Bonfire
Add Custom Frame
Frames ship to U.S. addresses only. Framed prints ship in 2–4 weeks and are final sale. Full framing details
Add Custom Frame
Frames ship to U.S. addresses only. Framed prints ship in 2–4 weeks and are final sale. Full framing details
Add Custom Frame
Frames ship to U.S. addresses only. Framed prints ship in 2–4 weeks and are final sale. Full framing details
Rachell Sumpter paints small and big splendors into a desolate, peopled wilderness. Using layered gouache and pastel, she paints scenes that are at once of community and of isolation. Figures stand in heavy, embroidered clothing, hidden and yet seen, in procession, in ceremony or in witness to a wonder. There are melting mountain tops and bonfires, ghosts and graves; vast monuments and intimate moments that speak to the legacies a generation leaves, to the promises it makes. Sumpter borrows symbols from religious and political traditions, from dreams, from our threatened natural world. And yet, amid these artifacts, memories and future relics, there is a human closeness, a physical intimacy. This lends an optimism to what might otherwise seem an elegy. In this bleak and changing landscape there are celebrations as well as lamentations, and with deceptively simple strokes she creates an iconography for the longed-for and the feared: a mythology of mystery, pleasure and the foreshadowing of loss.
Rachell Sumpter grew up in the suburbs of San Francisco. Swayed and beguiled by nature, she travels throughout the West Coast of the U.S. to find relics of inspiration. Sumpter's work has been exhibited worldwide, including at Jack Hanley (SF), Allston Skirt (Boston), Richard Heller (Los Angeles), Sunday L.E.S. (NY), OCMA and LACMA, and has been featured in the Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Mean, Giant Robot, ArtWeek and McSweeney's Issue 24.