Date and Time for this Past Event

• Saturday, Jan 18, 2025  3:30pm - 6pm

Location

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Details

Brenda Stumpf: Borrowed Dust
Lanny DeVuono: Human Nature

Opening Reception: Saturday, January 18, 2025, 3:30 - 6:00 PM
On view: January 18 - March 1, 2025

Brenda Stumpf is a contemporary sculptor and painter. She is a self-taught artist and began exhibiting in the mid-1990s. Stumpf's work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group shows, including The Westmoreland Museum of American Art, The Butler Institute of American Art, the Alexandria Museum of Art, and the Marietta Cobb Museum of Art.

Stumpf has been awarded a purchase prize from the New Mexico Arts Acclaimed Artist Series, won the Juror's Prize from The Tubac Center of the Arts, and was shortlisted for the Hopper Prize. There are numerous online interviews and printed features in newspapers and magazines, including The Denver Post, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Atlanta Homes & Lifestyles, and Southwest Contemporary. Stumpf's art resides in over 350 private collections throughout the United States and abroad. Originally from Parma, Ohio, the artist lives near Denver, Colorado.

Left to right: Prophet, Oracle, Seer, Mixed media: Antique stair stringer, hand torn paper, blue print, sand, pencil, reactive paint and acrylic on wood panel, 48 x 25 1/2 x 2 inches each
Stumpf's latest exhibit, Borrowed Dust, is inspired by the last line of Stanley Kunitz’s poem, “Passing Through.” Her assembled paintings and sculptures bring together memorials in artifact form, reflecting on the inevitable disintegration of the human experience and the salvaged materials used in her works.

The poetics of loss and remembrance are expressed through the deconstruction and rearrangement of found objects, such as paper documents, wooden stair risers, stripped wallpaper, book pages, tin ceiling tiles, plastic leaves, leather and canvas strips, furniture pieces, family costume jewelry, metal bells, and materials removed from older paintings. The surfaces are treated with a reactive iron paint that rusts, transforming and creating a veneer to reference the passing of time.

While melancholic, the works possess a sense of mystery and allure, with some titles bearing the hallmarks of mystical leanings and perception.

Lanny DeVuono currently resides in the Bay Area. From her early series Romance Paintings to the present, she has used images of nature to draw attention to human contradictions, foibles and desires. In Terraforming and Searching for Water on Mars, DeVuono examined the project of space exploration in the face of crises here on earth. In 2022, she was intrigued by the concept of 'agnotology’ as it applies to climate change. That term was originally coined in response to tobacco companies’ public efforts to create doubt about the dangers of their product to ensure profit. Monuments deliberately isolates parts of our planet, as portraits or icons to remind us of what is verifiable in our fast-changing, endangered world.

Awards include a Fulbright Fellowship, Washington State Artist Trust Fellowship, GAP Grant; and artist residency awards at Yaddo, Centrum, Jentel and RedLine, Sitka, among others. Her work is in collections across the country, including the NW Museum of Art & Culture, Mills College Art Museum, Washington State Medical Center, Swedish Hospital, Jundt Art Museum, the Kent Justice Center, Great Western Bank, as well as in private collections.

Under the name of Frances DeVuono, she writes for Third Text online. Her writing has also appeared in Art News, New Art Examiner, Arts and Artweek, Sculpture, Art in America, among others.