Regen Projects is pleased to present Book of sand, an exhibition of new paintings, sculptures, and a tapestry by Elliott Hundley. Marking the artist’s seventh solo exhibition with the gallery, the presentation furthers Hundley’s rich, multifaceted approach to materiality through an expanded lens of metacognition and philosophically grounded play. Whereas previous exhibitions have drawn from the subject matter and esprit of Euripidean tragedies, Rilke’s sonnets, and plays by Artaud and Genet, Book of sand focuses on Hundley’s own exuberant internal universe.

With each work in the show, Hundley follows a path of automatism: compiling paint, paper cut-outs, string, encaustic, and other found materials without a predetermined narrative or aim. Hundley’s characteristic use of pins and accumulation as both method and content surfaces throughout the exhibition as an important symbol for the conscious and unconscious act of becoming. “The pin, collecting, assembling, is simultaneously the desire to remember, to track, to understand—and also to lose track, to lose oneself in the fantasy of one’s objects of desire, one’s attachments, becoming plural, multitudinous, and overwhelmingly so. A self forgotten in its manifold projections, collections, memories, and possibilities.” (Jonathan Alexander, Los Angeles review of books, 2023).

The exhibition engages Jungian sandplay therapy, a method which enables unconscious elements of the psyche to become visible and processed by playing with miniature figurines in a tray of sand. Often used for children and adults who struggle with trauma, the sand tray provides another modality for expressing intense emotions beyond language. Certain paintings in the presentation are bordered by a pronounced frame echoing the boundary of a sand tray, while the gallery space becomes a psychic arena in which the artworks are arranged as figurines.

The sculptures are constructed around objects that hold personal resonance for Hundley, who then embellishes them through accumulation. With Palette (2024)—a vertically-oriented amalgam of concrete, steel, plastic, rope, wood, yarn, cable, leather, bone, rattan, paper, encaustic, wire and feathers—the artist free associates objects he has collected in his studio into a totem-like offering. The large tapestry on view integrates pieces of the veil his mother wore on her wedding day as a gesture collapsing memory, familial heritage, identification, and maternal attachment into a monumental tableaux. Hundley’s exhibit is titled after Jorge Luis Borges’ short story The book of sand, wherein a mysterious, diabolical bible embodies the concept of infinite mutability. Echoing Borges’ metaphor Hundley’s works, like “neither the book nor the sand has any beginning or end.”