VISUAL ARTS + MUSEUMS

Rudolph Blume Fine Art/ ArtScan Gallery presents DumpTruck (Cory Wagner and Mat Wolff): Secret Messages and Pillow Talk.  Opening Reception Saturday, January 22 from 6:00 to 9:00pm. On view through February 26, 2011. Extended through March 5.

DumpTruck (Cory Wagner and Mat Wolff) present a new body of work in Secret Messages and Pillow Talk that explores the dynamic of interpersonal relationships, often as mediated by objects. The works seek the connective tissue between ourselves and the people, places, and things that are our reality.

The video and performative works investigate the transitory nature of our ephemeral world, trying to capture the nearly invisible and somewhat contradictory space that binds us to one another while the sculptural pieces utilize materials that contain cultural information about daily life and describe our relationship to objects. They are constructed from ubiquitous materials found in big box stores and, consumed in mass, are like life-sized model kits that threaten to remove innovation and problem solving from our daily lives while enforcing a transitory ethos in our throwaway society.

Our entire landscape is slowly becoming derivative and uniform, lackluster and banal. We work to restore the process of creating to reinterpret our lives in order to better understand where we have come from and where we may be going.

A portion of the work exhibited in Secret Messages and Pillow Talk is funded in part by a 2010 Idea Fund grant.

DumpTruck is an open artist collaborative founded by Mat Wolff, Cory Wagner and Noelle Mason in Fall of 2008.

Our members live and work in Houston, TX, Tampa Bay, FL, and New York, NY. Collectively they have exhibited work both nationally and internationally including exhibitions at PS1 Contemporary Art Center/MOMA, Repetti Gallery, and Moti Hasson Gallery in New York, NY; Galeria Metropolitana in Santiago, Chile; KU Art Center in Beijing, China; School 33 Art Center and Maryland Art Place in Baltimore, MD; Rudolph Projects and Lawndale Art Center in Houston, TX; Flat International in Richmond, VA; Conner Contemporary in Washington DC; Moore College of Art and Design and Icebox Gallery in Philadelphia, PA; and Arlington Art Center in Arlington, VA. DumpTruck's members have individually been recipients of a Joan Mitchell Foundation fellowship and a fellowship with the Center for Emerging Visual Artists in Philadelphia, PA. DumpTruck is also a recent recipient of an Idea Fund grant.

More information on Houston based artists Cory Wagner and Mat Wolff:

Cory Wagner holds a BFA degree from Montana State University and an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and is currently Research Faculty at the University of Houston and Co-Director of the MICA in NY Summer Intensive studio program.

Mat Wolff holds a BFA degree from the University of Houston and is currently the Associate Director at the American Institute of Architects Houston Chapter at the Architecture Center Houston.