My drawings are a practice of world-building, stemming from daydreams, fantasy, and bouts of escapism. They depict animals and nature living in a surreal harmonic existence. In my landscapes, flora and fauna germinate, intermingling like a symbiosis taking on each other's characteristics. The animals I use are highly symbolic and typically with mythological ties. For example, dogs or dog-like creatures appear with a particular frequency, a nod to the once wild, now tamed animals, acting as an essential link between our human world and the environments I've placed them in. Snakes also appear frequently, representing feminine symbolism and allude to the ouroboros, one of the oldest symbols known to man. Symbols and mythologies are occasionally used as a starting point for ideas, acting as an additional tie to our world, communicating connections to the unknown and nature. Often colorful and bright, my works are seemingly happy and sometimes romantic. However, upon closer inspection, the snakes with dog heads, multi-headed animals, or flower animal hybrids can also appear alarming. My drawings are enticing on purpose, to capture the viewer and lead them through all the details. Mylar and transparent papers allow me to use both the front and back, adding depth and intricate layers. Using multiple mediums such as color pencil, gouache, and silkscreen, I can adjust the opacity. This translucent quality of the work contributes to a state of unreality. Part imagined and part longed for, the universe in these works is a world where anything is possible.

This series of works by Cary Hulbert involves an admixture of landscape and life. Animals and plants alike are not merely placed into the scenes that surround them. Instead, regardless of whether the piece in question has a colder tone (dominated by blues and greens) or a warmer tone (oranges and pinks), there is a push and pull between the animate and the inanimate; the dog-like creature in the bottom right section of Spirit Dogs, for example, not only blends into the landscape around it but is in fact constituted by the very same tones, to the extent that each can be said to foreshadow the other.

Taking these pieces together, they can be said to evoke a kind of atmosphere that belongs to the state of dreaming. Rather than relying primarily on “surreal” subject matter, the color and line-work of these pieces come together to strike an unlikely harmony: whereas the movement of the lines gives a sense of fragmentation and irreducible particularity by which we might characterize the logic of dreams, the gradients, contrasts, and recurrences of color give rise to an enveloping feeling of atmosphere. Across the pieces, and even within individual pieces, abstract and blurry shapes give way to delicate, careful lines, and vice versa. This interplay is what makes us feel a certain atmosphere of dreams here.

Of course, neither dream nor atmosphere can be strictly aligned with particular aspects of form, especially when we consider the symbolism that, albeit quietly, informs much of this work. As noted in Hulbert’s statement, the dog-like creatures are a link between nature and the human world. In fact, humans seem to be altogether absent from these pieces, which suggests that the implied perspective belongs to something other than the human, perhaps something in touch with its very limits. This expanded sense of perception reveals an expansion of sense in general — an expansion of the senses brought about by contact with the atmosphere.

- The Editors