Organized by participating artist John Neff, Mark Jackson / Tony Lewis / John Neff will present two bodies of drawings and a sound recording. A publication featuring an essay by artist Gillian Riley will accompany the exhibition.

Jackson's charcoal portraits of lone men - primarily African-American and Latino youths - are based on images from the artist's photographic scrapbooks. Jackson's sensitively rendered, carefully individualized portraits contrast with the anonymity and "lowness" of his sources, often vintage pornographic and pulp magazines. This contrast opens onto a series of questions about, for example: the relationship between artistic production and erotic desire, where "individuality" is located within a portrait image, and the play of generality and specificity that operates in both serial image-making and sexual attraction.

Tony Lewis's drawings of fragmentary texts, geometric patterns and enveloping color fields alternate between Minimalist abstraction and metaphoric / metonymic suggestion. The smudgy black-and-white drawings hint at – but never explicitly represent – bleak landscapes, raced bodies, and narratives of rage restrained. Of Untitled (Lump), Lewis writes: “Work begins and lives on the floor of my studio. It feels as though it has become a condition impervious to interruption, a starting point for attempting to handle such a feral material as graphite powder. This second iteration of this project is built to conform to the precise floor plan of the gallery...The result is a 1000sq ft. monochrome graphite drawing, upon which viewers will inevitably walk when they enter the gallery.”

John Neff works primarily in photography; however, at LUMP he will present a new, in-progress sound work. After traversing Lewis's graphite floor drawing and passing Jackson's wall of charcoal portraits, visitors to the gallery will find a darkened room. In this room, a recorded conversation between Neff and his boyfriend, a graduate student of astronautical engineering, drifts from cosmology to missile defense to space travel to interracial / intergenerational relationships. In avoiding the visual entirely, Neff’s contribution to the exhibition is perhaps most explicit of the three artists’ works in its representation of conflicts and desires arising across differences of age, race and sexual object choice.