Saundra Fleming with visiting artist Darren Haper
June 6 – 29, 2019
Humor and whimsy incite the viewer to make new personal associations and open a unique poetic vein. Suggestive cartoonish images relate back to these artists’ memories of drawing recognizable shapes. A world is created where order is undermined and lightheartedness rules. Multilayered images arise in which the fragility of our daily lives is questioned.
Join the artists Saundra Fleming and Darren Haper for the reception on Friday June 14, 5 – 7pm.
On “Pop Figurations in Flux”…
Saundra Fleming’s pop figurations unleash new evolutionary, post-anthropological possibilities of becoming-human. Some of these transmogrifications take us to the limit of form and phylum. Others, drawing on more personal observations of her mother in decline from Alzheimer’s disease, imagine humorously how the artifacts and prostheses of technology can liberate memory from within transgenerational cultural figurations and biological programs. We delight at the uncanny appearance of a vestigial hand feeding pop tarts into the abyssal mouth of our ancient Mother, the bouquet of flowers rioting from the head of a woman mated with her medical technology. The artist’s palette of Pez dispenser colors contrasts with the themes of mortality, of death-in-life. With wit and whimsy, she revels in the radical flux behind every Trojan horse of form.
–Elizabeth Sikes
This show at Gallery 110, in Seattle, WA, is an event that runs from June 6-29 and is the first time in town, Darren Haper’s paintings, singular cream puffs of joy, are rockin’ our city. Winner of the esteemed New American Painting competition, his techniques and materials are mysterious and masterful. Mr. Haper combines random imagery, taken from the internet with a philosophy of holding childhood memories to his bosom…His sense of comedy, whimsical and subversive.
Poetic lightheartedness rules the day in these yummy and witty paintings de jour. Pop culture characters such as Ash from the Pokeman series in “What I Had With You” and his rumored to be new pieces, that give center stage to Smurfettes, are things that most all kids and many adults will recognize. His familiar celebrations of cartoony characters, or meditation on their body parts (i.e. their smiles!) work for me as a kind of communal Elmer’s glue. And the poetry brought to us through these brightly syncopated images from our past and present lift us up and cuddle us in soft blankets…my kid’s heart delights and pouts for more from this Dayton, Ohio painter….
-Ellen Jordan
The Willful Interloper