Southern Light Gallery to feature Christopher Hudson’s Crop Circles

Dr. Chris Hudson has long been drawn to the boundless crop circles that airline passengers cannot help but see blanketing the Great Plains, so much so in fact that he has drawn them – painted them, too.

But it was not until Hudson, an assistant professor of English at Amarillo College, began downloading and digitally embellishing images of crop circles that his handiwork proved truly satisfying.

An assortment of Hudson’s variegated airborne imagery, dubbed “Crop Circles,” will be on display from Jan. 30 to March 22 at AC’s Southern Light Gallery.

“I’m not sure how long ago this project started,” said Hudson, who hints that its origins may coincide with flights he took onboard long-shuttered airlines like Braniff and TWA. “But seeing the fields and wanting to represent them in some way began to take shape during my exile in Indiana (2002-2016).

“By that time I had a certain taste in art: abstract, geometrical, minimal. I had sketched a certain section as I flew by and tried to paint the shapes and estrange them by making them different colors. Problem was, I am a terrible painter, even just painting shapes.”

Hudson, a native Texan with a trio of degrees from the University of Texas at Austin, returned to his home state and joined the AC faculty in 2018. Fairly soon thereafter, and quite by chance, his notion of creating agriculturally inspired art came full circle.

“I was looking for something on Google Earth and there they (crop circles) were,” Hudson said. “There was the landscape. I could zoom in, move around, cover ground far faster than the jet airplanes had.

“I started getting screen shots, cropping them, manipulating them, then eventually playing with them. The images in the show are kind of like NFTs if you could get one of those with a handshake,” he said. “I mean, I could never make the image again.”

Hudson’s show is largely comprised of embellished screen shots; however, he also has dabbled in crop-circle integrated sculptures and says he hopes one day to use some of his one-of-a-kind images to make silk screens in the Andy Warhol style. Transferring some images to tile is another idea he might pursue.

The Southern Light Gallery is located on the first floor of the Ware Student Commons on AC’s Washington Street Campus and is free and open to the public.

For more information about Chris Hudson’s “Crop Circles” exhibit or the Southern Light Gallery, please contact René West, associate professor of photography, at rwest@actx.edu or 806-345-5654.