The Armory Show

For The Armory Show 2025, Megan Mulrooney presents a new body of work by Los Angeles-based artist Piper Bangs. Across oil paintings and intimately scaled watercolors, Bangs stages a world of fruit-like protagonists adrift in surreal, mutable landscapes. The scenes appear sequential yet remain unmoored from any fixed plot, glimpses of a narrative that resists completion. Pear figures inhabit recognizably human states, hovering at thresholds, clambering toward uncertain destinations, or idling in ambiguous terrain.

The figures themselves - plump, pear-like, and anthropomorphic - act as stand-ins for states of mind. They huddle together intimately, venture further into their forest-world in cautious clusters, or sit amidst surreal infrastructures deadpan stasis. Around them, the environment refuses to settle: light shifts from cool dawn to romantic sunset, and surfaces oscillate between lush tactility and flattened diagram. Bangs’s brushwork intensifies this instability, at times meticulous and slow, at others extravagant and rococo in flourish, cultivating a distinct emotional register in each work.

While creating this body of work, Bangs was immersed in existentialist thought. The resulting paintings meditate on the idea that to be conscious is to be free, and to be free is to confront the immense, disturbing openness of choice. She filters this philosophical interest through a visual language that emphasizes uncertainty and entrapment: playground apparatuses that become enclosures, skybound ribbons that could ensnare as much as adorn, domestic objects that become quasi-architectural. These metamorphic settings evoke the absurdity of searching for meaning in a world that can, at turns, feel entirely meaningless or entirely magical.

While each canvas can be read as a self-contained vignette, the works accrue power in sequence. Together they form a constellation of emotional states - seeking, hesitating, tethered, unmoored - capturing the push and pull between agency and surrender. Throughout the presentation, the paintings invite viewers into a state of suspension, where tenderness, absurdity, and wonder coexist. Bangs asks us to linger in that uncertain space, to see it as its own form of arrival.

Piper Bangs (b. 2002 in San Antonio, TX; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) is a painter who earned her BFA in Drawing and Painting at Laguna College of Art and Design in Spring 2024. Bangs has had solo exhibitions at Megan Mulrooney in Los Angeles CA and The Watermill Center in Watermill, NY, and has a forthcoming solo exhibition with HdM Gallery, Beijing. She has exhibited her work in group exhibitions at venues such as Megan Mulrooney, Los Angeles; the Sehwa Museum of Art, Seoul; Galerie Raphael Durazzo, Paris; Uffner & Liu in New York, NY, The Pit in Palm Springs, CA; NMG in Los Angeles, CA; the National YoungArts Foundation in Miami, FL; and the Contemporary at Blue Star in San Antonio; TX, among others.

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