LUCY PULS
Things Go Round
May 1 - May 31, 2003
BIOGRAPHY
PRESS RELEASE
Lucy Puls is interested in encapsulating vestiges from our recent culture. She continues to gather her raw materials for her artwork from resale shops, book recycling centers, and the curbside emporium where items with signs saying “Free!” abound and are there for the claiming. Recently she has tapped another vein for this mining of materials by soliciting items from resale proprietors, items that are destined to be discarded again, perhaps permanently. Puls gathers and selects these cast-offs (which are often multiples of the same object) and uses them as elements in her sculptures. Record albums from the sixties and seventies (that once played such a defining role in popular culture) are a fundamental component for new work on panels that use the repeated image as a pictorial element. This work deals with plenitude as a significant cultural signifier of that era as well as the present. Puls has made pigment prints from records she has first cast in resin then sanded thereby exposing layers of imagery, paper, cardboard and vinyl. These objects are then digitized. She has flipped and repeated the resulting graphic element to create symmetrical and at times abstract images that encourage the viewer to willingly associate all manner of meaning and ideas (both conscious and subconscious) to the work.
In the smaller gallery, Puls will be exhibiting sculptural works made from significant books that are references for information and knowledge, such as the Encyclopedia Britannica and The Webster’s Dictionary. For many years she has explored this theme in different materials. In these new pieces she has glued, sanded, rolled, and cut apart these volumes that, like the work done with record albums, make use of the multiple as a pictorial element that acts to unify the imagery. Several pieces are “interactive” in that the viewer is encouraged to place fingertips on the pieces in places that point to specific areas of content.
LUCY PULS (b.1955, Milwaukee, WI) received her B.S. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and her M.F.A. from Rhode Island School of Design. There is a solo exhibition of Puls’ work in New York which will run concurrently at Littlejohn Contemporary. Her work has been shown in numerous national group exhibitions such as The Darker Side of Playland: Childhood Imagery from the Logan Collection, at SFMOMA; Without, Diverse Works, Houston, TX, and The Pervasiveness of Memory, at the Corcoran Gallery of Art.