The final installation for the semester, “Fundles,” united two artists, MFA Painting candidates Lindsay Hall and Madeline Winter. Hall and Winter brought to the gallery some of their abstract sculptural works with distinct inspirations but similar color schemes.
“Lindsay and I are both first-year MFA students and I think, right off the bat, we just sort of hit it off on a personal level, we just clicked,” Winter said. “I wouldn’t say our aesthetic is totally similar, but it plays nicely together.”
“I think the colors are very similar,” Hall added. “Like poppy, optimistic colors. They play off of each other.”
The exhibit as a whole, Winter said, focused on shedding light on some of the inspirations at play in their larger bodies of work, including those in different medium.
“We were both interested in creating a show that shows the back story or some inspiration that inspired our paintings,” Winter said. “For example, Lindsay’s soft sculptures or my installations.”
Hall’s pieces, which followed a bright color scheme full of pinks, yellows and ?oranges, were a mix of foam forms hanging from the ceiling and in smaller pieces within cages of net or tulle.
One objective behind the works, Hall said, was defiance of perceptions of what her pieces could be by making them look the opposite of how they should given their medium.
“You make something harsh or heavy when really it’s light or it’s delicate, or you make something that’s delicate or light when it’s really heavy,” Hall said. “You fill a sack of tulle with foam and they look like they could be ceramic or they could be cement, but really they’re light, it’s very airy and delicate but it looks dense.”
The pieces suspended from the ceiling were meant to represent internal organs or bodily invaders such as diseases, Hall said, and she purposefully suspended them within the viewer’s space so they would need to directly interact with them.
“I wanted them to be in the viewer’s environment,” Hall said. “They could sort of circumnavigate that environment so that they would be directly in your viewpoint and you have to kind of contend with them. I want them to be beautiful, but also seen as sort of grotesque. A little bit garish, but not horrifying.”
Explaining the theme as a whole, Winter said the two of them collaboratively wanted the exhibits to embody the idea of creating “bundles of fun” for the viewer. Inside of the Fundles umbrella, she added, can be the bodily or other underlying themes.
The works Winter chose to display follow a different inspiration than Hall’s. Winter said she was inspired by an escape from the day-to-day in the form of a beach vacation, as was evident from her materials: beach towels, deflated balls and beach chairs, among others.
“I use a lot of beach items to create these installations, which hopefully evoke for the viewer (the) bright, fun time they could be having taking sort of a vacation from their normal, hum-drum life, like a 12-hour car trip from where they actually live,” Winter said.
Winter said “Day Trip,” one of the major installations in her collection, was the basis for many of her paintings.
“The installation was originally up in my studio, and it fed into my paintings. I used the installation as sort of a road map to shapes, forms, color stories, ideas — that really inspired my last body of work,” Winter said. “I moved on from it, but I still really feel excited when I look at it.”
For Hall, the sculptures are a way to bring life to ideas that would be flat on canvas.
“I make them in terms of the solutions or the errors that I’m having in my paintings, that’s a way of sort of correcting things or doing things I can’t do in my paintings,” Hall said.
Both artists reflected fondly on the experience of working together at the Fuller Projects because of their ability to work together and mesh well as personalities.
“I hope that the viewer will see in the show that we have a strong relationship and we respect each other’s opinion,” Winter said.
“I feel very excited and I’m very happy also to work with Maddie,” Hall said. “She’s a very strong painter and a very strong artist.”
