‍Artist Statement

I see, I capture , I create.

I am fascinated with the human experience; the unique lifelines built from experiences, lessons learned, healed wounds, trials and tribulations, and our genealogy make up who we are as humans. The journey of one’s soul takes on this plane, and the idea of what is beyond, is something beautiful. I pull from these attributes and make them the string or soul that binds my work. Imagery presented is from my ‘The Ode to John Henry collection’ is a series of sculptures consisting of relatively young wood, old wood and aged metals from Atlanta rail lines. Combined, these items are a metaphor for the strength of the natural spirit in man....

John Henry was a man who challenged the machine. That machine was a new steam drill tasked to do his job of drilling holes in stone for dynamite used for tunnel making. As the story goes, he defeated the machine by a thin margin but soon died after. This story tells us that with strength, determination, will and dexterity we can accomplish wonders. The use of highly textured abstract imagery exemplifies depth of the human reality while conveying metaphysical meaning.The aim of my art is to awaken the human eye to the world's often unseen beauty linking the physical world and the metaphysical. I wish to push the mind past the mundane and into my organic abstract world.  

Hopeton St.Clair Hibbert Jr.

Bio  

My name is Hopeton St. Clair Hibbert. I am an Atlanta based multidisciplinary contemporary artist with a focus in highly textured photography and sculpture. My goal behind the camera has been capturing the beauty of the world from a view less noticed with abstract presentation. I was born of Jamaican ancestry and raised in New Jersey by my highly artistic mother. In my teens I relocated to Atlanta, GA in 1993. After attending Johnson & Wales culinary school in Charleston, SC in 1996 I began my journey in  the culinary arts. Around the same time I was given a camera and my photography hobby ran parallel. The restaurant prepared me with a lifetime of needed skills, many of which have helped me hone my artistic abilities outside of the culinary world. In  2017 I brought my camera back out and restarted my photography practice. A year later I got accepted to my first art exhibition and continued to evolve my photographic art as a self taught artist. I then began to create with more intensity and expanded my practice to abstract mixed media and sculpture to follow my love of texture.  

Since 2018 I’ve shown in many exhibitions throughout Atlanta as well as Brooklyn NYs SITE gallery and Philadelphia's Rush Arts Gallery. My first solo exhibition EXPLOITED TEXTURES was curated by Michi Meko in 2019. In 2020 my second solo exhibition was an arts and culinary experience where I first showed my London Plane tree series . The latest solo exhibition was  ‘EXPLOITED TEXTURES II’ at Jennifer Balcos Gallery 2022.

www.stclairrenaissance.com

IG @stclair_renaissance