Tyler Cufley and Heather Hollenbeck

Dumpster Strawberry

June 02 – 26, 2010

We used to go out 'dumpster diving.' This is what we called breaking into the back lots of local grocers and picking through what they had in their trash bins, which was mostly expired packaged food and tired looking produce, wilted lettuce, moldy peaches, what have you. We'd come back with all kinds of perfectly edible food. There was the occasional cereal box with maggots, surprise! Or bagels that were actually super moldy, I told you! But all in all it was mostly fine. I remember wearily walking to the kitchen after a late night of dumpster diving, looking forward to the strawberries we had brought home, a real prize. I was going to enjoy them, there's nothing quite like a red ripe strawberry, so satisfying and so delicious! I open the fridge. Those poor strawberries, they were pretty far-gone, I guess they had looked good in the dim light of the street lamp, but not now. Not these. Dumpster strawberries.

Tyler Cufley creates dynamic paintings and sculptures that layer transparent color, geometric form and found imagery. These carefully considered geometric compositions adhere to a strict formalism, interrupted only by the swathes of transparent color. The obscured images found in Cufley's works represent a random sampling of ambiguous pop culture references. Cufley's work is carefully conflicted, motivated by cultural critique and the aesthetics of contemporary art. For Dumpster Strawberry Cufley has created an illuminated dumpster from plastic sheet material to serve as a companion and counterpoint to Hollenbeck's bold floral imagery. The Dumpster was original conceived as a barricade within the confines of a small gallery space. Illuminated, it references the dumpster as a container of ready kindle that gives rise to the dumpster fires of protest movements and riots, and in the same turn the aesthetics of contemporary art and design.

Cufley lives in Seattle and has exhibited in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Rochester.

Heather Hollenbeck's large-scale paintings are all flourish and polish and brash and garish and beautiful and ugly and petty and bold and sinister and lovely and pink and black and white and gold and spit and venom and flowery and flat and layered and spare and dense and nice and breathy and....

Heather Hollenbeck received her MFA from Northwestern University and has exhibited her work in Chicago and Seattle.