• << Press Release Archive
• View Exhibit Slide Show

Malflourished
A new installation with accompanying paintings & photographs

By Pete Goldlust and Julie Hughes
Premiering October 14, 2006    
Until November 19

Pete Goldlust and Julie Hughes, the collaborative team of sculptor and painter respectively, will be filling a 12’ x 12’ x 8’ niche of the gallery with a cankerous environ displaying the beauty and repulsiveness of a pseudo-living ecosystem comprised of gallery pox, digitated strawberries and meat flowers. Here a colony of feral art organisms infest and infect the clinical white surface of the formal gallery space – a bizarre garden that compels us to think of a meat locker full of hanging flesh and at once a fanciful hothouse of exotic flora becoming MALFLOURISHED.

The subject matter of the work is similarly related to a noted progressive painter during the time of Renaissance Humanism (circa 1500), Hieronymus Bosch - specifically “The Garden of Earthly Delights”. This was an age when art was still predominantly seen in cathedrals and art was made to evoke the sensibilities of religion.

Hanging strands of meat petals and bruise blossoms suspend in candy-colored agglomerations where corpuscles and popsicles mate, inviting the attentions of secondary species. From the bowels of the gallery walls clusters of gallery pox accrete like aggressive barnacles across the room. They protrude and burrow out of the gallery skin then diversify into variants that range across the plant/animal continuum. Others emerge from pupa to crawl and hover around the central arrangements like mutant fruit flies or malevolent spermatozoa. The audiences become participants in the lustful, luscious, visceral and conceptual inedible fruits and flora that enchant yet at once repulse.

There is an immediate natural selection process amongst the growth of the progeny, much like a Tree of Life, in this folly of the red, fleshy and succulent grove of mutant strawberries.

The strawberry can be found in German, Italian, Flemish religious art and English miniature art of the 1300’s and into the 1400’s as well – symbols of the Earth’s bounty that God created, a life-giving Virgin Mary, of Christ’s Blood. Charles V of France was a patron of miniatures and owned 12,000 varieties of the species in gardens thus perpetuated the notion of the court, the hypocrisy of courtly love and piety, excess and consumption not privy to those outside the regal cloister. Conversely, 100 years later in “The Garden of Earthly Delights”, strawberries break the obvious religious connotations and serve as a metaphor for voluptuous sustenance, unbridled folly of choice and ethical dilemmas that were facing the questioning pious people of that Humanist era.

MALFLOURISHED continues to break away from the use of fruit as a religious metaphor beyond Bosch’s intentions and furthering it into an era of Baroque excess and monstrous beauty. Compartmentalizing the elements into carnality – inviting us into a primordial forest of magic and horror, of delicious and disgusting, of nourishment and starvation, of a place in its most ripe stage before the brink of decay.

In addition to the sculptural installation, a series of bugs-eye view photographs provide peep-holes into the caverns of the gallery walls and invite us inside its bowels. The micro-views provide mirrors to the surroundings and question our vantage points. These images are compliments to the 3-dimensional work. A series of acrylic-on-canvas paintings by Hughes further develop the graphic motifs that appear within the installation.

Pete Goldlust received his MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago & has exhibited in galleries in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago amongst others. His resume also boasts awards and an extensive bibliography including numerous catalogs and several reviews. Julie Hughes received her MFA from the California State University at Northridge. She has exhibited in and around the Los Angeles, Minnesota and Philadelphia. Her work can be found in several private and public collections. Gallery Revisited hosted “Polyponesian Tuberfoil Mangrove” by Pete Goldlust and Julie Hughes in July - August 2005 which was noted in Artweek by Charlene Roth and Los Angeles Times by David Pagel. Later the piece was juried by Howard Fox of LACMA for the Korean Cultural Center where it won a cash prize. We hope that you find MALFLOURISHED to be the most delectable installation of the season.