Leanne Shapton: La Donna Del Lago

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Design by Jerstin Crosby

December art openings at LUMP

PRESS RELEASE:

From December 19th through February 25th Lump will showcase two forces majeures of narrative. Each are every bit an artist’s artist, but his and her work manifests in circles that are more or less tangential to the funky little, Southern, avant-garde scene, that we like to call Lump.

The late, Joe Frank will forever be a legend in Los Angeles, where he created delicious, sprawling monologues and radio plays for KCRW. In all, Joe recorded over 230 hours of work between 1976 and 2002, and Lump has the honor of exhibiting his series, Somewhere Out There, in its entirety. We invite you to relax in our sound installation, inspired by Joe’s nihilistic sensibilities, for as long as you can stand to be entranced by Joe’s mesmeric tone. Over the course of the show, we will play forty, hour long, radio shows, in chronological order as they originally aired between 1995 and 1997. The world that Joe created is easy to enter, and difficult to exit. The deeper you go, the more hilarious it becomes, and the more painfully it reflects the real world of today.

In the adjacent gallery, with Joe’s voice seeping through the walls, Leanne Shapton will charm you into her own brand of hypnosis, with a series of noir-esque paintings and a set of found photos paired with original text. The latter spins a hysterical ghost story that might have been plucked from the pages of a David Foster Wallace story, but no, it’s from Leanne’s latest project, Guest Book, hot off the Penguin Random House presses. Leanne’s reverence for the cinematic moment drives the work in this show. In fact, her paintings are taken from still frames of famous black and white movies of eras past, which are collected in her book, Sunday Night Movies, published by Drawn and Quarterly. While each of Leanne’s images harbors a discrete narrative, the entire collection reveals a delicately rendered tableau, built from the dark and endearing aspects of human nature.