Bio
Pursuing a non-public approach to a fine art career, Bachrun LoMele has for the past seventeen years developed his art practice in the remote Sierra Nevada foothills of California. Notwithstanding his rural isolation, his work has been exhibited in the United States and Europe.
Ongoing since 2014, LoMele’s Burn Pile is a project derived from sincere donors of truths — residents of the agricultural San Joaquin Valley of California. He invited donors to speak inside a portable, private booth in sixteen shopping malls, flea markets, public parks, and other public spaces in the Central Valley cities of Visalia and Fresno. Their statements were immediately leached of meaning by rudimentary, purpose-made software, which scrambled them with previously donated truth statements from others.
Supported by funding from the Central Valley Community Foundation (in partnership with the James Irvine Foundation) and the City of Visalia Community Arts Grant Program, LoMele continues the project by commemorating this confusion of peoples’ innermost expressions. By creating a heap of materials both carefully handmade and crassly commercial (LED signs) he draws attention to the imperfections of communication, and to an ambient sincerity freed of specificity, particularly relevant in this current moment of truth-prodding.
Solo exhibitions of iterations of Burn Pile have been mounted at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga Apothecary Gallery, GearBox Gallery in Oakland, California, Experimental Intermedia, Gent, Belgium, Los Angeles Art Association’s Gallery 825, Subud California Wilshire Center in Los Angeles, College of the Sequoias Art Gallery in Visalia, California, and Morris Graves Museum of Art, Eureka, California.
The exhibition of Burn Pile / The Andromeda Mirage that I often see at Morris Graves Museum received a review in Sculpture Magazine online by critic Gabrielle Gopinath. In September 2023, LoMele's studio was featured in Hyperallergic's A View From the Easel.
Solo exhibitions of a previous project, Walls, have been presented at Marshall Arts in Memphis, Tennessee, and Arts Visalia, Visalia, California.
In 2010, LoMele instigated the development of the Hatchery Art Spaces in rural Badger, California. Together with a team of California- and New York City-based artists and curators, he utilized abandoned buildings and acreage (formerly a Synanon drug-rehab compound) as a venue for three international exhibitions. The 2015 exhibition, The Hatchery: Fortress, was selected for an International City Tour, as conceived by UAMO in Munich, Germany, and was the sole United States location chosen. A video of the event and works from the exhibition were presented at UAMO’s City Festival in Munich in April 2016.
He has participated in artist residencies at the Stonehouse Residency for the Contemporary Arts in Miramonte, California, Eastside International Los Angeles (ESXLA), located at the Brewery near downtown Los Angeles, and again in 2024 at the Brewery at Shoebox Projects.
LoMele’s work has been selected for group exhibitions (selected list): Schatten-Parcours, Zeitz, Germany; Memphis Social (apexart-supported city-wide event in Memphis, Tennessee); 10th and 11th National Print Competition Exhibitions, Janet Turner Print Museum, California State University, Chico, California; Painting Center, New York City; GearBox Gallery, Oakland; 4th and 6th Annual Juried International Exhibitions of Contemporary Islamic Art, Dallas and Irving, Texas; San Luis Obispo Museum of Art, California; numerous exhibitions at Galley 825, Los Angeles; Brand Library and Art Center's Brand 49 Works on Paper (Janet Friend award), Glendale, California; and Bedford Gallery, Walnut Creek, California.
A graduate of Art Center in Pasadena (with Honors) and the University of California Santa Cruz, LoMele pursued an illustration career in New York City before returning to California in 2003. His New York clients included Barron’s, Money Magazine, Business Week, New York Times, New York Daily News, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Gourmet Magazine, Travel & Leisure, and others. He is a current member of the International Association of Hand Papermakers and Paper Artists (IAPMA), and formerly of the Los Angeles Art Association.