RUNNING TIME June 3 – July 10, 2022 Every week of RUNNING TIME, a different video will be projected into the center of the gallery. Each piece documents a unique undercurrent of American culture and its corresponding rituals. The show mutates over time. It starts with a dingy, unhinged video tape, but ends with a tightly lensed 16mm piece that is playful and clever. It shifts from one very American phenomenon to another while spanning a wide swath of geographic settings. From a claustrophobic New York rock club, to the banks of the Mississippi river, then through a bizarre amalgam of the Austrian Alps and East Texas, up through the midwest, ultimately landing down in Amarillo. 6/3 Minor Threat, by Dan Graham Graham captures a pioneering hardcore band at a world famous punk rock club on blurry hand held video […]

Future Fakers: curated by Mike Geary “Future faker” is a dating term. It is someone who paints a rosy picture of the future, in a relationship, knowing full well that there is no future at all. It goes beyond dirty tactics. It takes plotting, organization and vision. More broadly considered, a future faker is any entity that uses a detailed vision of the future to facilitate or manifest events. Each of the works in this show is deceptive in a similar way. It takes its time, lays the groundwork, projects an illusion, then strikes. The show’s curator, Mike Geary describes it as, “a holographic semblance projected back at the viewer through a technique/anti-technique that misleads or removes the artists hand.” He raises the question of whether or not it is possible for a collective belief to become so thoroughly defined […]

UNC MFA thesis exhibition with Raj Bunnag, Charlie Dupee and Stella Rosalie Rosen April 15th through May 22nd Opening reception this Friday April 15th, 6-9pm The artists in UNC’s MFA thesis exhibition at Lump aren’t brooding. They’re mad. A cloud hangs over the gallery, seeded by slyly transgressive sculpture, drawings, and video. But as always at Lump, you need only to stay long enough to recognize the divine beauty in these artists’ work, and the tough-to-swallow message that comes with it will fall gently into place. Raj Bunnag’s large format, starkly rendered linocuts pose the question of where we stand in the spectrum between complacency and oppressive violence in a hyper-polarized America; a question that’s all the more discomfiting because the answer leaves no room to claim high moral ground. Stella Rosalie Rosen’s animated, video trilogy resonates with a similar […]

  ARIEL WILLIAMS March 4 through April 10 Opening reception this Friday March 4th, 6-9pm Lump is proud to host Ariel Williams’s first solo show ever, comprised of baroque portraits of cakes and people. They veer quickly into dark territory, as each subject in this series is beautifully and bafflingly infested with ants, fungi, slugs and parasitic abstractions, all presented with the aim of tackling grave issues like chronic illness and grief. The execution is exquisite. The subject matter is intoxicating. And the unease that you’ll walk away with, is matched by awe at Ariel’s fast emerging talent and vision. ARTIST STATEMENT Cake is meant to be something beautiful and desirable, but that is not always the case. This series started out as a way to communicate the abundance of emotions that came with the low points in my life, […]

  JASON LORD March 4 through April 10 Opening reception, this Friday, March 4th, 6-9pm Jason Lord has walked thousands of miles since the beginning of the pandemic; miles a day, every day, regardless of weather or general mood. On the way, he has collected flotsam and jetsam of a peripheral world. These are places that people deem worthy of nothing more than trash, but for Jason, those cast-off items, retrieved from street gutters and stretches of railroad track, provide an opportunity for intimate connection and aesthetic rebirth. ARTIST STATEMENT I have walked 5600 miles since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. March 10th will mark two years–731 consecutive days–of walking at least five miles, regardless of weather, temperature, workload, or mood. As I walk, I look, listen, and gather: thoughts, sounds, images, and objects. I notice, pick up, and […]

TV PARTY (UP ALL NIGHT 2) VIDEO GROUP SHOW CURATED BY GEORGE JENNE January 21 – February 27 Closing reception, Friday February 25, 6-9pm In 2017, Lump exhibited a show called Up All Night that paired music video with avant-garde video by long-established artists, alongside underrepresented artists. Up All Night described the point at which video art and music video intersect. Born close to the same time and out of a single technology, these disparate forms evolved in divergent economies, whose ideals seem to be at odds, yet inextricable. TV Party moves the dial in another direction and focuses on material born out of the public access television model, starting with Glen O’Brien’s raucous, New York City public access variety show, TV Party, which aired from 1978-1982. Here is yet another microcosm of creative expression made possible solely by video technology. As with Up All Night, Lump’s TV Party presents a playful […]

FLAT AFFECT GROUP SHOW CURATED BY HARRISON HAYNES January 21 – February 27 Closing reception, Friday February 25, 6-9pm Harrison Haynes launches his first ever curatorial endeavor with a group of fellow artists who have created works that are, at once, flat and sculptural. Playful deception runs throughout the show as each work oscillates between thing and picture. Making sense of a trick of the eye can be maddening, but also fun. These works force a person to slow down perception and decide wether or not to trust what their brain is showing them. “But it is precisely this quality of indecision,” Harrison says of the show, “connected to my ongoing, simultaneous discomfort with and dedication to the flat picture, which draws me to these works. And that, I believe, will be the catalyst for curiosity and conversation around them.” The show includes: Amanda Barr, Jared Buckhiester, Dawn Cerny & Nancy Shaver, Jerstin […]

BAD TOUCH 2.0 GROUP DRAWING SHOW CURATED BY BILL THELEN December 3 – January 16 opening reception, Friday December 3, 6-9pm Bill Thelen and a few of his cohorts originally came up with what would become the title to this show, in reference to their common approach to drawing: a style so lackluster that the end results were often great. They would refer to other artists with this peculiar gift for drawing as having a “bad touch.” It could be the charming way the lines are lazily put to the paper, or a drawing’s endearingly sophomoric feel. Or, it could be an awkward rendering, where the beauty of an object is muddled, but somehow comes out beautiful anyway. Whatever the cherished flaw, a drawing like this has the potential to cut through the bullshit in an exceedingly conservative art market, one with a logic of value that strains credulity. The first Bad Touch […]

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 […]