Process

Christopher McNulty (http://wp.auburn.edu/cmcnulty/) creates task-based sculptural objects, videos, and works on paper whose concerns include the vulnerability of the body and our culture’s anxiety about death and the future. Currently a Professor of Art at Auburn University, McNulty was the recipient of an Alabama State Council of the Arts fellowship in 2005-2006, and his work has been featured in galleries and museums around the country, including the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art and the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, and in publications such as Art Papers and The Atlanta Journal Constitution. In the Days Series to be featured in this exhibition, McNulty contemplates his own mortality by using over 20,000 repetitive marks representing the probable number of days remaining in his life.

Angela Piehl (http://angelapiehl.com/) combines references to opulence and luxury with organic materials like flesh, hair, tentacles, eggs, fat, bone, muscle, crystalline structures, and wood to explore and critique the codified construction of feminine identity from a gendered/gendered-queer perspective. She holds an MFA in Drawing and Painting from the University of Arizona, and was awarded the 2012 Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition Fellowship. In addition to being widely exhibited in national, international, juried, and invitational exhibitions, and having work included in Kala Art Institute’s Permanent Collection, the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art Print Collection, and the New Mexico State University Art Gallery’s Permanent Collection, she has lectured widely on gender and sexuality, contemporary queer theory, and art practice. In her most recent exhibition, Lonely Hunters at the Lawndale Art Center in Houston, Piehl’s Southern-gothic inflected drawings revealed the inherent narrative quality and grotesque beauty of the dualism of the natural and the synthetic.

Ying Zhu (http://yingzhu.org) mines her experience moving from her native China to Nebraska as a young adult to elaborate the confluence of ideas, qualities and histories that inform cultural identity, and to interrogate and challenge conceptions of the self and the other. Zhu holds an MFA in Studio Art from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and her work was selected for solo exhibitions at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, the Eisentrager-Howard Gallery at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and the Project Room in Lincoln, NE. In expressing her own shifting perceptions and identity negotiation, Zhu’s work invites the viewer to interrogate kinesthetic spaces that distort the familiar and traverse the emotional terrain of the migrant experience.