rigid metal frames to pouring plaster into bulging distended elastic sacks, Elhoffer utilizes materials and processes that evoke bodily masses and skin-like surfaces. Elhoffer ruminates on the nature of physiological change, beauty, value systems applied to the body and the male gaze.  “The human form has become a material to be shaped, sculpted, and objectified. In an inverse way, I humanize material to discuss ideas about selfhood, augmentation, and the changing context of one’s bodily experience.”

 

Jessica Hunts work concerns itself with interpersonal relationships and individual experiences. Feelings of intimacy, be it vibrant and life-giving or strained and broken, is played out in ambiguous sculptural forms made from materials such as chicken wire, welded steel, clay, or wire. The forms are finished with various types of skin or external marker that prompts the viewer into further exploring the relationship. “I am specifically interested in how we create, maintain, or destroy our relationships, and how certain experiences come to define who we are as people.” The sculptural forms are prompted by personal narratives pulled from diaries, intimate conversations and collected stories offering an entry point for the viewer that allows for a more empathetic understanding of the relationships and experience.  

 

Emily Elhoffer is an emerging artist who explores power, beauty, and toxic value structures of femininity in her sculptural practice. She graduated from Kansas City Art Institute with a B.F.A. in sculpture, and  her national mixed media practice is based in St. Louis where she manages a makerspace and artist community. Process, material, and experimentation drive my studio practice.

 

Jessica Hunt was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, where she presently resides. During undergrad she studied sociology where her interest in human dynamics and interpersonal relationships ultimately helped steer her conceptual interests in her artistic practice. She received her MFA in 2018 from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and currently teaches sculpture at John Burroughs School.