Joe Grillo and Mike Geary : Geary and Grillo

Geary and Grillo

July-August 2016

For July and August, Flanders and Lump work together to host Joe Grillo and Mike Geary in a collaborative residency with pop up performances, a group exhibition curated by Grillo and Geary, and a two person exhibit in August presenting the works created during residency.
“Mining a kind of throwaway culture of 99-Cent stores, the ubiquitous thrift shops of his home town of Virginia Beach, with their long-forgotten cartoon characters or cereal box mascots, broken toys or instruments, crazy fabrics or discarded lamps, Joe Grillo generates a constant flow of remixed and regurgitated visual information of hybrid pop nonsense that when organized and presented in his artworks and shows, stops seeming random and starts speaking meaningfully to an audience that can synthesize the amount of cultural information he does, and who looks as closely at fine art concerns as he does. It is safe to say that he has achieved “cult status” as an artist, and his work is extremely influential. Grillo was a founding member of Paper Rad and Dearraindrop. (The Hole NYC)

Boone artist Mike Geary experiments with the ideas of exponential infinity or motifs that expand and contract from a set point. In his handmade loop tapes, Geary samples both found recordings and his own source music. The restructured looped rhythm from the sample syncopates with the silent or even lumpy-sounding tape edits, and while the loop tapes are small stand-alone artifacts, each provides the artist with “new” source material for further iterations of his music. His visual works continue this idea by playing with expansion of found and drawn images. Perspective is skewed and new images propagate as Geary experiments with low-tech manipulation and copying techniques to stretch and shrink and multiply his images. This results in oddly echoing visual works, which, like the loop tapes, combine elements of abstraction, familiarity, and a hint of the grotesque.

Lump is located at 505 S. Blount St, Raleigh, NC. More information about our mission and exhibition programs can be found at lumpprojects.org.