In Conversation with Tait's "In a Tight Fix" At Box 13
PROJECT STATEMENT
In Conversation with Tait's "In a Tight Fix" is an archival intervention and the work that anchored the development of a larger speculative narrative about bears, hunting, and human systems of control.
The source is a print by Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait: The Life of a Hunter. "A Tight Fix," 1861, held in the collection of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth. A bear attacks. A hunter fires. The scene is beautiful and matter-of-fact about what it depicts. The bear and the gun belong in the same frame, and only one of them gets to leave.
Working from research photographs taken during a visit to the Amon Carter, the figures were extracted from their original context: the scenery stripped away, the action reduced to its essential components. The bear, the hunter in the foreground, and the smaller figure behind were redrawn in Illustrator and laser-etched as freestanding figures in wood. What remained, once the landscape was gone, was the assumption the image had always been carrying.
The installation at Box 13 Window Space in Houston placed these figures on a floor plinth against a printed canvas backdrop of treeline imagery, with UFOs laser-cut from day-glow green plexi suspended from the ceiling above the scene. The encounter from Tait's original print is reconstructed in three dimensions and watched from above by forces that were not in the original image. This is where the speculative narrative enters: not as an afterthought, but as a structural presence built into the space.
This work began as a two-dimensional intervention in No Vacancies at Arts Fort Worth in 2023, where appropriated archival imagery was central to the exhibition. Box 13 expanded it into installation, giving the figures physical presence, scale, and a new ending.
Source print: The Life of a Hunter. "A Tight Fix" — Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait (1819-1905)
The source is a print by Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait: The Life of a Hunter. "A Tight Fix," 1861, held in the collection of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth. A bear attacks. A hunter fires. The scene is beautiful and matter-of-fact about what it depicts. The bear and the gun belong in the same frame, and only one of them gets to leave.
Working from research photographs taken during a visit to the Amon Carter, the figures were extracted from their original context: the scenery stripped away, the action reduced to its essential components. The bear, the hunter in the foreground, and the smaller figure behind were redrawn in Illustrator and laser-etched as freestanding figures in wood. What remained, once the landscape was gone, was the assumption the image had always been carrying.
The installation at Box 13 Window Space in Houston placed these figures on a floor plinth against a printed canvas backdrop of treeline imagery, with UFOs laser-cut from day-glow green plexi suspended from the ceiling above the scene. The encounter from Tait's original print is reconstructed in three dimensions and watched from above by forces that were not in the original image. This is where the speculative narrative enters: not as an afterthought, but as a structural presence built into the space.
This work began as a two-dimensional intervention in No Vacancies at Arts Fort Worth in 2023, where appropriated archival imagery was central to the exhibition. Box 13 expanded it into installation, giving the figures physical presence, scale, and a new ending.
Source print: The Life of a Hunter. "A Tight Fix" — Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait (1819-1905)
