Lumpkin & Israel Exhibition in LaGrange

Recently my brother Ephraim, his girlfriend Julie and I drove up to LaGrange, Georgia to check out the Lumpkin & Israel exhibition at the Cochran gallery (by recently I mean November- my blog is slow to catch up with my life sometimes.) Cochran gallery sits on the town square, facing a bronze statue of Lafayette holding a cockade above his head. In his other hand he clutches a hat which, from a certain angle, resembles an enormous taco.

Jon Lumpkin uses traditional sculpture process such as casting and modeling to generate objects that prompt us to question our relationship to the larger world that we live in, both ecologically and geopolitically. Lumpkin has worked extensively creating outdoor bronze figurative sculpture, but in these pieces he employs a range of plastics, epoxies and resins to play games with our assumptions and readings of context.

These animals are about life-size, with exquisite surface detail. The forms are dynamic and flowing, with complex hidden armatures.

Here are a couple world leaders you may recognize from the not-so-far in the past 20th century... I am not sure my photo does this justice, but the pez dispensers are covered in gold leaf, which is a great compliment to the translucent candy-like plastic.

Hannah Israel's work is very concerned with invention through process. To me, many of her works seem to originate in some kind of playful exploration and then lead to an end result that is austere and aesthetically sound.

The framed work above uses blue carbon transfer paper as a print/assemblage material. The ghostly floating forms on the right are made from common mosquito netting sold in the Philippines.

The dark free-standing objects on this table resemble metal or coal, but they are actually paper with graphite rubbed into it. The accordion book in front of it involves cut shapes drawn from maps of Georgia.