Sump Pumped Sentiments
Curated by Matt Phillips
February 21 – March 30,  2014
Opening Reception: Friday February 21, 7 – 10 PM

[Images]

TSA is pleased to announce the opening an exhibition of paintings by Todd Bienvenu, Gideon Bok, Shara Hughes and Jason Mones.

Van Gogh painted The Potato Eaters in 1885. It portrays a peasant family eating dinner in a cold and dark room. They huddle around a lamp – the warm light seems to fortify them as much as the food they eat from a single shared plate.  At the time, it was still fairly rare to find a family of poor farmers depicted so directly in a painting. For Van Gogh, this family dinner embodied a vital way of life that went against the surging currents of modernization and materialism. These people had values and ethics formed through hard work and beliefs found within the very earth they tilled and harvested. Their dinner is a dusty-handed communion. If The Potato Eaters was a song, it might have been by Woody Guthrie.

Paintings have long used a meal or a gathering as a stage to show lives unfolding. It seems logical. We are organized by what sustains us: light, heat, food and community. So we congregate for meals and meetings and our lives unfold as we nourish ourselves. At the table we do our best to pull it together and relate to one another before heading our separate ways.

Van Gogh sought to stretch painting’s frame with The Potato Eaters. Essentially, he wanted to invite some different people over for dinner. The conversation in art has continued to broaden in the 125 years or so since that piece was made. Sump Pumped Sentiments gathers a few works by four contemporary artists that are in loose conversation with Van Gogh’s painting and his desire to portray a gritty yet entirely holy gathering. Using the supper as a standard, the pieces presented in this show examine painting’s constant transformation and inevitable mutation.