Topher Lineberry
Giant-Sized Annual: A Solo Exhibition in Two Parts
opening Saturday, July 12, 6-9pm [updated date]
Saturdays & Sundays 1-5pm
through August 31
Giant-Sized Annual is a solo exhibition by Topher Lineberry across Lump’s two gallery spaces. Each of the two gallery spaces presents a different thesis and collection of Lineberry’s work. The exhibition includes drawing, collage, photography, sculpture, and animation. Giant-Sized Annual is named after the comic book industry’s practice of publishing a 13th stand-alone annual issue within a 12-month series run. This issue is often an extra space to experiment with one-offs, genre and format twists, reprints of older stories, or any combination of deviant strategies outside of a continuous story.
Side one of Giant-Sized Annual – “Statuemania!” – showcases an assortment of art playing with, questioning, and deconstructing statuary forms, sampled from more than a decade. While conversing with political overtones of U.S. statues in recent years (Revolutionary and Confederate war statues, among others), Statuemania! flays some of the more absurd ideas of contested American imagination which underwrite statuary form. Because it is a miniature bust on a pedestal, is a Pez dispenser a statue? What about an action figure?
Side two of Giant-Sized Annual – “Memory X-Ware” – presents Lineberry’s latest body of work, using X-Men as a primary source material. The term “memory ware” refers to a folk art tradition associated with the American South and Appalachia, where pieces of mementos such as buttons, coins, shells, and other found items are placed onto structures like jugs, frames, and vases. Memory X-Ware combines allegedly “Southern Appalachian” strategies of folk art with New York-based tropes and legacies of pop and minimalism.
Topher Lineberry is a multidisciplinary artist who is promiscuous in form and method. Born and raised in Greensboro, North Carolina, Lineberry has spent considerable parts of his life in the Blue Ridge Mountains where deep family roots are planted. He received a Bachelors of Fine Arts from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of the Fine Arts, Boston, and earned a Masters of Fine Arts from Hunter College in New York City.
