Gallery Address:
119 N Peoria St, 2A
Chicago IL 60607
312.480.8390
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Gallery hours:
Wednesdays thru Saturdays
11am to 6pm
STAN SHELLABARGER
Untitled Performance (Vernal Equinox 2010), Chicago Avenue, Chicago, Illinois.
Saturday, March 20, 6:54 am to 7:03pmOn Saturday, March 20, 2010, Stan Shellabarger will perform the latest in his series of Equinox and Solstice Walking Performances. From sunrise to sunset, Shellabarger will walk in a straight line across Chicago's city limits.
Starting at sunrise, 6:54am, Shellabarger will start his performance in Melrose Park, just west of Oak Park, at the terminal point of Chicago Avenue. He will walk east on Chicago Avenue towards Lake Michigan, hoping to reach the lakefront at the sun's transit (when the the sun is directly overhead) at 12:58pm. He will then switch directions and walk west, back to his starting point, finishing an sunset, 7:03 pm.
To view Shellabarger during this performance, please call the gallery at (312)-480-8390. Viewers will be given Shellabarger's cell phone number so they can contact him for his coordinates. Or, one can be at the eastern terminus of Chicago Ave, at the lakefront, at 12:58pm.
See prior Solstice and Equinox Walking performances here and here
Paraphrased from the writer Cassie Riger’s essay “Stan Shellabarger: The ∞ Cycle of Life”:
In the Solstice and Equinox Walking Performances, Shellabarger uses the tread of his boots to draw directly on the landscape, literalizing the figure-ground relationship. This act and sensibility could be attributed to something akin to “Primordial Farmer Pagans, noting the events of the solar calendar and mapping strange meanings onto the stars. In this vein, the Solstice and Equinox Walking Performances conduct Primordial Farmer Pagan activities, steps taken to commemorate astrological events, the shifting notations of the seasons, and seasonal relationships to that larger fecundity of the planet earth.
Stan Shellabarger's images from his first-ever walking performance, "One Year Circle, Easton, Maine", 1993, will be included in a group show at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MAMAC) in Nice, France, this summer, alongside performance luminaries Marina Abramovic, Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, Valie Export, Paul McCarthy, among others.Shellabarger's performance and book work addresses issues relating to the body and the Earth. He often takes mundane, everyday activities like breathing, walking and writing to extreme measures in endurance-based, laborious performance work: walking from sunrise to sunset on solstices and equinoxes, counting every breath he takes in an 8 hour time span, filling notebook after notebook with his signature. The long durations of Shellabarger's performances lead to massive accumulations of marks and residues that record discrete units of time and space, elegant testimonies to the transient and fleeting qualities of life. The repetition of activity is necessary so that the extremely subtle marks left by these activities emerge as clearly visible artistic interventions, marks that are, like the body itself, ephemeral in nature.
Stan Shellabarger's solo shows include a pine-needle installation at the Hyde Park Art Center in 2009, a 12 x 12 New Work/New Artists exhibition at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art in December 2005, a collaborative show with his husband Dutes Miller at Western Exhibitions in 2007 and his 2004 solo show at Western Exhibitions was reviewed in Art in America, artforum.com and ArtUS. He second solo show with Western Exhibitions in September 2008 was discussed in the Chicago Tribune, New City, Art Letter, Flavorpill, and Artslant. He has been invited to perform at the VOLTA show in Basel, Switzerland, the Time-Based Art Festival in Portland, Oregon; Macy’s downtown department store window during the Looptopia festival in Chicago; Millennium Park in Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Illinois State University in Bloomington, Illinois; The Suburban in Oak Park; and the Center of Contemporary Art in St. Louis. Shellabarger has been included in shows at inova in Milwaukee, the Chicago Cultural Center and the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. He received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and lives and works in Chicago.
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