 Evening Plum, 11/2/18 - 12/2/18 “I am Asia Lae Bey, a multi-disciplinary visual, performance, and comics artist. Using sequence, space and narrative, I explore identity in its many forms. My drawings are portraits of un-still moments that go too fast. A way to sustain, discover, and define myself within change. Archives of my own thoughts, emotions, and personal confessions unable to speak, lost in description. As a means of self recording and atonement with what I myself struggle to accept or seek to amplify. A way to unpack dissociative tendencies and resonate with my own body."  asialaebey.carrd.co
 Between the Lines, 9/7/18 - 10/28/18 Between the Lines, was a solo exhibition of new paintings by Su Su curated by Bunker Projects Director, Jessie Rommelt. Su Su’s paintings are a stunning mix of 21st century imagery, re-woven into rich, non-linear narrative devices. Her works bring us into a world that is notably enticing, disjointed and unreal. Each painting situated itself in collaboration with the viewer, calling on them to stir the waters and even swim along. "My work depicts the tension between globalization and our environment through narrative deconstruction, spontaneity, abstraction, and surrealism. This point of view - questioning and re-imagining time and space - is shaped by my personal experience of being born in China during the one-child policy. As a result, I have always kept to myself and rarely disclosed much. I found painting to be a refuge to explore my thoughts and connection to the world." -Su Su  Born in Beijing, China in 1988, Su Su began painting at the Central Academy of Arts & Design at the age of 12. She further developed herself as a visual artist through her undergraduate studies at the Beijing Dance Academy of Art and Design Program. In 2008, she assisted costume designer ChunQi Han at the Beijing Olympic closing ceremony. After earning her BFA in 2010, she won the China National Scholarship. In 2011, Susu received a full scholarship to attend graduate school at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Drama, where she completed her MFA in 2015. In Pittsburgh, she worked on local productions at the Opera Theater of Pittsburgh, City, Quantum, and Attack Theaters as a designer. Although she had a promising future in theater, she knew she wanted to pursue her true passion in painting. Immersing herself into the local Pittsburgh art community through theater, she made friends with curators, painters, and other artists who have helped guide her career into the painting world. Currently, she makes paintings full-time and further develops her professional studio practice, out of her Wilkinsburg-based studio.   7 Deadliest, 8/3/18 - 8/28/18 7 Deadliest was a solo exhibition by resident artist, Damion Dreher that explored different manifestations of the seven deadly sins through mixed media paintings. These sins are thought to be seven vices that spur immoral behavior of various scales. His visual language is influenced heavily by urban and decaying spaces like abandoned buildings, busy subway platforms and dive bar bathrooms. This body of work blends abstraction and representation to tell stories through fragmented visual clues. The layers, although torn, ripped and sometimes almost unintelligible, help to convey a message. That is a message of resilience, defiance and sometimes, even a message of hope.
 Not Not-Violent, 7/6/18 - 7/20/18 Hannah is a mixed media artist who is interested in revisiting the ways that she has experienced herself as a spectator in her own experience. Through the fabrication and curation of fibers, casting, and meticulously-searched-for found objects, Not Not-Violent is a laborious cataloguing of moments frozen in time that are rooted in anxiety, fantasy, failure, and the othering of her own body.
 House Warming, 6/1/18 - 6/24/18  Graces' work at Bunker was an assemblage of sculptural surfaces that map her nostalgia for the everyday. Reoccurring images and dimensional textures create both a charming fantasy and a disturbing hyper-reality: a layered narrative lending to a subjective experience.
Her works were inspired by objects and imagery from her Tex-Mex roots. Grace Stott is a visual artist currently living and working in Charlotte, North Carolina. Grace studied art at Calarts before going on to receive her BFA from Tufts University with the School of the Museum of Fine Art. She is focused on experimenting with the application of narrative to surface. Presently, Grace’s work includes mixed media acrylic painting and ceramic sculpture. In conjunction with her studio practice, she has also organized curatorial and community projects.  Blue Like Fortune, 5/4/18 - 5/24/18 Blue Like Fortune was an exhibition of works by Jenna Kay Houston, Kasem Kydd, and Gray Swartzel curated by Reese McArdle. Through a mix of contemporary mediums including video, sculpture, photography, and installation the artists transformed the Bunker Projects gallery - already once transformed from domestic space to art space - into a space for imaging possible futures. The artists set out, queering past and present, on an investigation of our collective preoccupation with binary structures and symbolic roles. Among other, often intertwined, areas of investigation:
Houston created work that queers domestic space and investigated narratives between chronic illness and gender Kydd explored the tangible and metaphoric role of the ocean as an instrument in the slave trade as well as water’s capacity for cleansing and transformation Swartzel considers symbolic roles like that of mother/son or masculine/feminine through the lens of Lacan, positing a preoccupation with theses symbolic roles as an obscuring of Lacan’s object petit a, or the object cause of desire In these combined works we are left to ask: Is it our roles, our position in systems and histories, that give us meaning? And if so, can new meaning be discovered in a project of challenging this particular symbolic order? |
