Opening reception, April 9, 6-8pm

Fleisher/Ollman is pleased to present Uuughhh, the Dufala Brothers fifth solo exhibition at the gallery, where humor melds with socio-cultural commentary in a vision at once profane, profound, and lighthearted. Creating sculpture and drawings that reference themes of the moment like the environmental devastation caused by our continued thirst for metals and minerals, the histrionics of masculinist culture, and supply chain disruption, the Brothers present a weird dystopia where objects hint at utility but ultimately fail as functional things. Think a grown-up version of the 1960s children’s Christmas animation Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’s island of misfit toys.  A copper pipe sculpture and its watercolor counterpart suggest refrigeration cooling systems but loops to an endless nowhere, a meditation on the perils of fluorocarbons and ozone degradation in our atmosphere. A weighty, rectilinear object composed of welded industrial chain might be a building block from a world where bricks, concrete and wood are no longer available in a heavy-metal centered post-apocalypse. A graphite drawing at once a cartoonish, muscle bound arm and a plume of smoke, shares the same disposition as the chain block—the language of swaggering, titanic industry. A metronome carved from coal is oddly inert and frozen in mid-tempo as if it has captured the moment of an environmental point of no return. Collage/drawing hybrids of paper cutouts that look like rubber bands piled upon drawn grounds underscore how the most mundane items exponentially accrue in our kitchen junk drawers and eventually end up in landfills. Lungs fashioned from ductwork seemingly connected to the gallery’s HVAC system might imply a cyborg breathing apparatus required for survival in the not so distant future. Always searching for the humorous spin on serious subjects like sustainability, the Dufala Brothers have taken notions of recycling to the level of bodily byproducts, collecting belly button lint and fashioning it into celestial bodies.

The Dufala Brothers both graduated with certificates from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. They have had solo exhibitions at the West Collection, Oaks, PA; Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts, Wilmington, DE; Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford College, Haverford, PA; Buffalo State College, Buffalo, NY; and Space 1026, Fleisher/Ollman, and Fleisher Art Memorial, all in Philadelphia. The Dufalas have been featured in many group exhibitions in the Philadelphia region in venues such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Galleries at Moore College of Art, Space 1026, Slought Foundation, Globe Dye Works, Delaware County Community College, and Fleisher/Ollman. Elsewhere, they have shown at the Drawing Center, New York, NY; John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI; Naidre's, Brooklyn, NY; and The Corner at Whitman-Walker, Washington, DC. In 2014, the Dufala Brothers were resident artists in Philadelphia's Mantua neighborhood where they collaborated with local church and civic leaders in organizing a funeral for a home slated for demolition (project overseen by Temple Contemporary, Philadelphia). In 2009, they received the West Grand Prize. Their work is in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.