Bubblegum Pop Gallery Guide

Where the Sun Shines Everyday (detail), BCA Center installation view, 2021

GA LLERY GU IDE

OVERVIEW

Merging popular and consumer culture with fantastical themes, Bubblegum Pop presents a group of artists whose colorful works and playful imagery explore themes of nostalgia, youth, optimism, and material abundance as both a celebration and slanting critique on contemporary society. Using materials and subjects drawn from, or inspired by popular culture, the artists in Bubblegum Pop blur the distinction between high, low, and massproduced forms of artistic expression.

BCA commissioned several artists to create original work for Bubblegum Pop, Australian artist Tanya Shultz of Pip & Pop, created a large-scale, immersive sculptural installation from an eclectic range of materials including sugar, glitter, candy, plastic flowers, found objects, and everyday craft materials to evoke a magical landscape. Vermont artist Kathryn Wiegers painted and installed a wall-size mural that re-imagines Vermont’s idyllic landscape with native and fantastical creatures. The Indie-twee-pop music of Vermont/New York band, The Smittens, pulls together the show visually and vocally through an original song with accompaning graphic art by band member David Zacharis.

Exceptional works by local and national artists were included that explored the exhibition’s theme. New Jersey artist Jon Rappleye contributed opulently detailed paintings that playfully synthesize art historical, social, and popular culture imagery while exploring the complexity of identity.

Vermont artist Matt Neckers utilized collaged, upcycled materials to create a story board of child-like silhouettes that juxtapose both joyful and ominous imagery as commentary on contemporary events and society.

Bubblegum Pop entices us with its accessible and upbeat imagery, while simultaneously encouraging us to gaze beneath its glossy veneer and consider the economic, environmental, and social mythologies we self-perpetuate as a society.

- Heather Ferrell, Curator and Director of Exhibitions

BIOGRAPHIES

MATT NECKERS is a visual artist and teaching artist who works in a variety of media including sculpture, photography, painting and installation. Neckers artwork has been featured by Hyperallergic, Art New England, Vermont Public Radio, Seven Days, and Vermont Art Guide. Neckers received a Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council for his Mobile Museum Project: The Vermont International Museum of Contemporary Art + Design in Year, which toured multiple locations in Vermont including Burlington City Arts, the Museum of Everyday Life, and Fairbanks Museum. His work was recently featured in Small Worlds: Miniatures in Contemporary Art at the Fleming Museum of Art, Burlington. Neckers lives and works in Northern Vermont.

Australian artist Tanya Schultz works as PIP & POP to create immersive installations and artworks from a wide variety of materials including sugar, glitter, candy, plastic flowers, and commonplace craft materials. Pip & Pop is fascinated with ideas of paradise and wish-fulfillment described in folk tales, mythologies and cinema. Working internationally, the artist was recently featured in the 2018 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, and has created large-scale commissions and installations in Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, Germany, the UAE, and most recently, the United States. Tanya Shultz currently resides in Perth, Australia; she committed over four weeks to create the installation with BCA staff via Zoom due to the pandemic and Australian travel ban.

JON RAPPLEYE creates highly detailed, imaginative and exquisitely rendered paintings that merge symbols from art history, pop culture, and traditional folklore. His work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States, including solo exhibitions at Jeff Bailey Gallery, NY; Richard Heller Gallery, CA; the Salina Art Center, KS; and the Jersey City Museum, NJ. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and has been an artist in residence at the MacDowell Colony, NH; the Headlands Center for the Arts, CA; and John Michael Kohler Arts Center, MI; among other venues.

He received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He lives and works in Jersey City, New Jersey.

BIOGRAPHIES

Formed in 2002, THE SMITTENS identify themselves as an indie-twee-pop sextet musical group. The band has worked their way into the fabric of the underground American indie scene through their strong harmonies and powerful lyricism. Band members Max Andrucki, Missy Bly, Colin Clary, Dana Kaplan, Holly Chagnon, and David Zacharis are self-produced, and refuse to submit to singular roles within their work. Although their songs evoke the Bubblegum era of music from the ‘60s and ‘70s, their complex lyricism and musical creativity provide a deeper nuance to their songs. The band has released a number of albums and EP’s, and they have played for festivals such as Indietracks, United Kingdom; Athens Popfest, Georgia; Popfest New England; NYC Popfest, and the Cosy Den Festival in Stockholm. The Smittens are based in both Burlington, Vermont and New York City, New York.

Vermont-based KATHRYN WIEGERS is a self-taught mural artist whose imagery often centers on natural scenes of flora and fauna, characterized by vibrant colors and bold forms, fantastical or otherwise. She is inspired by her environment and the art and murals she views while traveling in Europe. Weigers’ has completed numerous art commissions; her work can be viewed at the University of Vermont Medical Center; Green State Gardner, Burlington; and in downtown Rutland.

Weigers studied Biology at Messiah College, Pennsylvania, and received a BA in Natural Science from the Castleton University, Vermont. She currently resides in Rutland, Vermont.

MATT NECKERS

Perfect World: Familiar Robots and Their Animal Kindred, 2021 Moveable magnetic art, mounted on painted steel and mixed media Wall Installation: 6' x 10' x 10" Price Upon Request

PIP & POP Where the Sun Shines Every Day, 2021

installation: sugar, modelling clay, polyurethane foam, crystals, gems, glitter, artificial plants, beads, pompoms and various craft materials room-size installation: 22' x 26' x 9' 10" NFS

JON RAPPLEYE

JON RAPPLEYE

oil and acrylic on canvas 52" x 42" Price Upon Request

oil and acrylic on canvas 52" x 40" Price Upon Request

Loss of Innocence, 2021

Pocket Full of Posies, 2020

KATHRYN WIEGERS Fantastic Forest, 2021

acrylic on non-resin fiber, mounted on foam board (5 panels) 8' x 20' Price Upon Request

THE SMITTENS Wanna Go Dancin (So Far Away), 2021

Wav audio file (4:29 min) Band members: Max Andrucki, Missy Bly, Holly Chagnon, Colin Clary, Dana Kaplan and David Zacharis Produced by The Smittens Mixed and Mastered by Eric Masunaga, Modulus Studios LLC, Brighton, MA

DAVID ZACHARIS OF THE SMITTENS Wanna Go Dancin (So Far Away), 2021

Die cut digital illustrations on styrene with nylon and vinyl Photograph by Nik Vestberg NFS

RELATED PROGRAMMING

Family Art Saturday

Saturday, September 25, 2021, 11am – 1pm BCA Center, Fourth Floor

Get creative and make art together! Families can drop-in at the BCA Center in-person and enjoy an art activity with Bubblegum Pop artist Matt Necker, who will lead an activity inspired by his magnetic artwork, Perfect World: Familiar Robots and Their Kindred.

SPONSORED IN PART BY

BCA Exhibitions are funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and Vermont Arts Council.

Burlington City Arts is supported in part by the New England Foundation for the Arts through the New England Arts Resilience Fund, part of the United States Regional Arts Resilience Fund, an initiative of the U.S. Regional Arts Organizations and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with major funding from the federal CARES Act from the National Endowment for the Arts, and by the Vermont Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts.

135 CHURCH STREET, BURLINGTON, VERMONT, 05401 BURLINGTONCITYARTS.ORG