John Umphlett wa­s born in southern­ New Jersey in 1974. Trained in Richmond Virginia in drawing and sculpture where he graduated with a BFA in Sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University. John continued his education at Bennington College at which he graduated with a MFA in 1999. His work has crossed between many mediums including, but not excluded to, installation, video, performance and drawing. John has shown at Emory Community Art Center / University of Maine Farmington, Southern Vermont Art Center; VT, Collar Works; Troy NY, Franconia Sculpture Park ; MN, Bennington Museum; VT, Empac; Rensselaer NY, Vermont Studio Center, Johnson,VT, to name a few and has also worked with numerous artists, architects, and engineers in New York and around the world, as a fabricator and designer producing work for Brooklyn Museum, Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building, Moody Center of the Arts, Rice University, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA, Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN, Fowler Museum, UCLA, Simone Subal Gallery, NY,NY, San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA, PAFA, Philadelphia PA, Viva Arte Viva, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice,IT, Kunsthallen, Brandts, Odense, DK, Yokohama Triennale,Yokohama Japan, and Guimet Museum, Paris, France. Ect.

John is an innovator and inquisitive thinker, consistently searching for new experimental processes. Entranced within material parameters and properties, he finds ways to fuse those findings with the ephemeral human body. This relationship informs the direction for him to respond. He describes the physical world as a creator of conceptual boundaries on the brink of illusion. This, he explains, sparks a foundation for the choreography of making. John expresses parallel relationships between material and color, ideas and images, and concepts and objects. These relationships challenge him to contemplate limitations around a subject and push into the why; creativity seeking novel approaches in developing a body of work. His trained heightened awareness of social communication allows for him to see ways to make work within this space. Small gestures and cues of someone's emotional pathways lead to large rich personalities. Personalities exist, as a catalyst in extending the important revisited elements; sound, saliva drip, burned skin, fear. The work can exist as a laborious fabrication in which its finished form and performance added element exists only for a split second or inverse by means of building out and slowing down an action that normally exists for only a split second. Time is often observed as having an inevitable and ever-changing presence. This element of life often can hold a focal point, harnessing the space and often highlighting the most powerful detail of the piece. He is searching for a connection to something that actually doesn’t exist in this material world; a fluid fleeting Spirit that has shaping principles of something externally internal. The work simmers on the surface of vulnerabilities;, oxygen, sweat, criticism, empathy, hate, language, sarcasm and forgiveness.

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