Lump Gallery Presents
UNC-Chapel Hill MFA Thesis Exhibitions 2025
Lump Gallery is located at 505 S. Blount St., Raleigh, NC 27601
Opening Hours: Saturdays and Sundays, 1-5pm, and by appointment
For press inquiries or other questions, please contact [email protected]
March 7th – March 29th:
An Animal Within by Rebecca Pempek / Sermons in the Soil – John Felix Arnold Opening reception: March 7, 6-9pm
April 4th – April 26th:
Confluence by Carson Whitmore / ¿Qué dice tu corazón? by Dominique Muñoz Opening reception: April 4, 6-9pm
Lump Gallery is pleased to present thesis exhibitions by UNC-Chapel Hill’s 2025 MFA graduating class: John Felix Arnold, Dominique Muñoz, Rebecca Pempek, and Carson Whitmore. The exhibitions will be shown in pairs at Lump Gallery from March 7 – 29 and April 4 – 26.
At the culmination of a rigorous two-year research-based program, these artists consider the idea of place and their personal relationships to it. Each artist employs a range of mediums and responds to geographic, constructed, psychological, and bodily spaces. These relationships between place and personal narrative form larger questions around positionality and society; history and identity; and human impact and ecology. Catharsis, purpose, and possibility guide each artists’ research.
Carson Whitmore makes sculptural works that explore the meeting of geologic and human time, using found material to create a semiotic language of the built environment. Dominique Muñoz adapts the language of photographic portraiture and material culture to explore queer identity, tracing how histories of care, survival, and migration shape our sense of self. John Felix Arnold’s drawing and sculptural works explore intersectional histories, using found and vernacular materials to complicate and reimagine traditional notions of monument and landscape. Rebecca Pempek utilizes abstraction in painting and printmaking to explore the mythologizing of female pain, including her own. Individually and as a collective the artists point the viewer to consider place as a means to see the interwoven nature of the world around us.
About the Artists
Rebecca Pempek is a mixed-media artist interested in rendering internal physical and psychological terrains. She earned her B.A. in Studio Art with Honors, graduating magna cum laude from Davidson College in Davidson, NC. Her current work utilizes her pelvic MRI scans to interrogate the history and mythologization of female pain. By layering and abstracting 17th-century reproductive anatomical illustrations with fauna imagery and gestural mark-making, she reclaims agency over the narratives of
chronic pain and invisible illness. Before pursuing her MFA, Rebecca was a teaching fellow at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, NH. She has exhibited her work in North Carolina, New England, and Iceland.
John Felix Arnold is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice employs a wide range of media, focusing on the intersection of drawing, sculpture, installation, movement research. His work uses alchemy and draws on critical and material histories to explore monument, place, and myth-making. He received a BFA from Pratt Institute. He has exhibited and presented at SFMOMA, Nasher Museum of Art, B.R.I.C. House, The Luggage Store Gallery, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Anchorlight, and Spes-Lab Experimental Art Space Tokyo. He has been in residence with Wassaic Projects, Cassilhaus, Duke University’s Rubenstein Visiting Artist Program, and the Peter Bullogh Foundation. He has received a Southern Futures Fellowship, UNC Wilson Library Incubator Award, UNC Southern Oral History Program Artist Award, Duke University Arts Grant, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Covid 19 Emergency Grant, and Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs Public Art Grant. His work has been collected by the Duke University Rubenstein Arts Center, UNC Chapel Hill Sloane Art Library, and Kai Kai Ki Ki Ltd. He is a former contributing writer for the Coastal Post and has written for Border Crossing Magazine.
Dominique Muñoz is a Guatemalan-American visual artist whose practice uses found objects, images, printmaking, and performance to explore the entanglements of assimilation, family, and queer desire. Through a photographic language that engages personal and collective memory, Muñoz investigates how images and spaces function as archives of our identity—shaped by what we keep, carry, and inherit. By unpacking objects from his childhood home, he questions traditional notions of masculinity and belonging. Muñoz was awarded the 2025 Denis Roussel Fellowship at the Center for Fine Art Photography and participated as a summer fellow at Ox-Bow School of Art in 2024. His work has been exhibited in numerous galleries, including Candela Books & Gallery (Richmond, VA), the Greenville Museum of Art (Greenville, NC), The National Building Museum (Washington, DC), Silver Eye Center for Photography (Pittsburgh, PA), and Soft Times Gallery (San Francisco, CA).
Carson Whitmore is a mixed-media artist working across textile, paint, and found objects. Her current body of work utilizes assemblage processes and the logic of quilting to explore personal and social relationships with waterways. Carson’s work responds to and often occupies spaces where public and private, wild and domestic meet. Her experiences as a farmer and carpenter inform her material sensibilities. Based in Durham, NC, Carson has exhibited in many galleries across the Southeast, including the Durham Art Guild Gallery at Golden Belt, Sertoma Arts Center, Lump Gallery, the Duke Rubenstein Center, Wavelength Space, Wilma Daniels Gallery, Tiger Strikes Asteroid GVL, and Artspace, where she was a Regional Emerging Artist in Residence in 2020.
