MFA 2025 Thesis Exhibitions at Lump Gallery

March 7th – March 29th:

An Animal Within by Rebecca Pempek / Sermons in the Soil – John Felix Arnold  Opening reception: March 7, 6-9pm

April 4th – April 26th:

Confluence by Carson Whitmore / ¿Qué dice tu corazón? by Dominique Muñoz  Opening reception: April 4, 6-9pm

Lump Gallery is pleased to present thesis exhibitions by UNC-Chapel Hill’s 2025 MFA graduating class:  John Felix Arnold, Dominique Muñoz, Rebecca Pempek, and Carson Whitmore.

At the culmination of a rigorous two-year research-based program, these artists consider the idea of place and their personal relationships to it. Each artist employs a range of mediums and responds to geographic, constructed, psychological, and bodily spaces. These relationships between place and personal narrative form larger questions around positionality and society; history and identity; and human impact and ecology. Catharsis, purpose, and possibility guide each artist’s research.

Carson Whitmore makes sculptural works that explore the meeting of geologic and human time, using found material to create a semiotic language of the built environment. Dominique Muñoz adapts the language of photographic portraiture and material culture to explore queer identity, tracing how histories of care, survival, and migration shape our sense of self. John Felix Arnold’s drawings and sculptural works explore intersectional histories, using found and vernacular materials to complicate and reimagine traditional notions of monument and landscape. Rebecca Pempek utilizes abstraction in painting and printmaking to explore the mythologizing of female pain, including her own. Individually and as a  collective the artists point the viewer to consider place as a means to see the interwoven nature of the world around us.

Opening Hours: Saturdays and Sundays, 1-5pm, and by appointment

For press inquiries or other questions, please contact uncmfathesis@yahoo.com

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