Randy Shull

Tracey Morgan Gallery is pleased to present, SIESTA, an exhibition of medium and large-scale paintings by Randy Shull created while quarantining and working in solitude in Mexico. In this series, Shull continues his investigation of the vernacular using Yucatán hammocks as the core material. This will be Shull’s second exhibition with the gallery.

The hammock, an ancient woven functional form introduced to Mexico from the Caribbean, is at the core of life in the Yucatán, where nearly all the inhabitants in the surrounding villages, sleep with their families in hammocks to this day. The hammocks are woven in small villages by hand on stand up looms by both men and women.

Shull purchases the colorfully woven material in the markets of Merida and intuitively composes the woven forms on the roof of his studio, where they are painted obsessively and left to cure for days in the hot tropical sun. “As an artist who also makes furniture, I see the hammock as an ancient furniture form that has stood the test of time, uses very little resources, and is super easy on the body, casting it into a sense of dreamy weightlessness. In a way, I continue my investigation of furniture through the use of the hammock, it just takes on the form of a painting.”

In his previous series, Shull playfully buried the hammock under layers of paint, which were then sanded to reveal the color and texture of the threads below. The SIESTA series sees the hammock as a pictorial power: first as canvas, then as texture, and finally abstraction.

Randy Shull lives and works in Asheville, NC and Merida, Mexico. He received his BFA  in Furniture Design from Rochester Institute of Technology, NY in 1986.  He was awarded a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship and a NEA Southern Arts Federation grant.  He has exhibited both nationally and internationally. His work is included in the collections of The Brooklyn Museum, NY; The High Museum of Art, GA; The Renwick Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; The Mint Museum of Craft + Design, NC; Racine Museum of Art, WI; The Gregg Museum of Art & Design, NC; Museum of Art and Design, NY, Black Mountain College Museum, NC; The Asheville Art Museum, NC; The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, LA; The Mobile Museum of Art, AL, and numerous corporate collections including Fidelity, Wells Fargo, Piedmont Natural Gas and Galloway Ridge, among others.

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Image above: Mundo, 2021, Acrylic on hammock, 78 x 70 inches