Exhibitions

Conceived in the spirit of George Condo, Ub Iwerks, The Hairy Who, construction-site warning signage, and a vast assortment of other visual elements, Ryan Travis Christian’s new series of graphic graphite drawings, “The River Rats”, are inspired by outwardly surreal personal narratives. The drawings are fueled by the absurdity of life in his small hometown and take the “River Rats” as endlessly fascinating subjects for both studies and stories. Recently waxing nostalgic for these ridiculous characters and instances, the pieces have been created in the last 5 months with recurring themes of, but not limited to; fires, wheelchairs, heavy petting, fireworks, drug and alcohol usage, rivers, boats, beat up cars, death, homes, speed bumps, and cats.

Over the past three years Christian has developed an idiosyncratic style of drawing: densely layered intensities of graphite pencil, graphic yet amorphous stylistic flourishes, in high contrast and slow motion, and executed in a cartoon y/ comic-esque style, but in an understated sort of way. Working in a stream- of-conscious fashion, Christian inserts his signature characters into hazy sfumato-esque landscapes and skewed spaces alike that repeatedly melt and coalesce.

This is Ryan Travis Christian’s first solo show at Western Exhibitions. Christian has had solo shows at Guerrero Gallery in San Francisco Ebersmoore in Chicago, and has been included in group show at Show and Tell in Toronto, Eric Firestone Gallery in East Hampton, MAMA in Rotterdam, Baer Ridgway in San Francisco, Space 1026 in Philadelphia and Synchronicty in Los Angeles and has curated exhibitions at many of these same venues. In 2010 Christian organized a three-part exhibition, “The Power of Selection, Parts 1, 2, and 3” at Western Exhibitions, the goal of which was to increase the circulation of contemporary artwork seen in Chicago by showing works by out of town and/or up-and-coming artists. New City named Christian as one of Chicago’s “Breakout Artists” for 2010 and his work has been written about in Daily Serving, Beautiful/Decay and The Chicago Reader. He lives and works in the Chicagoland area.

In Gallery 1, Stan Shellabarger, a performance artist known for his 12-hour long walks made in celebration of Equinoxes and Solstices, will show several printed objects and artist-book hybrids that are derived from his continued interest in issues relating to the body, the Earth and for devising alternative methods of drawing.

The centerpiece of the show is a long accordion-fold artist book, presented stretched out across a low-slung pedestal in the middle of the gallery, features a 6-color reductive woodcut made by Shellabarger’s repetitive pacing atop wooden panels while wearing special boots, with coarse grit sandpaper affixed to their soles. For his “Dragging Book”, another accordion-fold piece, Shellabarger hung 10 steel plates on a wall and while wearing sandpaper-covered gloves, dragged his hands across the plates while pacing parallel to the wall. He printed the plates like one would a drypoint, in red ink in an edition of 10, and affixed one of the steel plates on the cover of each book in the edition. Two colorful reduction woodcuts resemble welcome mats, where Shellabarger again created the image by stepping on the wooden substrate with sandpaper-covered boots. Western Exhibitions will also show two framed black-and-white documentary-style photographs from Shellabarger’s first walking performance — he walked intermittently in a circular path for an entire year in 1993.

Shellabarger will also show a selection of new Walking Books, a body of work he introduced in his last show at Western Exhibitions in 2008, in which he marries his performance and book-making impulses by pacing on long sheets of rag paper with graphite-soled shoes. His footsteps create a luminous graphite/gray drawing that betrays the pattern of the surface trod upon. The verso side of the drawing simultaneously becomes a beautiful blind embossment of this same surface. He folds the paper accordion style and affixes the ends to waxed MDF panels that function as the covers of the book.

This is Stan Shellabarger’s third solo show at Western Exhibitions. Photographs from Stan Shellabarger’s first-ever walking performance, “One Year Circle, Easton, Maine” from 1993, were recently included in a group show at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MAMAC) in Nice, France, alongside performance luminaries Marina Abramovic, Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, Valie Export, Paul McCarthy, among others. His 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, collaborative shows with his husband Dutes Miller at Western Exhibitions in 2007 and 2010 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. Shellabarger lives and works in Chicago.

RACHEL NIFFENEGGER and PAUL NUDD traffic in arresting and grotesque imagery, depicting the body in ridiculous levels of distress. Though their goals differ — Niffenegger’s heads and body parts suffer damages from external sources; Nudd’s figures seem diseased, comically so, from within — both artists wrestle an indelible, even beautiful power from repulsive and revolting sources and materials.

Rachel Niffenegger’s sculptures and paintings transcribe the figure in transitional states: between being and ghost image; statuesque and the formless; two-dimensional and three-dimensional spaces. Her effigies are created, manipulated and destroyed through ritual; torsos are cracked, propped up and covered, faces are absorbed and imbedded in cloth, and paint is picked off and reapplied to appendages. These objects are material gestures of the psyche fulfilling the necessity to make solid objects as a permeable and porous body. Materials travel between objects and are generated through discarded works as she employs spray-painted polystyrene, sawdust, concrete, ash, hair, plaster, and paint skins.

Paul Nudd’s new large vertical drawings depict cartoonishly terrifying mutants, alien/human mash-ups besotted with tumors, warts, lesions, growths, male and female genitalia and mis-placed pubic hair. The slightly-larger than human full-body portraits feel like amalgamated bastard spawn of Nudd’s gross-out heroes and influences: Paul McCarthy, Öyvind Fahlström, Peter Saul, Ivan Albright and of course, Jim Nutt, along with popular sources, movies like “The Fly”, “Dead Alive”, “The Toxic Avenger” and The Thing from the Fantastic Four. Nudd’s hermaphroditic figures (“Most of the action goes on between the legs”, per the artist) map bizarre physical characteristics with green being a prevalent color, representing life, growth, bacteria, mold, fungus and monsters, Frankenstein and the Hulk. These radioactive icons find redemption in disease, being self-aware bodies in a paranoid age, reveling in genetic mutations, bad pharmaceuticals and environmental degradation.

Chicago Magazine named Rachel Niffenegger Chicago’s best emerging artist in 2010 and New City named her one of “Chicago’s Next Generation of Image Makers” in 2010, this after naming her the “Best Painter Under 25” in 2009. She currently has work in Seeing is a Kind of Thinking: A Jim Nutt Companion, Museum of Contemporary Art, in Chicago and has been included in exhibitions at Ceri Hand Gallery in Liverpool, England and in Chicago at Corbett vs. Dempsey, the Sullivan Galleries at SAIC, The Post Family, and the Hyde Park Art Center. Niffenegger, born in Evanston in 1985, received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently an MFA candidate at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

Paul Nudd currently has a large mutant drawing in Seeing is a Kind of Thinking: A Jim Nutt Companion, Museum of Contemporary Art, in Chicago and has been included in exhibitions in New York, Dusseldorf, Kansas City and Chicago. Abraham Ritchie, writing in ArtSlant called his recent curatorial effort, “Heads on Poles”, organized with Scott Wolniak, “the Inadvertant Chicago Biennial”. His prodigious zine work can be found in several national artist book collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Microsoft, Seattle; National Academy of Design, New York; Indiana University and School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Paul Nudd, born in 1976 in Harpenden, England and received his MFA from the University of Illinois-Chicago in 2001. He lives and works in Berwyn, Illinois.

In the “The Lightweight”, the signature work in JOSÉ LERMA’s first solo show at Western Exhibitions, Lerma screenprinted a cartoon, in varnish, on a section of a large reflective curtain (1) that is stretched to look like a painting, an image that can only be seen when one is in-line with the light source. The cartoon, from the French satirical newspaper Le Charivari in 1880, refers to the Salon Exhibition of that year; its translated caption reads: A painter whose work is badly placed installed a telescope so that art lovers can see his picture for two sous (2) …which he gladly gives them.

The telescope in the cartoon image points toward a section of the reflective curtain where Lerma has affixed colorful cut-out circles taken from his old sweaters that are ridden with moth-holes (3). This image and organization of painting materials piqued Lerma’s interest in the idea, that at the time of the Salon, reputation (prestige) and physical placement of a work were the same thing, of which Lerma equates with the contemporary idea of credentialism.

Lerma continues to expand upon his already expansive vision of painting for the second piece in the show, titled “Rampant Mid-Careerism”, by stretching a Vietnam-era training parachute over several blank canvases that are hung salon-style and a larger photograph of a painting. A larger canvas with the text Lord Landsdowne (4) scribbled on it in large blue letters, also wrapped within the parachute, rests on a synthesizer, set to arpeggio-mode, playing random glass harmonica (5) sounds.

“The Lightweight” runs in Gallery 2 at Western Exhibitions, located in Chicago’s West Loop gallery district, from April 8 to May 14. José Lerma’s recent solo show at Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York was reviewed in Artforum.com and he has shown at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Milwaukee Art Museum; El Museo del Barrio, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit; and the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture, and he has shown internationally with recent solo gallery exhibitions in Seoul, Berlin and Madrid. Lerma was born in Spain and raised in Puerto Rico, studied political science at Tulane and law at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, before switching his major to art and earning his MFA. He was granted a year-long residency in Puerto Rico, attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and the CORE Program (affiliated with the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, TX). José Lerma lives and works in New York and Chicago, where he is on faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

(1)
The reflective fabric, made by 3M, is used for night safety. The curtain is a classic motif for many painters (Richter’s gray curtains for example) due to the story of Parrhasius and Lerma is interested in reversing its function (light suppression) to, if not light emission, a hyper-reflection. This idea of being aligned with light picks up on a parallel narrative to a strand of positivist ideas in art and painting in particular. States Lerma: “The curtains can go from dull, to sublime, to cheap depending on one’s physical relation to it…that is my favorite quality about them.”

(2)
The sous, or solidus, is a pure gold coin weighing 1/60th of a pound, introduced by Diocletian around 301 AD. By 1880 in France, the term had come to mean an almost worthless coin.

(3)
Moths live, and often die, for the pursuit of light. They also eat the proteins of foodstains in our garments. The moth-holes in Lerma’s sweaters have been blown up and turned into abstractions.

(4)
Lord Landsdowne was a professional wrestler who was the first to truly combine sports and theater. Originally from Ohio, he began dressing as an English lord in the 1920s, was accompanied to the ring by two valets and was the first to use a soundtrack when entering the ring.

(5)
The Glass Harmonium sound was invented by Benjamin Franklin and in the 18th and early 19th century, it was believed to induce madness. Because of its frequency, it is difficult to locate the sound of the Glass Harmonica spatially.

Heads on Poles

The iconic display of a head, severed and mounted on a stick, is ubiquitous as a representation of ominous primordial savagery. Cliché in its references to cannibalistic ritual, human sacrifice or cautionary symbolism, its general structure also contains rich connotations to formal art- a 3-dimensional image-object, laden with material and conceptual possibility.

For the purposes of this project, curators Paul Nudd and Scott Wolniak have adopted the concept of Heads on Poles as an open guideline to direct broad responses from a large group of artists. Over four dozen artists, ranging widely in discipline and style, were invited to produce sculptures loosely based on the formula of Head On Pole, in any material. These totem-objects will be simply placed, as casually clustered bodies, throughout the main gallery space of Western Exhibitions.

Additional artists have been asked to respond to the same theme with graphic works for a concurrent print project.

Through collective effort and the idea that creative freedom can occur within structural uniformity, Nudd and Wolniak hope to achieve a complex and immersive spectacle. Diverse interpretations are anticipated, with possible outcomes such as conceptual objects, portraiture, obscenity, abstraction, political gestures, humor and horror. With no attempt on the part of the curators to control submissions after the initial call for participation, the final group of works will be a surprise for all.

 

ARTISTS:

Mike Andrews

Ali Bailey

Jason Robert Bell & Marni Kotak

Nick Black

Daniel Bruttig

Andrew Burkholder

Lilli Carré

Joseph Cassan

Mariano Chavez

Ryan Travis Christian

Vincent Como

Bruce Conkle

Jean-Louis Costes

Vincent Dermody

Mike Diana

Edie Fake

Scott Fife

R.E.H. Gordon

John Hankiewicz

Keith Herzik

Carol Jackson

Bob Jones

Chris Kerr

David Leggett

Mike Lopez

Teena McClelland

Dutes Miller

Miller & Shellabarger

Joe Miller

Andy Moore

Max Morris

Rachel Niffenegger

William J. O’Brien

Onsmith

David Paleo

John Parot

Michael Rea

Tyson Reeder

Dan Rhodehamel

Bruno Richard

John Riepenhoff

Kristen Romaniszak

Steve Ruiz

David Sandlin

Mike Schuh

Mindy Rose Schwartz

David Shrigley

Edith Sloat & Sophie Greenstalk

Edra Soto

Ryan Standfest

William Staples

Ben Stone

Bill Thelen

Jeremy Tinder

Sean Townley

Jim Trainor

Anne Van der Linden

Jason Villegas

Sarah Beth Woods

Aaron Wrinkle