Two bodies of work, one titled Last Pictures and the other titled Markers are comprised of images of women the artist found on gravestones in two different cemeteries near his home in Los Angeles. Bunch became intrigued by the photographs that families chose to decorate headstones and vaults of their loved ones. These oval images or photo ceramics/memorial photos can be found in cemeteries throughout the Western world and come from an Eastern European tradition.

Fascinated by the memorialization of life during death, Bunch, in the series Markers, has painted small-scale portraits directly onto Ouija boards. The Ouija board is often used to try to make contact with the dead and the oval-shaped portrait is painted in the center of the game board where the players’ hands typically begin the game. The scale and palette of the painting is true to that of the original source image – painting in grisaille from a black and white photograph and a using a full palette from a color photograph.

Last Pictures is made up of oil paintings on canvas that are painted so realistically that they resemble the memorial photos themselves except that the scale of the paintings are life size – much larger than the original source material. The artist is attracted to the awkwardness and formal beauty of these found images. Some faces have peculiar expressions, some women are in their wedding gowns, and one is depicted in her nurse uniform, all are depicted in their prime. Bunch draws out the existence of the individual but retains the mystery of the original source.

A third body of work will be presented in the small gallery. 01-03 is Bunch’s effort to create a portrait from a postage stamp-sized source photo taken from a medical textbook published in 1910 depicting women with syphilis. The suite of canvases were selected from the eleven attempts the artist has created over the last four years.