There’s a way in which Elliott Hundley’s voraciously mixed media works are a helpful visualization of how memory operates and what it would look like if we could see it—charting its glorious chaos and inscrutable order through his collage- and assemblage-based objects. Not so much depicting as inherently reenacting mnemonic operations by external means, Hundley culls its specificity, randomness, fact, fiction, love, desire, fear, education, intuition, beauty, terror, accumulation, emptiness, and ambiguity from within his unimaginably vast, analog media library—and then he plays.

        Hundley is famous for his maximalist sensibility and the proliferate recurrence of shiny specimen pins to affix the fingernail-size images in place—evoking natural sciences as well as replacing the painted gesture as evidence of the artist’s hand, even as the compositions take shape, following their own internal logic, to a place of balance. The series is based on Jorge Luis Borges’ short story The Book of Sand, which is, more or less, about never-ending change as a principle of existence. In it, Borges says things like, “My story will be true to reality or, in any case, to my personal memory of reality, which amounts to the same thing,” and “I remembered reading that the best place to hide a leaf is in the forest.”

        In this way, it is both the most engaging game and entirely futile attempt to reconstitute meaning based on the content of the constellation of images and fragments. And yet, the many works also engage in Jungian sand-play—a therapeutic method in which the subconscious is engaged in accessing deeper memories. As in the method, the frames of Hundley’s works visibly contain the chaos that rollicks inside its edges. Each one has the distinct character of a chapter in a book or a short story in a collection. In comparison to Hundley’s work in general and his previous show at Regen Projects where he attempted an all-encompassing environment, this show is almost minimal, at least in structure. It is refined, balanced, assertively thoughtful, and its literary pacing encourages its reading as linked story time vignettes (though as with the Borges, there is no significance to beginning or ending).

        The clearest examples of this dynamic, like Relic and Wing, engage specifically and legibly with anthropological, mythological, and art historical citations. But across the entire series, the effect progresses through an eccentric, tertiary color spectrum in which each work explores its own key tone fully, along a volatile and occasionally seasick emotional arc, making it even more of a book to be read—and in that way Hundley’s most vulnerable work to date ironically becomes some of his strongest.

        While the “paintings” contain multitudes of collected materials from magazines, books, catalogs—pigment pours and scenic backdrops from some theater kids he mentors that he kept and repurposed—as well as personal archives, the sculptures like the totem-like I Remember,  are constructed intentionally and almost narratively around objects that hold greater personal resonance for Hundley, who then embellishes them through accumulation. Veil, the large tapestry repurposed from a trove of salvaged luxury textiles, integrates pieces of the veil his mother wore on her wedding day in the most perfected gesture of allegorical materiality, narrative origin/apotheosis, and aesthetic appeal.

For more information, visit regenprojects.com

Shana Nys Dambrot is an art critic, curator, and author based in Los Angeles. Formerly LA Weekly arts editor, her writing appears in LA Times, Alta Journal, Flaunt, and other publications. She is the recipient of the Rabkin Art Writers Prize and the LA Press Club Critic of the Year award.