Megan Plunkett
Beep If You Boop
April 18 – May 25, 2025
Beep If You Boop
April 18 – May 25, 2025
Public opening: Thursday, April 17, 6-8
List of Works
Press Release
Sometimes ideas, like men, jump up and say “hello”. They introduce themselves, these ideas, with words. Are they words? These ideas speak so strangely. All that we see in this world is based on someone's ideas. Some ideas are destructive, some are constructive. Some ideas can arrive in the form of a dream. I can say it again: some ideas arrive in the form of a dream. – Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer
Image and idea hail from the same spooky root. The Greek eidolon means to appear, a mental picture, or a likeness, semblance, or apparition, especially of a dead or absent person. Phantoms and specters are eidolon; ancient ghosts hover atop the heads of their dreamers. The dead are not alive, but they live; their appearances affect us, without predictability or permission. There are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life, said Jung. Dreams and séances taught him the same thing.
The invisible springs through the visible, but materiality haunts itself, too. Reflections in water, footprints in sand, any gesture which mimics another; art itself is eidolon. Later on, eidolon becomes icon and idol, imitatio dei and so-called false or “carved” gods, the eternal shaped by illusions of time. Images are a romance of veneration and suspicion. They make detectives of us all, sometimes.
The wildfires in Los Angeles had a pyre-y aspect when David Lynch, lover of ideas and diviner of portals, slipped from this world into another. When Marcel Duchamp died, Jasper Johns eulogized him, saying: “He has changed the condition of being here.” Lynch changed the condition of being here, too, or more exactly, made the wild conditions of being here more fully seen, validated, and therefore more fully livable.
Lynch was reborn in the light of LA, Megan Plunkett’s hometown (her childhood home was evacuated in the fires his spirit passed through). He is her hometown artist, an artist that her work and multileveled take on reality “makes sense” through. A suggestion is all that’s needed are her words. A kindred citizen to Lynch, Plunkett lets images arrive and move, fascinated by how they “ricochet” and gather into ideas. She investigates the realities of the unreal or “fungibility of the real” – whether images are calculated to manipulate us, whether they scamper into happy accidents of meaning, or whether, in states of exhaustion, they find refuge as hobby objects, assuming outlaw identities under new makers. At what point does a brand, a logo, an image become nothing? Isn’t nothing what mystics long to return to, to be alone with the Alone? Coca-Cola belongs to every and to no one. “It belongs to America; it’s our thing,” which means now it’s everyone’s problem. Like Lynch, Plunkett has affection and curiosity for the transcendental iterations of American treats and trash (including the Americana-ization of UFOs).
This world is full of worlds; likenesses and inversions cor/respond through uncanny images and bizarre objects, slicked and quickened (or steeped and slowed) by changes of light and sound. Lynch could make anything into bouillon cube of futures past. The givens are waterfalls and illuminated gas, electricity, Formica, and fantastic trees: living, logged, and armed. The murder is in the Victrola horn (so is hope). The owls are not what they seem but being aliens and/or bomb-stunned trauma blobs doesn’t extinguish their owlness. It’s like Jeff Kripal says: the supernatural is super natural. It’s all happening (again).
Devon Deimler, 2025
ABOUT:
Press Release
Sometimes ideas, like men, jump up and say “hello”. They introduce themselves, these ideas, with words. Are they words? These ideas speak so strangely. All that we see in this world is based on someone's ideas. Some ideas are destructive, some are constructive. Some ideas can arrive in the form of a dream. I can say it again: some ideas arrive in the form of a dream. – Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer
Image and idea hail from the same spooky root. The Greek eidolon means to appear, a mental picture, or a likeness, semblance, or apparition, especially of a dead or absent person. Phantoms and specters are eidolon; ancient ghosts hover atop the heads of their dreamers. The dead are not alive, but they live; their appearances affect us, without predictability or permission. There are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life, said Jung. Dreams and séances taught him the same thing.
The invisible springs through the visible, but materiality haunts itself, too. Reflections in water, footprints in sand, any gesture which mimics another; art itself is eidolon. Later on, eidolon becomes icon and idol, imitatio dei and so-called false or “carved” gods, the eternal shaped by illusions of time. Images are a romance of veneration and suspicion. They make detectives of us all, sometimes.
The wildfires in Los Angeles had a pyre-y aspect when David Lynch, lover of ideas and diviner of portals, slipped from this world into another. When Marcel Duchamp died, Jasper Johns eulogized him, saying: “He has changed the condition of being here.” Lynch changed the condition of being here, too, or more exactly, made the wild conditions of being here more fully seen, validated, and therefore more fully livable.
Lynch was reborn in the light of LA, Megan Plunkett’s hometown (her childhood home was evacuated in the fires his spirit passed through). He is her hometown artist, an artist that her work and multileveled take on reality “makes sense” through. A suggestion is all that’s needed are her words. A kindred citizen to Lynch, Plunkett lets images arrive and move, fascinated by how they “ricochet” and gather into ideas. She investigates the realities of the unreal or “fungibility of the real” – whether images are calculated to manipulate us, whether they scamper into happy accidents of meaning, or whether, in states of exhaustion, they find refuge as hobby objects, assuming outlaw identities under new makers. At what point does a brand, a logo, an image become nothing? Isn’t nothing what mystics long to return to, to be alone with the Alone? Coca-Cola belongs to every and to no one. “It belongs to America; it’s our thing,” which means now it’s everyone’s problem. Like Lynch, Plunkett has affection and curiosity for the transcendental iterations of American treats and trash (including the Americana-ization of UFOs).
This world is full of worlds; likenesses and inversions cor/respond through uncanny images and bizarre objects, slicked and quickened (or steeped and slowed) by changes of light and sound. Lynch could make anything into bouillon cube of futures past. The givens are waterfalls and illuminated gas, electricity, Formica, and fantastic trees: living, logged, and armed. The murder is in the Victrola horn (so is hope). The owls are not what they seem but being aliens and/or bomb-stunned trauma blobs doesn’t extinguish their owlness. It’s like Jeff Kripal says: the supernatural is super natural. It’s all happening (again).
Devon Deimler, 2025
ABOUT:
Megan Plunkett (born in Pasadena, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles. Plunkett received an MFA from Bard College and is the residing Bard MFA Photography Co-Chair. Recent solo exhibitions include Timeshare, Los Angeles (2024, with John Divola); F Gallery, Houston (2023); Sweetwater, Berlin (2022); and Emalin, London (2021). Institutional group exhibitions include Files, Kunsthalle Zürich (2024); A Manual of Errors?, Sgomento, Zurich (2023); In The Shadows of Tall Necessities, Bonner Kunstverein (2022); and The Wig, MOSTYN, Llandudno (2022).