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With All My Heart explores the notion and idea of home, relationships, rituals and family, inviting the viewer to think about one’s roots, love and the experiences that shape both life and identity. Often romantic, sometimes joyful, and frequently melancholic, the works on show journey through moments of great happiness, uncertainty and even grief. Evocative of a life lived with one’s heart on their sleeve, Jeffly Gabriela Molina and Brad Stumpf’s paintings perform a quiet and enchanting contemplation of the everyday. Engaging the audience in the intimate moments of the life they share, the quotidian becomes the substance of dreams.
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Born in Venezuela, Jeffly Gabriela Molina grew up in the Andean city of San Cristóbal. Looking back at her family history, while also considering her more contemporary experiences, Molina’s works survey people and events with motifs like flowers, glasses of water and candy jars suggesting deeply personal associations, beliefs and routines. Brad Stumpf, for his part, was raised outside the town of Hamel in rural Illinois, USA. Creating and reorganizing moments of intimacy, Stumpf playfully registers daily activities, depicts time spent with his partner, and navigates the emotional terrain of relating in what seems like a visual diary full of imagination and sensitivity.
Isolating and elevating the inconspicuous objects and interactions that make up living, Molina works from photographs or small scenes made up of the objects that populate her home—like in her Homemade Sculptures—, while Stumpf’s paintings function like miniature stage sets constructed from observation and depicting handmade assemblages. Honoring and portraying their most cherished daydreams as well as deeply painful experiences, Molina and Stumpf come up with a vision of home as a place where family is secure and protected and within which hope is built.
For two years, Stumpf and Molina lived in a small apartment in Chicago alongside her mother and stepfather, who had recently emigrated from Venezuela. A year later, in 2023, Stumpf’s mother passed away from lung cancer and not long after they had to navigate mortality once again with the passing of Merida, their unborn child.
Having lived through the loss of home (Venezuela for Molina), family (a parent for Stumpf), and a child—an experience that they both memorialized in works like Last Day with Merida (2024) and Merida – Footprints (2024)—their works offer up containment through vulnerability and companionship. Carved willfully from elements in their immediate surroundings, their pieces do not deviate from reality but rather reflect kernels of hope to reach for and hold on to.
Brad Stumpf, who is originally from Southern Illinois, moved to Chicago to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago after having worked on a dairy farm for fourteen years. Recent exhibitions include his solo shows “Shadow Plays” at Harkawik Gallery, Los Angeles and “Still Life” at the Weather Station, Lafayette, as well as a two-person show “Esta casa es un cuerpo / This House is a Body” at Artruss Gallery in Chicago. In addition to exhibitions, he has two permanent public sculptures: Point of Entrance at Jeske Park in Ferguson, Missouri, and A Dream Set in Stone at Governors State University in University Park, Illinois.
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