Team Lump
May 29, 2023
Thursday June 8 Erik Brandt: Ficciones Typografika Artist talk (registration) 6pm Saturday June 10, Workshop with Erik Brandt (registration) 9-11am Thursday June 22 Don Crow: The Spaces Between Two Things (registration) 6-7pm Friday June 23 5-6pm: Conversation between Don Crow and Annie Blazejack and Geddes Levenson about their current exhibition (registration) 5-6pm Small School is an art-based, alternative education platform. Currently Small School is serving Raleigh by providing opportunities to directly engage with prominent national and international visiting artists through artist talks and small group workshops. Erik Brandt is a graphic designer and educator currently based in Minneapolis and runs a studio called Typografika. Don Crow is a teacher, painter and collage artist based in Richmond, VA. Crow’s fragile paper collages, large digital prints and abstract paintings draw attention to objects as obvious constructions and invisible processes. This series is free, please register at […]
May 29, 2023
A Matter of Life and Death (Probably Death) Annie Blazejack and Geddes Levenson June 2 through July 2, 2023 Opening reception: Friday June 2nd, 6-9pm A Matter of Life and Death (Probably Death) is a painting show with a plot twist. It is a show about how truth shifts depending on your point of view. It’s a show about how both looking and knowing that you’re being looked at can be assertions of power. The paintings imagine precarious choreographies between women and wild animals, perilous partnerships that only exist because they are frozen in paint. Saturated light splashes across nightscapes. Fluorescent colors and crisp lines contrast with mushy grays and muted hues. Portrait subjects look back with bravado – though the eye contact doesn’t always come from a human. As we play out the performance of the gaze in a […]
April 10, 2023
Yeah Chapel Solo Show by Amanda Barr On view April 14th through May 21st Opening reception, First Friday, May 5th, 6-9pm Amanda Barr is back with another weird and wonderful installation about the bait-and-switch between spirituality and vain consumerism. Amanda’s work always delivers razor-sharp humor, hidden beneath layers of her idiosyncratic process and craft-embued resourcefulness. In Yeah Chapel, a misguided spiritual journey comes packaged as an amalgam of painting, sculpture, stained glass, and ceramics. Follow Amanda Barr on Instagram.
April 10, 2023
The Good Ear Solo show by Bob Ray April 7th through May 21st If you pair Bob Ray’s prolific output with his personal mystique, you’ve got all of the ingredients of that Tom Waits song, “What’s He Building In There?” And this Friday, Bob’s first-ever Lump solo exhibition might provide an answer to that question. Bob has been making drawings and sculptures for decades, and this show is just the tip of the iceberg. It includes a massive series of graphite drawings made on 8 1/2 x 11 copy paper, lowbrow, sculptural objects, and an installation of handmade album covers, titled Baby D’s Record Shop. The work reads like a personal journal of fantasy and machination. Bob’s drawing hand is unflinching, even harsh, but his text that often accompanies those drawings reveals a type of humor, wonder, and self-doubt that […]
March 2, 2023
The Digital Wilds Group show curated by Cosmic Rays Digital March 3rd through April 2nd, 2023 The Digital Wilds is a digital art exhibition curated by Cosmic Rays Digital, a programming initiative of the 5th Cosmic Rays Film Festival (www.cosmicraysfilmfest.com). The artists selected for this exhibition observe human-made digital technology as it interacts with the natural world. The works include computerized bivalves, botanical fakery, species séances, and vegetal matrices. Through the twisting tendrils of digital code, these artists render nature as both wild and programmed, toggling between responsive and impervious states. The show highlights critical engagement with the new media technologies that surround us– technologies that threaten to ensnare us at the same time they promise to set us free– while investigating digital forms of privacy, identity, and nature. Patricia Dominguez Meredith Drum eteam (Franziska Lamprecht and Hajoe Moderegger) Tama Hochbaum Kristin Lucas Jessye […]
March 2, 2023
ROUTINE Solo show by Sean Livingstone March 3rd through April 2nd, 2023 Sean’s work melds his own strange brand of analog nostalgia with one of the darkest aspects of American culture: gun violence. To say that gun violence has become ROUTINE, is an understatement, and the work in this show highlights the unsettling banality that characterizes our response to that violence. Through a series of deftly simple drawings, Sean has abstracted crossword puzzles, taken from the New York Times on each day that a mass shooting occurred. He has created a series of shrines to cassette tapes which contain music that are connected to three gun-related, teenage suicides during the 1980’s. In each case, the parents blamed the music and sued the bands for causing the deaths. And Sean punctuates the show with a low-fi video that pairs militaristic TV channel sign-off clips, with CCTV footage of the school shooting at Columbine. See Sean’s full body of […]
February 1, 2023
FETISH Drawings by Beth Tacular January 13th through February 19th First Friday reception, February 3rd, 6-9pm Beth’s drawings channel tumult and serenity, rage and ecstasy all at once. They plunge into those deep caverns of the subconscious that most people prefer to leave unexplored. Despite tight, aggressive line work and sub-human forms, most of which are sexualized in bizarre ways, the purpose of these drawings is to heal. The ultimate goal is transcendence. And Beth has created a trail of cryptic totems, in ink on paper, to lead you the entire way.
February 1, 2023
Countdown to Entropy Drawings and animation by Louis Watts January 13th through February 19th First Friday reception, February 3rd, 6-9pm Louis brings us a series of drawings that allude to the emotionless eye of HAL 9000. Mesmeric forces are at play in each, all-seeing orb, two of which are animated – slowly rotating in concentric circles that confound and hypnotize in the same moment. But closer scrutiny reveals that each of these works is created from thousands of minuscule, hand-drawn hashtags. This seemingly infinite repetition points an accusatory finger at social media and all of its brain-dulling tactics. It’s an old sentiment, to say that technology is out of sync with our humanity. But so is the computer; old, I mean. Louis’s concern goes beyond Instagram and the smartphone or the latest meme. He sees an algorithmic drive toward mediocrity, forever […]
November 4, 2022
ZACH STORM September 9th through October 9th A conversation with Zach Storm inevitably veers toward literature. Real books. Bound paper, slathered with words printed in ink, seem always to be on his mind. And this consummate reader’s love of syntax correlates directly to his love of pigments, inks and paints. In his world, a “line” is literary and visual, at once. And the specific speed of that line, in either realm, is essential. Zach reads slowly, deliberately, so that his experience of a story is immersive. The same goes for his drawings and paintings, whose abstract narratives smolder, rather than unfold. His method of creating the work is akin to a real time rehearsal of our experience of seeing the work. In the end, everything is quiet. This entanglement between, ink-line and sentence, between saying and seeing, is best illustrated […]
November 4, 2022
INTRODUCING, THE LUMP VOLUNTEERS September 9th through October 9th This might be one of the best Lump shows of the year. We all know that Lump is an artist-run space, but did you know that the person who peers from behind the desk at the back of the gallery, also makes precariously balanced sculptures out of hand-made, wooden blocks? Or, has been collaborating with the same creative partner since the 4th grade? Or, makes paintings based entirely on a fascination with cheap, metallic barrettes? This show presents a handful of Lump’s volunteer army; the people who keep the doors open (almost) every weekend, year-round. Without these folks, the schedule would be totally erratic, the art would hang lopsided, and there would be no toilet paper, just when you need it the most. But the indomitable quality of the work in […]
November 3, 2022
A great amalgam of creative activity at Lump, curated by Bill Thelen November 4th through December 18th Opening reception this Friday, November 4th, 6-9pm the love letter is a culmination of everything Lump’s founder, Bill Thelen, has been doing since he stepped away from the gallery in 2017. To be fair, he was never truly away. This show is, in fact, a broad collection of isolated curatorial concepts that Bill has been testing at Lump in various forms, such as Drawing Room and Bad Touch 2.0. Whatever the project, the foundation is always drawing. And this is where Bill’s curatorial impulse is clearly inexorable from his own practice, which is dominated by an even stronger impulse to draw. Bill says, “My practice had always been a little bit here a little bit there but one thing always remained consistent was my drawing practice. I was always thinking about how I could utilize my curating background […]
July 18, 2022
STORY SHARING EVENT Friday. July 22nd, 7:30-9pm Abortion Stories 2022, is an interactive art project, founded by Cassandra Neyenesch @CassandraNeyenesch and Carolina Franco @dra.wc_franco, that will provide Lump as a safe, non-judgmental space for anyone who feels moved to share their personal abortion story. You will not be recorded without your permission, but you may indicate in the notes section of the sign-up form (linked below), whether or not you consent to have your story documented, in video or audio form. The story telling event is for absolutely anyone who wants to share their experience with abortion, regardless of whether they have been pregnant or not. Those who prefer to tell their story privately, have the option to share it with a listener, one-on-one. You can explore more about this ongoing project, HERE. and HERE. We are especially welcoming of people with identities that are disproportionately affected in the abortion struggle: BiPOC, […]