Western Exhibitions is thrilled to participate in the 2025 Barely Fair; this year, a ticketed event at a space near McKinley Park in Chicago (location revealed upon making an appointment), opening the same week as EXPO Chicago and running through May 11, 2025. Learn more here: https://www.barelyfair.com/
BARELY FAIR is an international art fair operated by Julius Caesar, an artist run space, founded in 2008. The invitational fair presents a tiny peek inside the programming of twenty-four contemporary art galleries, project spaces, and curatorial projects. Included spaces will exhibit works in 1:12 scale booths built to mimic the design of a standard fair.
Western Exhibitions is presenting all new work made for the fair by a selection of LGBTQ artists that the gallery regularly works with. Edie Fake’s intricate psychedelic mural Unothering loops through the entirety of the booth’s interior walls, an Elijah Burgher dropcloth painting of a sigil Fortune’s Fairy #11 centers the booth from above and a cut-paper “life-size” silhouette self-portrait garland of Miller & Shellabarger engaged in an intimate activity is strung across the left corner. Dutes Miller’s “giant” buttplug sculptures guard the entrance while Ruby T’s rug painted with eye shadow and inlaid with hand-marbled silk panels anchors the queer magic chaos of this liminal space.
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ELIJAH BURGHER (b. 1978)
Using painting, drawing, photography and printmaking, Elijah Burgher works at the crossroads of representation and language, figuration and abstraction, and the real and imagined. Drawing from mythology, ancient history, the occult, and ritual magick, Burgher cultivates a highly intimate code of sigils and emblems imbued with magical power to investigate the personal and cultural dynamics of desire, love, subcultural formation, and the history of abstraction. Burgher is an artist and occasional writer currently living in Berlin. His work has been included in the 2014 Whitney and Gwangju Biennials and in shows at the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Switzerland, The Drawing Center in New York, Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam, the Schwules Museum in Berlin, LAXART in Los Angeles and the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa. His work has been discussed in The New York Times, Art in America, Frieze, ArtReview, Artforum and was included in VITAMIN D2, the hardcover survey of contemporary drawing. He received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. Elijah Burgher is represented by P.P.O.W in New York City, Western Exhibitions in Chicago and Ivan Gallery in Bucharest.
EDIE FAKE (b. 1980)
Edie Fake is a painter and visual artist whose work examines issues of trans identity in queer space, through the lens of architecture and ornamentation. Fake’s work has been exhibited in solo shows at Berkeley Art Museum and Film Archive; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse; Providence College Galleries, Rhode Island; in New York City at The Drawing Center, Broadway Gallery, and Marlborough Gallery, and recently exhibited publications, paintings and a large wall installation in “Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Fake’s work is held in the collections of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, Columbus; Des Moines Art Center, Iowa; RISD Museum, Providence; KADIST, San Francisco; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas; and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California. His work has been written about and featured in artforum, Art in America, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Art News, Art 21, Juxtapoz, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. Fake received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2002. He is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and Broadway Gallery in New York and currently lives and works in Twentynine Palms, California. Fake currently has a mural, The Free Clinic for Gender Affirming Care, on view at the MCA Chicago’s second floor atrium and has a commissioned wall painting on view at the Tang Teaching Museum in Saratoga Springs, NY, through July 20. He is participating in a panel at EXPO Chicago on Sunday, April 27, more info here.
DUTES MILLER (b. 1965)
Dutes Miller’s collages, artists books and phallic sculptures examine the spaces where the artist’s inner life, queer subcultures and mass media intersect. Miller appropriates images from pornographic websites, magazines and his own imaginings to investigate alternative standards of beauty, visualizations of lust and desire found on the internet, and power dynamics in sexual relationships. Miller’s work has been written about in Artforum, Hyperallergic, Chicago Reader, New City, and the Chicago Tribune. Miller received a BFA from Illinois State University. He is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and lives and works in Chicago.
Dutes Miller (b. 1965)
Stan Shellabarger (b. 1968)
Married artist collaborators Miller & Shellabarger use self-portraiture, laborious material processes, performance and considered craftsmanship to meditate on love and death, often adopting traditional American craft techniques, including silhouette cutting, sewing, crocheting and bookmaking. The possibilities of connection, partnership, interdependency, and the eventualities of loss penetrate the objects and enactments of their work. Miller & Shellabarger have had solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Chicago Cultural Center, and the Hyde Park Art Center, all in Chicago and at INOVA in Milwaukee, the University Galleries at Illinois State University, The Carnegie in Greater Cincinnati, and Gallery Diet in Miami. They have performed and have been exhibited in group shows across North America, including the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis; the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati; the Time-Based Arts Festival in Portland, Oregon; Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York; Sun Valley Center for the Arts in Idaho; Institute of Contemporary Art in Maine; and Sala Diaz in San Antonio. Miller & Shellabarger are a 2008 recipient of an Artadia Chicago award and a 2007 recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award. Their work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, the DePaul Art Museum, the Newark Public Library, Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University and the National Gallery of Canada. Their work has been written about in Artforum, Art in America, Art & Auction, Frieze, Artnet, The Art Newspaper, Flash Art, Chicago Tribune, and the Chicago Sun-Times. Dutes Miller and Stan Shellabarger also maintain separate artistic practices. They live and work in Chicago.
RUBY T (b. 1986)
Ruby T is an artist, educator, and organizer. Her work is an experiment in translating fantasy to reality, and she is fueled by anger, desire, and magic. Rooted in drawing, her practice has offshoots in painting, print, fibers, comics, and video. She has exhibited and performed at Western Exhibitions, Roots & Culture, and Iceberg Projects in Chicago; Hales Gallery in New York; and Bass & Reiner in San Francisco. Her comics and illustrations have been published by Half Letter Press, and are in the collection of the Thomas J Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She lives and works in Louisville, Kentucky.