Rachell Sumpter paints small & big splendors into a desolate, peopled wilderness.
Using layered gouache and pastel, these are scenes at once of community and of isolation: figures stand
in heavy, embroidered clothing, hidden and yet seen, in procession, in ceremony or in witness to a wonder.
There are melting mountain tops and bonfires, ghosts and graves; vast monuments and intimate moments
that speak to the legacies a generation leaves, to the promises it makes. Sumpter borrows symbols from
religious and political traditions, from dream, from our threatened natural world. And yet amid these artifacts,
memories and future relics, there is a human closeness, a physical intimacy. This lends an optimism
to what might otherwise seem an elegy. In this bleak and changing landscape there are celebrations
as well as lamentations, and with deceptively simple strokes she creates an iconography for the longed-for
and the feared: a mythology of mystery, pleasure, and the foreshadowing of loss.

Rachell Sumpter grew up in the suburbs of San Francisco. Swayed and beguiled by nature, she travels
the west coast of the US to find relics of inspiration. Sumpter's work has been exhibited worldwide,
including Jack Hanley (SF), Allston Skirt (Boston), Richard Heller (Los Angeles), Sunday L.E.S. (NY),
OCMA and LACMA, and has been written about in the Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Mean, Giant Robot,
ArtWeek, Artforum and McSweeney's Issue 24 among others.

RACHELL SUMPTER

FUTURE
2014 Fall
Richard Heller Gallery

PAST
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2011
Cornucopia, Hosfelt Gallery NY Artforum.com
Memory Palace, Richard Heller Gallery, Santa Monica CA
2009
Molten Kin, Richard Heller Gallery, Santa Monica CA
2007
Bones, Bones, Bones, Richard Heller Gallery, Santa Monica CA
Fern Whips, Allston-Skirt Gallery, Boston MA
2006
Frizzly Gur, Motel Gallery, Portland OR
2005
Seahorses Unite!, Sixspace Gallery, Culver City CA
SELECT GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2012
Resan fram och Tillbaka(cont), Swedish Traveling Exhibitions, Stockholm Sweden
2011
Resan fram och Tillbaka, Swedish Traveling Exhibitions, Stockholm Sweden
Espacio Minimo Madrid , Spain
2008
Tenderly, Sunday Gallery L.E.S., New York NY
Vocabularies of Metaphor, Hosfelt Gallery, New York NY
2007
The Happening, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach CA
White Light, Motel Gallery, Portland OR
2006
Collage Party, Affair, Portland with Allston-Skirt and Motel Gallery
Selected Videos, Small A Projects, Portland OR
ARK, HaNNa Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
Lace Auction, Los Angeles Contemporary Projects, Los Angeles CA
2005
Dear New Girl, Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco CA
Flood the Gutters, New Image Art, Los Angeles CA
A-Z, New Image Art, Los Angeles CA
2004
MKR, Branch Gallery, Raleigh NC
Coloring Book, Branch Gallery, Raleigh NC
Moonboots, Barettes, Elves and Cigarettes, Sixspace, Los Angeles CA
2003
(Re)Narrate, Urban Institute for Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids MI
Covers That Never Were, Track 16, Santa Monica CA
Long Gone Holiday, Motel, Portland OR
New Talent for a New Year, Mark Bradford Gallery, Newport Beach CA
2002
Making, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles CA