TOOK A PIC WITH LEAVES, GLUED A SKULL IN THE TREES PHOTOGRAPHS BY JIMMY FOUNTAIN AND JOHN BOWMAN October 15 – November 21 opening reception, Friday October 15, 6-9pm In a first time collaboration, photographer Jimmy Fountain teams up with collage artist John Bowman to create a series of wild and weird images made from excised pieces of medium format digital photos. Low key humor pervades the work, building on a compositional format that subverts our immediate expectations while honoring the mixed media gods of yore. The way it works is, John collages parts of photos that Jimmy takes. Then Jimmy rephotographs those collages and, in some instances, alters them digitally. It’s a game of tit for tat, where layers of action build while the image is increasingly galvanized into a single stratum. It’s tough to tell who did what, where the […]

MORE LIFE NEW PHOTOS AND VIDEO BY LYDIA MCCARTHY October 15 – November 21 opening reception, Friday October 15, 6-9pm Lydia McCarthy’s latest Lump show splits into two bodies of work that are both based in morse code signal for help, SOS. Her video series, Life After Death, pinpoints the desperation and boredom that Covid 19 imposed upon Lydia, as she dot-dot-dot-dash-dash-dashes her way through bizarre games, self-help rituals, and feminist texts, captured in vivid colors and performed with intimacy and great humor. Send Nudes is a photographic series that reveals Lydia’s practice in uproarious selfie-indulgence. Here, she presents a vast array of nude selfies that were intended to lure prospects from Tinder, Hinge, and Instagram. But what is at first glance a predacious act, quickly devolves into desperation and, once again, the SOS emerges. The constant repetition and revision […]

A BEAUTIFUL PROXY SOLO SHOW BY JASMINE BEST August 27th through October 3rd A type of low grade terror pervades Jasmine Best’s work in her inaugural Lump show, A Beautiful Proxy. Mangled Black femme bodies, rendered in various types of fabrics, serve as the base for an ethical and social atrocity that Jasmine underscores: the exploitation of black bodies for commodity, paired conveniently with our distorted sense of beauty, which she calls out as being oppressively anglocentric. Horrors aside, the work is exquisitely made, invigorating to look at and brilliantly intertwined. Soft sculptures point toward fabric collages, which in turn point toward videos that nod to unconventional works on paper. The show takes an immovable stance in the gallery, inhabiting the space with gravitas and beauty. But the more the colors pop, and the looser the fabric hangs, the more you’ll feel […]

STICKS AND STONES INTRODUCING PATRICIA SHAW July 2nd through August 8th OPENING RECEPTION, Friday July 2nd, 6-9pm Patricia Shaw spent the bulk of her career as a much feared lawyer. Eventually, she became fed up with the unending, predacious maneuvers required by the job, so she checked out and focused all of her intensity on ceramics. She’s been making sculpture, no less maniacally, ever since. In Sticks and Stones, Pat is bluntly allegorical. Good and evil are in a taught battle here, and the message comes en mass from an enormous taxonomy of ceramic grotesqueries, highlights of which are: eleven bodiless representations of vices and virtues and a vast series of tiny rocks-turned-characters that each express some version of every emotion under the sun. There are too many pieces to even count, so Lump’s advice is to bring good shoes, pack a snack, and prepare to spend a significant amount of time in the uproarious world of Patricia Shaw’s creatures, great and small.

IS-NESS NEW WORK BY JESSICA LANGLEY July 2nd through August 8th OPENING RECEPTION, Friday July 2nd, 6-9pm Jessica Langley’s creative toolset runs the gamut: foraged materials, fresco, digital prints, sculpture, collage. But the Colorado-based artist uses these disparate methods with a single concept in mind –  “intrinsic significance” – a kind of all-encompassing interconnectedness that Aldous Huxley described at length in his legendary mescaline-fueled text, The Doors of Perception. Is-ness presents Jessica’s own version of the underlying fabric of space and time. Her collage paintings are visual renderings of abstract systems and networks, created in gouache, watercolor, and ink, on paper made from mushrooms, cast onto scraps of ubiquitous blue polystyrene insulation. Through narrative tact and material mastery, Jessica forces harmony between repellent compounds and the respective ideological forces that they represent. She melds crisis and comfort, offering works that are […]

DRAWING ROOM PRESENTS, BETH TACULAR July 2nd through August. Drawing Room, curated by Bill Thelen presents work by Beth Tacular, whose drawings take aim at grief and loss, gender and embodiment, the passage of time, and an intensely felt interconnectedness with the universe.

PLAN 9 NEW WORK BY GEORGE JENNE May 21st through June 27th OPENING RECEPTION, Friday June 4th, 6-9pm The plot of Ed Wood’s famously bad, Plan 9 From Outer Space, pivots on an extraterrestrial plot to sow chaos among the human race in order to get mankind to listen. The message: “Don’t build a doomsday weapon that will destroy the universe, dummies.” In George Jenne’s mind, the deep antagonism of the last four years suggests that Plan 9 got the green light, and that the aliens are on a fool’s errand. His latest, color saturated video installation imagines this strategic chaos through an amalgam of images and a cacophony of sound. The work features a cryptic newscast, an anarchist cooking show, a man with vampiric delusions, a menacing altar, a taxonomy of conspiratorial totems, and the warbling voice of Reverend Jim Jones as he […]

WHOLED UP INTRODUCING ALEXANDRIA CLAY May 21st through June 27th OPENING RECEPTION, Friday June 4th, 6-9pm Durham-based artist, Alexandrea Clay writes, “At the apex of the pandemic, we bore witness to massive gatherings to protest continued racial injustice. But a demonstrated strength in numbers held a new level of risk for people of color who hoped to see change in their communities.” This is the crux of Wholed Up, by the second of Lump’s, Artist First Fund recipients. In it, Alexandria explores and celebrates closeness during a time when a new sense of danger accompanies proximity and overshadows many of the nurturing aspects of intimacy, especially in communities of color. So she renders tender, interpersonal moments in charcoal on stretched and dyed paper, in a sprawling series of images. But what we see is not wholly pleasant. In a clever inversion, through the manipulation of paper, Alexandria taunts us with hints of the double standard that American culture has […]

DRAWING ROOM NEW DRAWINGS BY JASON LORD April 9th – May 15th Drawing Room, curated by Bill Thelen presents a series of drawings by Jason Lord that converge into single, sprawling piece. Jason says, “This is a continually expanding, meditative drawing – a mandala that I’m making as I think about dharmas, atoms, memories, what it means to be or seem whole, and what it means to be connected.  While I draw it, each square has new potential for intersection, belonging, or individualism.”

With Purpose Anthony Patterson April 9 – May 15, 2021 For our inaugural Artist First Fund exhibition, Anthony Patterson treads his old haunt, the Crest Street community, in Durham, where he was born and raised. The show combines documentary photography, archival video and original, site specific works to describe the struggles, victories and unresolved tensions surrounding this historic, black community. Anthony sees the show as less of an art exhibition and more of a cultural experience, one that is at once, deeply personal and broadly relevant to our current social climate.

Hyperstition Mike Geary April 9 – May 15, 2021 “Anything that removes the crippling nature of decision making, I’m a big fan of,” says Team Lump bad boy, Mike Geary. The title of his show refers to the experimental science of self fulfilling prophecies. As opposed to a superstition, which is simply a false belief paired with magical thinking, a hyperstition functions to manifest its own reality through specific methods. Geary’s personal hyperstition employs the generative techniques he uses to create improvised, modular music; he allows the machine and the method take over as a kind of low brow, artificial intelligence that manifests its own reality. The result is a series of acute, abstract paintings that present an invigorating exchange between cool control and unfettered madness.    

ART WILL SAVE US AGAIN PAINTINGS BY RENZO ORTEGA January 15th through February 21st Renzo Ortega dazzles us with an immersive installation that showcases a series of 8 large oil paintings along with found objects and video. Renzo literally painted the space in broad strokes, creating a celebratory, fantasy space that lures us with lush narrative images, then hooks us with a gamut of emotions that surface the moment we understand the stranger-than-fiction reality that each canvas pinpoints. Those realties are grave. The works were made exclusively during the pandemic. But Renzo is an energetic man, brimming with hope, and he vigorously invites us to indulge in a fantasy that could easily become a reality; that art will save us again.