Pulp

Matt Christy
Jessica Lund-Higgins
Astri Snodgrass

October, 2016

Pulp is a collection of aggregative works from Astri Snodgrass, Jessica Lund-Higgins and Matt Christy. Each artists’ works have a high pulp content, bound up with substances that are generally filtered out. Styrofoam, paper scraps and bits of cardboard are just a handful of the materials each artist engages with.

Striated and fragmentary, each artist has developed their own unique vocabulary with their specific material cache. Jessica's sculptural mascots tuck away into corners or perch onto windowsills - observing or laying in wait. Their specificity of material beckons a taxonomic recognition and also resists such an immutable knowing for a more poetic kind of understanding. Matt’s narrative drawings resist and even laugh at the idea of telling a coherent story. Instead they are concerned with the fuzzy surfaces and the bits that fall down into the cracks and crevices to tell a different, less dignified tale. Astri’s collaged fields are the residual embodiment of a two and fro- shift and shimmer between paper spaces and pictorial meaning.

An intimate reciprocity is fostered through the coupling of the pulpy materials and the process of making.

Astri Snodgrass holds an MFA in Studio Art from the University of Alabama and a BA in Art and Spanish from Luther College. Experiences in Norway at Nansenskolen Norsk Humanistisk Akademi and the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo in Mendoza, Argentina helped shape her interests in language, light, and perception. Snodgrass’ work has been exhibited in a number of group and solo shows at COOP Gallery in Nashville, Tennessee, the Fuel and Lumber Company in Birmingham Alabama, the Sarah Moody Gallery of Art in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and McNeese State University’s Grand Gallery in Lake Charles, Louisiana among others. She has also presented her work in artist talks and presentations at the Southeastern College Art Conference in Sarasota, Florida, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and at Luther College’s Faculty Research Symposium. Currently, she teaches painting and drawing at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

Jessica Lund-Higgins is a visual artist working primarily in tiny sculpture. In 2013, she received her Masters of Fine Art from the University of Memphis. She currently lives and works in New Haven, CT. 

Matt Christy: "I grew up in Franklin Tennessee, drawing before I could talk. I graduated from Watkins College of Art and Design back in 2007 with a degree in fine art. After school, I wrote art reviews and lived in an intentional urban gardening community here in Nashville. Then, I went to grad school at the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon. I recently graduated and moved back to Nashville to reconnect with my family and friends. I’m completing my first novel."