LAMPPOON
Colleen Billing / Eleanor Farley / Shelley Picot
May 5 - 28, 2017
Exhibition Opening: Friday, May 5, 6 - 10 pm
Curator Talk: May 27, 2 pm
Lamppoon features three artists who use humor to accentuate or alleviate darkness found in gender and relationships. Colleen Billing and Shelley Picot’s domestic sculptures take on cartoon-like qualities as they veer from their intended functions and reform as awkward substitutes. Eleanor Farley unpacks cartoon imagery in works that reveal entangled roles and memories. All three women employ comedy as a way to cope with tragedy. They turn grotesque into goofy. They revel in the confusion, anxiety, and discomfort found when confounding expectations. What looms beneath the surface of these works is made acceptable through laughter.
Colleen Billing (b. 1991 Baltimore, MD) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator living and working between New York and New Jersey. She is currently a 2018 MFA Candidate and undergraduate instructor at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. She received her BFA in Painting + Printmaking in 2013 from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work has been exhibited at Essex Flowers, New York, NY; Motel, Brooklyn, NY; Mason Gross Galleries, New Brunswick, NJ; Werkartz, Los Angeles, CA; ERA VII VI VII, Ridgewood, NY; Harvard Museum of Natural History, Cambridge, MA and VCU Anderson Gallery, Richmond, VA, among others. She also organizes an ongoing collaborative arts publication called We’re Pregnant.
Eleanor Farley was born in 1988 in Richmond, Virginia. She received her BFA in Interdisciplinary Sculpture from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2010. In the years since she has continued her own Art practice while also participating in the satirical online video series "Sad Girls Club". She currently lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.
Shelley Picot’s sculptures and drawings blend narrative, autobiography, magical realism, and comics. She has shown her work in DC, Vermont, and Massachusetts, and she attended a grant-supported residency at the Vermont Studio Center in 2014. Born in Alexandria, Virginia, she received her bachelor’s in studio art with a focus in sculpture from Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. She currently works and resides in the greater DC area with her loving, dedicated self and pet paper cat, “paper cat.”
Curated by Julia Owens