Porthole Portico is an exhibition of new, site specific work by Jaime Bull and Lauren Clay.

 

We are entering the regions of Dream. A time beyond history, where everyday life is imbued with mythology. Eat me - Glimpse a world existing outside of things known to the human spirit. Complicated rooms with stairs, ramps, windows, and secret doors. Sea like a mirror. See, well marked streaks of foam are blown along the direction of the wind. 13 is Shipwreck. Bridges and more stairs, leading to more rooms. Limitless. Never ending. Glittering abyss. This metaphysical world, nonexistent for us, this world beyond physical things, is the Porthole Portico.

 

Jaime Bull splits her time between Atlanta and Athens. Bull looks to the ocean for inspiration. Her work walks a tightrope between Busby Berkley’s dazzling, synchronized choreography to conversely, falling off a Carnival cruise ship and drowning. There’s glitz, glitter and energetic dancing ladies but there’s also slumping, over-fed obesity and the futile treading of water. Bull received her MFA in Drawing and Painting from the University of Georgia, Athens in 2013. She is a recipient of the Willson Center for the Arts research grant for her thesis work Lady Beasts: An Investigation of Womanliness. She has exhibited in Atlanta with the Doppler Project, the Mint Gallery, the Mammal Gallery, Whitespace Gallery and at the Airport in Terminal E. Regionally, she has shown work at the University of North Georgia, Auburn University, and the COOP Gallery in Nashville. She is a Vermont Studio School Fellow and attended a two-month residency at the Bernheim Arboretum in Louisville, KY. She was featured in and on the cover of the 219th edition of Ambit Magazine, London. She currently teaches at the University of Georgia and is an Atlanta Contemporary Art Center Studio Artist.

 

Lauren Clay, originally from Atlanta, now lives and works in New York. Clay makes sculpture and large wall works. Her site-specific wall installations warp and manipulate space using digitally printed vinyl photos of handmade collages. Her sculptures, painted plaster reliefs, also address metaphysical interactions with architecture. She received her MFA in Painting from Virginia Commonwealth University, and BFA in Painting from Savannah College of Art and Design. She has had solo exhibitions at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, Denver; Larissa Goldston Gallery, New York; Whitespace Gallery, Atlanta, and Savannah College of Art and Design. Her work has been included in recent group exhibitions at Asya Geisberg Gallery, New York; Patrick Parish Gallery, New York; and Sometime Salon, San Francisco. Clay’s work has been written about in the New York Times, Bomb Magazine, Art in America, and Sculpture Magazine. Her artist book, Subtle Body, published by Small Editions, is included in the library collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Brooklyn Museum of Art.