Lumpy, Bumpy, & Pink, a group exhibition of recent Master of Fine Arts graduates of Purchase College, State University of New York. The exhibition will feature work by artists Sasha Kopelowitz, Brian Lund and Jennifer Perry, recent graduates of the Purchase College School of the Arts, School of Art+Design. This exhibition is generously sponsored by Dolly Maass and the Friends of Art+Design at Purchase College.
Inspired by a pleasurable sense of optimism and a life-affirming spirit, all three artists pursue the playful, the intelligent and the whimsical in their artistic practice. Exhibiting a preference for organic forms, meticulous surfaces, eccentric visions, thought-provoking humor and a keen attention to a refreshing outlook on aesthetics, each artist tells a personal story within a fabricated setting. The diverse settings—a mountainous Eastern-influenced landscape, organisms of internal psychology, a cinematic roller rink stage featuring an actor and actress engaged in dance moves—have a commonality in their distinctive sensibilities.
Sasha Kopelowitz's miniature abstractions investigate the body as a complex locus for contradictory corporeal and spiritual experiences. She has created a unique, cartoonish imagery in which organisms float above, and sometimes collapse upon, a desolate and fantastic background, simultaneously beckoning and repelling their viewer. In more recent work, ladders of light visually explore how sexual, moral and spiritual growth interconnect.
Brian Lund's drawings and paintings feature extensive graphic vocabularies translated from pop-culture media sources, such as television and movies. After selecting a specific scene from an original source, he documents a set of the physical actions of the actors' and actresses' bodies, coding movements of the arms, legs, head, etc. so as to create a fictionalized vocabulary of visual ciphers that interact in an overall surface. In creating this work, Lund attempts to replicate, therefore calling attention to, an experience of popular culture overload that coincides with today's entertainment industry.
Jennifer Perry sees her sculptures as contemporary versions of scholars' rocks, or guai shi (literally "strange rocks"), which Chinese literati have valued for centuries as a means of bringing part of the natural landscape indoors for contemplation. Perry mines the "landscape" of her Brooklyn neighborhood for ordinary materials such as Styrofoam and cast-off furniture using them to create miniature "moveable mountains" that perch on wheeled bases. In using lowly and synthetic materials to mimic nature, Perry raises questions about preciousness, permanence and our troubled relationship with the natural world. The exhibition is curate by Denise Mullen, Dean of the School of Art+Design.