Self-Assembly

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 antipathy as it follows a child who wants desperately to avoid a preordained, however bleak path into adulthood, inheriting a deeply damaged world. And Charlie Dupee shows us an equally doomed future through an amalgam of found objects and odd materials, which he describes as “survival-based home decor.”

It’s a heavy show that will not let you leave unscathed. But if you’re a glutton for punishment, and the brilliant offerings of these three artists don’t quite satiate, you can make an appointment over at Anchorlight to see work by the rest of the MFA crew, Hugo Ljungbäck and Phuong Duyen Nguyen.