NEW YORK, NY.- Jack Hanley Gallery presents a solo exhibition by Megan Whitmarsh. Using hand-stitching and embroidery, Whitmarsh renders sculptural and painted objects that evoke popular culture as well as abstract and gestural painting. The result, a giant fabric collage of personal and cultural ephemera, reckons both past and present imagery in a rueful Pop art.

The word revolution to the cultural mind may signify a permanent change to existing conditions, but the literal meaning is to rotate back to a point of departure. Something can be transformed, but not eliminated entirely – a rule of thumb. To Whitmarsh, this reading provokes a needed multiplicity and contrast. By faithfully recreating and re-interpreting familiar objects and forms from the 70s to today, her work acknowledges and projects the shifts in our collective material history.

Megan Whitmarsh lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her MFA from the University of New Orleans, and her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute. In addition to her detailed hand embroidery, she works in a variety of low-tech media, including stop-action animation, soft sculpture, self-published comic books, painting and drawing. She has shown internationally in locations such as New York, Seoul, Los Angeles, Reykjavik, Toronto, Miami, Brussels & Barcelona.

Artist’s Statement I will create a layered, textile-based installation of recursive artworks launched from recognizable cultural iconography (e.g., Joni Mitchell, science fiction, New Wave, the Muppets, New Age); resulting in a rueful sort of Pop art that explores the oscillation between mass culture and subjective narrative.

I consider art a practice of transformation. We cannot expect to make new energy; instead we must reinvent, recycle, and transform what exists already. Making art is my attempt to synthesize my optimistic vision of the future with my pragmatic appraisal of the world I inhabit.

I am a child of the 70s whose sense of futurism is informed by Star Wars (fucked-up dusty robots) instead of Tomorrow Land. A future with entropy and drug use and weeds growing in the cracks between the scratched plexiglass windows of the geodesic domes. Bits of yarn and dusty houseplants. If this sounds bleak, I don’t mean for it to. Perhaps the healthiest kind of futurism is one that admits entropy and flux. Perfection is suspicious; worn and dusty can mean well-loved, too. Who loves the Stepford Wife?

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