Parts of Some Hole

by

Jackson Hunt

When I tell a story I’m accessing a memory– or am I making a memory? 

Paint is something to wrangle. To handle. There’s only so much you can control.

My memories are physical supported by images on screens and glossy paper that I hold delicately on the edge. Careful of prints.

Documents freeze time. They need an interpreter and I am here with it right now. I don’t know everything, but I can look. 

(Give me the keys to the time machine)

I’ll look as close as I can. I lose focus the closer I get. Things start to blur.

Photographs printed on large pieces of paper resist flatness and contact. The prints have agency, they distort, make, reveal an image. Ridges and pockets become gestures that cut through the image.

I see familiar people and then I see people I think are familiar. Maybe they are familiar because of the picture. The picture tells a story– so do I. 

I’m drawn to pictures with bright colors or where the light is an object / intruding into the space. 

I may have been alive in some, at a different time, in a different world. I experienced it but forgot until I saw it again.

Some were before I was there but the people are connected to me I come from them. Is part of me in them or are they in me?

Seeing makes me remember a new memory.

The first painting class I ever took was called “Painting After the Masters” where we learned their techniques and tried our best to copy. 

Copy of a copy. 

Light leaks into camera rolls. Printers clog and smear and  band. Paper bubbles and wrinkles and tears.

Mechanical failures leak. Revealing the new image with all of the same parts.


Zoom. Crop. Repeat. All it is is CMYK. 

QUOTE AS:
Jackson Hunt. Parts of Some Hole. The Living Commons Collective Magazine. N.3, September 2025. p.