Always now

Married artist collaborators Miller & Shellabarger use self-portraiture, laborious material processes, and carefully considered craftsmanship to meditate on love and death. Working across a myriad of media, they adapt traditional American craft techniques, including silhouette cutting, sewing, crocheting and bookmaking into their practice. The possibilities of connection, partnership, interdependency, and the eventualities of loss penetrate the objects and enactments of their work. For their sixth show at Western Exhibitions, Miller & Shellabarger present artists’ books, screenprints, photographs, three non-theatrical* performances (more below) and for the first time ever, paintings. Always Now will open with a public reception on Friday, November 6 from 5 to 8pm and will run through December 19. Gallery hours are 11am to 6pm, Tuesday to Saturday.

In new unique artist books and paintings on paper, Miller & Shellabarger utilize silhouette images of each other, from prior bodies of work as stencils, stamps and resists, resulting in Rorschach-like mirror images of entwined and entangled bodies. The silhouette is very present in their “Loving Repeating” artist books series, the most recent of which is included in this show. In Miller & Shellabarger’s words, “A silhouette is made from tracing a shadow. A shadow is a reminder that a body is present and a silhouette is a reminder that a body is gone. What is missing causes loneliness.” The title of this series comes from the Gertrude Stein novel, The Making of Americans, in which Stein talks about history being made by the repetition of the everyday over generations, a type of infinity. Stein suggests that love is tied to loving the way that another [person] is repeating. These ideas of togetherness and separation run throughout most of Miller & Shellabarger’s collaborative efforts.

Tintype photos taken in 2024 on the coast of Maine queer the history of this media by explicitly depicting their relationship, as opposed to vintage tintypes, where men were often seen arm in arm, arms around shoulders, or even sitting in one another’s lap, their sexual orientation seemingly ambiguous. Three wooden urns house the ashes of previous cut-paper-based installations that were ritually burned at the end of each exhibition.

During the run of the exhibition, Miller & Shellabarger will restage an updated, indoors version of Untitled Performance (Tabletop) a performance piece last presented in 1995 in Madison, Wisconsin. This iteration on Tuesday, November 17, from 4 to 6pm, begins when Shellabarger strikes a match on the zipper of Miller’s pants to light a small candle that gets placed on a table, the same one used in 1995. They will take turns striking matches and lighting 12 candles, every 5 minutes or so, that are then placed in pre-drilled holes in a circle on the table. The performance ends when the final candle melts down and burns out. Untitled Performance (Tabletop) will be staged on top of a large mandala-like cut black vinyl of silhouettes of their entwined bodies.

Last enacted in 2006, Miller & Shellabarger will reprise Untitled Performance (Sewn Together) on Friday, December 4 from 4 to 8pm. Miller & Shellabarger will repeatedly sew themselves together and then rip the seams apart, a metaphor for the ever-changing rhythms of human relationships, of working together and coming apart.

Miller & Shellabarger will also be presenting Untitled (Pink Tube) at Western Exhibitions twice, on Friday, November 13 and Friday, December 18, both from 4 t0 8pm. The artists’ most recognized artwork, Untitled (Pink Tube) is an ongoing non-theatrical performance begun in 2003. It is a lifelong artwork, publicly performed together, in which they simultaneously crochet at opposite ends of a long tube of pink yarn. The artists have agreed that when one of them is no longer able to perform, the other will unravel the tube, in public. Included in this show is a photograph of Untitled (Pink Tube), an image taken of them performing on the steps of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago during an exhibition there marking 10 years since the piece was initiated.

Vasia Rigou wrote about their work in a review in the Chicago Reader in 2023, concluding with: Importantly, there’s a sense of connectedness so strong that overshadows everything else: proof that in the face of life’s unimaginable challenges, togetherness can and will save the world.

Miller & Shellabarger have had solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Chicago Cultural Center, Hyde Park Art Center,  INOVA in Milwaukee, the University Galleries at Illinois State University, The Carnegie in Greater Cincinnati, and Gallery Diet in Miami. They have performed and exhibited in group shows across North America, including the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis; the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati; Spencer Museum of Art in Kansas; 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, Minneapolis Institute of Art, DePaul Art Museum, Indiana University Art Museum, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Spencer Museum of Art, among others. 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.

Performance schedule (free and open to the public, non-theatrical*):

Friday, November 13, 4-8pm: Untitled (Pink Tube)

Tuesday, November 17, 4-6pm: Untitled Performance (Tabletop)

Friday, December 4, 4-8pm: Untitled Performance (Sewn Together)

Friday, December 18,4-8pm: Untitled (Pink Tube)

*non-theatrical: visit anytime during these hours, interact with the artists while they work