Please join us for the closing reception of Sam Hulsebus’ solo exhibition “Ode to Infrared.”
The exhibition “Ode to Infrared” is a nod to Hulsebus’ ongoing Infrared Nights series, exploring the invisible world beyond the visible spectrum, shaping our perceptions but remaining elusive. These paintings reinterpret foundational myths and collective memories through a visceral, dreamlike lens, dismantling linear narratives and layering time, space, and emotion.
Drawing from art history, mythology, and personal experience, the series reconstructs allegories of power, struggle, revelation, and collapse. Figures, architecture, and landscapes emerge and dissolve in cycles of destruction and renewal, with vertical compositions echoing ascension. These motifs explore themes of surveillance, obscured realities, and the human endeavor's existential weight.
At the heart of this series lies an engagement with materiality and process. Each work serves as a constructed space merging past and future into a heightened present. Using techniques such as pentimento, this same narrative storytelling is executed through multiple layers of under paintings. Layered abstraction intertwine with figurative mark-marking, embedded writing, often buried or fragmented, mirror history's rewrite, concealment, and rediscovery. This interplay invites viewers to search and decipher meaning within the image's ruins.
Sam Hulsebus is a visual artist from Omaha, NE, whose work explores the intersection of history, materiality, and perception.
Artist Bio: Sam Hulsebus is a visual artist from Omaha, Nebraska, whose work explores the intersection of history, materiality, and perception. Originally trained in architecture at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, he brings a structural sensitivity to his compositions, constructing space as something that exists simultaneously inside and outside of time—blending past, present, and future into layered, singular moments. His paintings reimagine historical narratives, mythological allegories, and philosophical inquiries, often depicting the human condition as cyclical, fractured, and in constant flux.
In his ongoing Infrared Nights series, Hulsebus revisits pivotal moments in human history, infusing them with contemporary tensions and abstract emotional currents. The series uses light, distortion, and veiled symbolism to question how history is constructed, perceived, and rewritten. His work blends figurative and abstract mark-making, allowing forms to emerge and dissolve—existing in a state of both actuality and potentiality.
Writing plays a key role in his process, serving as both a conceptual foundation and a physical presence in his paintings. Text may be embedded, obscured, or layered within the paint, reflecting the impermanence and continual reinterpretation of narratives. His approach echoes the improvisational nature of jazz, prioritizing rhythm and fragmentation over fixed representation.
Hulsebus’s work asks: How do we construct meaning? How does the past echo in the present? How do the materials of our world shape the metaphysical? By weaving together art history, mythology, and modern philosophy, he creates work that invites viewers to navigate shifting landscapes of memory, perception, and identity.