White Columns Online #35:
The Sleepover
curated by Lydia Glenn-Murray and Hop Peternell

Napoleón Aguilera
Liam Allan
Gabor Bata
Laura Chasman
Morgan Ritter
Oswald Newman Saenz
Jennifer Chai Shear
Val Sivilli
Kenneth Winterschladen

Cleaning up from the Winter Festival we found a little pink sticky note reading ‘Smurf Cumbia 1982.’ We imagined an album produced quietly in an out of the way place – what would its songs be titled? We thought of a stranger’s photo album – how connections between times and objects are bright and confused, how order and logic are disarrayed. We thought of the day after the party when things are out of their places and you find yourself holding a piece of bread that’s fallen, a precious engraved cup, and a friend’s hat. We thought of the names of weed strains and pornos, posters for lost fests. We noticed the way the letters were written looked like a mask, a monkey, or New Jersey, but everything looks like New Jersey when you look close enough. Falling asleep on the couch, the mystery was alive and the eddies of our curiosity became unpredictable: the glowing red lines of string connecting the pins of our map swung and curled like summer vines and swans gazed over books stacked on strapped on noses sniffing funny old orange peel DVDs. The sleepover had begun.

Hop Peternell lives in Locktown, New Jersey. They are a musician and songwriter, a painter, and co-founder and co-director at Studio Route 29 where they also run the small label and recording project Beauty Music. They hold a Master’s degree in painting from Rutgers University and a Bachelor’s degree in painting from The Cooper Union.

Lydia Glenn-Murray is co-founder and co-director at Studio Route 29 in Frenchtown, NJ, a studio, gallery, and community space centering artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities, and co-director of No School, an experimental art education project. She has co-founded several artist-run exhibition, education, and community art spaces and projects, and her curatorial projects have been featured in Artforum, Art in America, ArtReview, and more.

This exhibition is the thirty-fifth in a series of online exhibitions curated exclusively from White Columns’ Curated Artist Registry.