Exhibitions

David Leggett’s new mixed-media paintings wrestle with complicated feelings towards his two obsessions, painting and hip-hop, as he confronts race, sexuality, fame and class in humorous and ambiguous situations.

David Leggett’s ultra-vivid canvases mash-up a love-hate fascination with both machismo in hip-hop culture and the unyielding influence of 1980s German painters in current contemporary painting. No one is sacred in Leggett’s work – from Precious to Rick Ross to Gerhard Richter to the artist himself – his satirical images are often punctuated by barbed comedic one-liners, a strategy influenced by the stand-up comedians he listens to in the studio. Leggett his manipulation of cartoon imagery and caricature reveals the influence of Chicago Imagists like Karl Wirsum and Jim Nutt. His use of craft materials, however, complicates his relationship to painting as googly eyes, rhinestones, pom-poms, felt, glitter, gold and silver leaf add a layer of absurdity to Leggett’s reverence for his painting heroes. In the past year, Leggett’s studio suffered a devastating flood, destroying some 50 finished paintings. States Leggett: “When I saw all my paintings damaged from the leak I couldn’t help but notice how small the paintings were. I felt I wasn’t challenging myself. It felt like what I was doing wasn’t important.” This show, post-flood, will feature Leggett’s largest canvases to date.

Burr opens the show with a graphic depiction of a white woman performing a sex act on a black man contrasted with an image of Theo Huxtable, the lovable son from “The Cosby Show” (the 1980s are a recurring theme in this show). The title of the painting, “Burr” is swiped from rapper Gucci Mane to describe how much jewelry (ice) he sports. In this painting, Leggett uses the word to signify his attraction/repulsion to the gangsta culture that’s been prevalent in hip-hop for the past twenty years. As for “The Cosby Show” reference, Leggett states that he’s “curious why people aren’t putting the Theo Huxtable experience in paintings”.

The Chicago Dog pays homage to Sigmar Polke, the ‘80s German painter whom Leggett feels is slighted by current contemporary painters in favor of the cool machinations of Gerhard Richter. In this work, Leggett haphazardly stretches a large sheet of crumpled paper over an already-stretched canvas and on top, collages drawings of three white blondes (reminiscent of R. Crumb’s bawdy females), while sausage links tumble down the canvas across the women’s faces, a classic ‘80s compositional strategy.

Dead and Stank is a salmon pink field punctuated by candy-red dots (a la Polke’s appropriated Ben-Day dots) with the title phrase scrawled faintly at the top. “Dead and Stank” is a phrase that means tired and old (coined by Leggett’s older sisters) and he utilizes it here to describe his uneasy relationship to both hip-hop and canonized German painters.

That’s were they made me at might take its color scheme from late ‘80s rap videos such as TLC’s “What About Your Friends” or DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince’s “Parents Just Don’t Understand”. Like the text scrawled atop the garish pinks and blues, a line from a Jay-Z tune “Niggaz tryin’ to bring the ‘80s back”, Leggett is trying to combine 1980’s painting techniques, from both the street and the white cube, on top of stained raw canvas, that Greenberg-ian ideal.

In A Natural Death, the word “Jackson” is sweepingly splayed across a dark canvas splashed with white and pink splotches – again mashing graff-style with AbEx technique and combining the myths of Jackson Pollock and Michael Jackson. The twist here, however, as denoted by the black glittery fake skull that is perched on top of the painting, is that Leggett finds himself more interested in the after-lifes of these artists – how their fame, after death, is now more intoxicating.

The show at Western Exhibitions focuses on recent paintings; his concurrent show at the Hyde Park Art Center (January 15 to April 29, 2012) highlights his drawing practice. For the past year, Leggett has created an artwork a day for his blog project Coco River Fudge Street, named after a fictitious location invented by the artist “to sound funny, dirty and tasty at the same time.” HPAC will present over 150 of these hilariously ribald drawings.

This is David Leggett’s first solo show at Western Exhibitions. Leggett’s work has been included in group shows at The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, Fecal Face Dot Gallery in San Francisco, 65 Grand in Chicago and in “Disinhibition: Black Art Blue Humor” at the Hyde Park Art Center. He was a recipient of the 3Arts Visual Artist Award in 2009. Leggett received his BFA from Savannah College of Art and Design and his MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007. He currently lives and works in Chicago.

For his fourth solo show, Plastic Blastula, at Western Exhibitions, Paul Nudd presents a selection of large-scale paintings depicting an ambiguous and chaotic prenatal cosmic universe, densely populated by a series of many rapidly transforming and colliding embryonic cleavages. Collectively they can be seen as a forceful and monumental continuation of many of Nudd’s aesthetic and formal obsessions: bodies in distress, molecular anxiety, blobs and biomorphic abstraction, disease, malformation, mutation and uncontrollable biological forces. The show opens with a free public reception from 5 to 8pm on Friday, April 19 and runs through June 1, 2019.

A blastula is a pre-embryonic cellular blob of matter that eventually morphs into a fetus. Plasticity similarly induces a development or transmutation of nature as plastic is created through a seemingly science-fiction derived embryonic mass production. Both blastulas and plastics can be deformed in any direction, but plastic differs from these pre-embryonic forms in that it is materially permanent and impenetrable. Plastic is unnatural and can be molded and stretched to fit in or around anything.  If birth is rupture, plastic birth is rupture without rupture.

In Nudd’s worldview, Plastic Blastula walks the line between cautionary apocalyptic tale and orgiastic revelry. His canvases are littered with malformed phosphorescent fetal forms and prenatal neo-punk youngsters of varying size, mass and scale that expressionistically exhume the unnatural falsehoods that exist at our most plasmic level.  Nudd’s new primal sludge runs slow and deep as artificially colored, viscous high-fructose globs of amniotic fluid pumped up on bovine growth chemicals and quasi-natural anti-caking agents. Through an enlarged scope that allows viewers to experience the imperceptible dilemma of our collective degrading existences, Nudd proclaims that the very essence of the human condition is fake.  To boot, Plastic Blastula shows us the potential younger and earlier stages in the lives of the radioactive, self-aware mutants that Nudd is known for.

Paul Nudd has had solo shows in Berlin, Detroit, Portland, OR, Brooklyn, Kansas City, Raleigh, NC and in Chicago at the Hyde Park Art Center, Bodybuilder & Sportsmen, and Dogmatic. His work has been included in group shows in Dusseldorf, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Houston, Denver and was included in Seeing Is a Kind of Thinking: A Jim Nutt Companion at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. His prodigious zine work can be found in several national artist book collections including the Museum of Modern Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Thomas J. Watson Library; Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Newark Public Library; National Academy of Design, New York; Indiana University and School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Paul Nudd received his MFA from the University of Illinois-Chicago in 2001. He is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and he lives in Berwyn, Illinois.

Stan Shellabarger presents new artist books and collages made from cyanotypes produced during full moons, summer and winter solstices, autumnal and vernal equinoxes and a solar eclipse.

In Gallery 2, Western Exhibitions will present a companion show, My informal printmaking residency with Stan Shellabarger, that features work by Leslie Baum, Elijah Burgher, kg, Kelly Kaczynski, Rachel Niffenegger, Paul Nudd, Steve Reinke, and Jeremy Tinder. The work in this show highlights Shellabarger’s curiosity and generosity of spirit in inviting Chicago artists he admires, most with no printmaking experience, to make prints with him at Spudnik Press Cooperative.

Both shows open with a free public reception on Friday, March 1 from 5 to 8pm.

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Beginning in 1994, Stan Shellabarger has executed over a dozen performances on solstices and equinoxes. Marking the longest and shortest days of the year, or those days with equal amounts of light and dark respectively, the duration of his art-making activities are often influenced, or even determined by, these celestial events.

In Shellabarger’s new body of work, comprised of a series of cyanotypes— a camera-less photographic process where chemically coated paper is exposed to light— full moons, the solstices, equinoxes and a solar eclipse are also the work’s light source, in addition to the inspiration for its imagery.

Waxing spheres, waning crescents, curvilinear lines and various geometric shapes are balanced, measured and aligned across much of the work, like an elegant equation. With their richly varied hue, tint and saturation, Shellabarger’s cyan blue monochromes can feel meditative. With his slow-media approach, through the creation of accordion-fold artist books and the piecework of his collages— the passage of time is further ritualized.

Shellabarger’s practice is often characterized by its relationship to the passage of time, which is infinitely more complex then a linear beginning, middle and end. The cyclical, repetitious arcs and ellipses of orbiting stars and planets are powerful symbols of that, and this body of work not only evokes them, it also harnesses their charged and ever-changing intervals.

Stan Shellabarger has work in the permanent collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Minneapolis Institute of Art, The National Gallery of Canada and the Newark Public Library. His work has been written about in Art in America, Artforum.com, The Chicago Tribune, Art in Print, Chicago Magazine and ArtSlant. His work has been shown at Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MAMAC) in Nice, France; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Contemporary Art Museum Raleigh, North Carolina; Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; and he’s 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; Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois; The Suburban in Oak Park; and the Center of Contemporary Art in St. Louis. Shellabarger received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and he lives and works in Chicago.

Even with gloves, collecting a tangled specimen of thorny vines into a box is a precarious situation. Like a frenzied cat, the thorns spur out in all directions, their firm stems snap, rebound, and unfurl. Attempting to curl them into more manageable forms is natural. And perilous. Consider yourself enchanted if you get through the entire endeavor without scratches or punctures. And once you think you’ve bound them? They pierce through the sides of the box. Refusing to be contained.

An exhibition of Black Metal artworks is a thorny occasion. Summoned by Amelia Ishmael, “Black Thorns in the White Cube” is a traveling exhibition presenting a selection of photography, prints, drawings, and artist books by eight contemporary artists who are influenced by the heavy, dark, and mystic obscurity of Black Metal music. Based in the United States and Europe participating artists include Alexander Binder (Stuttgart, Germany), Vincent Como (Brooklyn), Terence Hannum (Baltimore), Karlynn Holland (Brooklyn), Elodie Lesourd (Paris, France), Aaron Metté (Brooklyn), Christophe Szpajdel (Exeter, U.K.), Grant Willing (Brooklyn), and Tereza Zelenkova (London, England). Engaging with the symbols, history, and myths of the Black Metal music subculture, their images explore haunted Germanic forests, descents into the void, visual translations of sonic experiences, ontologies of Black Metal band logos, and barren western landscapes. Together their artwork contributes to the discourse currently occurring in Black Metal theory, examines the innovations and significance of contemporary Black Metal visual art, and offers an account of its critical disruptions.

Thick gloves are not required attire to view this exhibition, but we cannot hold ourselves accountable for any cerebral wounds inflicted during your experience.

Amelia Ishmael is an artist whose practice includes critiquing, historicising, teaching, and curating other artists’ practices. She has shared her gleanings on Black Metal and Contemporary Art at conferences internationally, including the Black Metal Theory Symposium in London and the Home of Metal Conference in Wolverhampton, U.K. Her writings have also appeared in ArtSlant, Art Papers, and Review. She received a BFA in Photography and New Media from the Kansas City Art Institute and a MA in Modern Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and was an Urban Culture Project studio resident.

The artists:

Alexander Binder is a self-taught photographer based in Stuttgart, Germany. Born on Halloween night in the Black Forest/Germany Binder’s lenses are mostly built from optical toys, old soviet cameras, prisms or plastic crap. His photographs have been exhibited at Viktor Wynd Fine Art (London), Sugar (New York), and Feinkunst Krüger (Hamburg). Binder’s images have also featured on album covers for Stephen O’Malley, Ural Umbo, and Black Mountain Transmitter.

Vincent Como is an artist and curator based in Brooklyn, NY. He received his BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art. He has exhibited at Proof Gallery (Boston), Western Exhibitions (Chicago), and VONZWECK (Chicago). Como has given presentations at the Black Metal Theory Symposium, the Contemporary Artists Books Conference, and the Bruce High Quality Foundation. In addition, he is co-founder of Horse Trader Gallery in Brooklyn.

Terence Hannum is an artist and musician based in Baltimore, MD. He earned his BFA from Florida Southern College and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Has had solo exhibitions at Western Exhibitions, the Chicago Cultural Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and group exhibitions at Locatie Z, The Hague (Netherlands), telephonebooth (Kansas City), and San Francisco Cinamatheque. Hannum has performed music solo, with Locrian and Unlucky Atlas, and in collaboration with Nicolas Lobo at De La Cruz Collection in Miami and Scott Treleaven at Kavi Gupta Gallery in Chicago.

Karlynn Holland is an artist and curator based in Brooklyn. She earned her BA from University of Chicago and a Certificate in Forensic Sculpture from the New York Academy of Art. She has exhibited at the Smart Museum of Art (Chicago) and the New Art Center (Boston). Holland has designed logos for Dysrhythmia, Astomatous, and Krallice, and has collaborated with Kai Althoff and Brandon Stosuy in the exhibition “Mirror Me” at Dispatch Gallery, NY. Her ongoing curatorial project “Dreams Were Made for Mortals” is presented by St. Vitus, NYC.

Elodie Lesourd is an artist and musician based in Paris, France. She completed her Post Graduate studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Nantes and earned her DNSEP from the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Lyon. Lesourd has exhibited at Olivier Robert Gallery (Paris), Minus Space (New York City), and Center for Contemporary Art (Lausanne, Switzerland). She has performed at her exhibitions at Les Eglises Contemporary Art Center (Chelles), MAC/VAL (Vitry-sur-Seine), and Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art (Paris). In addition, Lesourd was a guest editor to the May 2011 issue of C.S. Journal.

Aaron Metté is an artist and musician based in Brooklyn. He received a BFA from University of Louisville and a MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. He has exhibited at Michael Steinberg Fine Arts (New York) and Crane Arts Center (Philadelphia), and collaborated with Terry Adkins in the performance “Invocation to Bessie Smith” at P.S.1 MoMA Center for Contemporary Art. Metté also leads experimental sound classes and workshops at 3rd Ward.

Christophe Szpajdel is an artist based in Exeter, U.K. Specializing in Black and Death Metal design, his work includes logos for the bands Emperor, Moonspell, Wolves in the Throne Room, Nachtmystium, and Enthroned, and for the 2008 documentary “Until the Light Takes Us.” Szpajdel’s work has been published in the 2008 compendium “Logos from Hell” and his 2010 monograph “Lord of the Logos.” He has exhibited at the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis) and Studio Krimm (Berlin).

Grant Willing is a photographer based in Brooklyn. He earned his BFA from Parson’s New School for Design. His works has been exhibited at Interurban Gallery (Vancouver), Foam Fotografiemuseum (Amsterdam), and Corridor Gallery (Brooklyn). His artist books have featured at the NY Art Book Fair at PS1 MoMA, Indie Photobook Library at in Washington DC and Toronto, and Self Publish, Be Happy at the Photographer’s Gallery in London.

Tereza Zelenkova is a photographer based in London. She earned her BA from University of Westminster and is currently a MA candidate at the Royal College of Art. Her work has been exhibited by Jerwood Art Space (London), HotShoe Gallery(London), and the Chelsea Museum of Art (NY). Zelenkova’s photography series Supreme Vice was published by Morel Books.
BLACK THORNS IN THE BLACK BOX
curated by Amelia Ishmael and Bryan Wendorf

An experimental screening of moving images that resonate with the heavy, dark, and mystic obscurity of Black Metal music

Artists: Annie Feldmeier Adams for Locrian (Chicago), Gast Bouschet & Nadine Hilbert (Brussels, Belgium), Una Hamilton Helle (London, England), Devin Horan (Brooklyn), Hunter Hunt-Hendrix (Brooklyn), Ruth Jarman & Joe Gerhardt of Semiconductor (Brighton, England), Chris Kennedy (Toronto, Canada), Marianna Milhorat (Chicago), Jimmy Joe Roche (Baltimore), Shazzula for Cultus Sabbati (Brussels, Belgium), and Michaël Sellam (Paris, France)

When: Friday, March 23, 2012 at 7pm
Admission: $7-10 (sliding scale)
Location: The Nightingale
Address: 1084 N. Milwaukee, Chicago, IL

Black Thorns in the Black Box is a touring screening of experimental film and video by eleven contemporary artists whose work resonates with the heavy, dark, and mystic obscurity of Black Metal music. Its screening in Chicago on March 23, 2012 coincides with the gallery exhibition Black Thorns in the White Cube-on view March 16 through April 14 at Western Exhibitions.

Based throughout Northern America and Europe, the participating artists include Annie Feldmeier Adams for Locrian (Chicago), Gast Bouschet & Nadine Hilbert (Brussels, Belgium), Una Hamilton Helle (London, England), Devin Horan (Brooklyn), Hunter Hunt-Hendrix (Brooklyn), Ruth Jarman & Joe Gerhardt of Semiconductor (Brighton, England), Chris Kennedy (Toronto, Canada), Marianna Milhorat (Chicago), Jimmy Joe Roche (Baltimore), Shazzula for Cultus Sabbati (Brussels, Belgium), and Michaël Sellam (Paris, France). This screening of Black Thorns in the Black Box is organized into three parts-the underground, the earth, and the heavens-according to the three branches of Medieval concepts of music-musica mundana, musica humana, and musica instrumentalis-to explore how Black Metal has permeated all known spheres of creation.

About the curators:

Amelia Ishmael is an artist whose practice includes critiquing, historicising, teaching, and curating other artists’ practices. Her current projects include the traveling art exhibition “Black Thorns in the White Cube” (currently on view at Paragraph Gallery in Kansas City, MO) and co-editing and curating pages for the academic journal Helvete. She studied studio art and art history at the Kansas City Art Institute and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and has published articles on contemporary art with The WIRE, Art21.com, ArtSlant Chicago, and Art Papers.

Bryan Wendorf co-founded the Chicago Underground Film Festival in 1994 and remains its Programmer and Artistic Director. He has served on the board of directors of IFP Chicago and has curated film programs including Conversations At The Edge at the Gene Siskel Film Center (Chicago), Transmediale (Berlin) and the Revelation Film Festival (Perth). He studied fine art at Columbia College Chicago, and has written articles about film, music, comics and popular culture for a variety of publications including New City, Indiewire, It’s Only A Move!, and Wormwood Chronicles

More here: http://www.facebook.com/BlackThornsintheBlackBox

Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present our second solo show with RICHARD HULL. His new series of paintings recombines the imagery of horses’ tails and the Klein bottle from recent works into ecstatic abstract portraits resembling exploding flowers. The show opens on Friday, April 20, 2012 with a free public reception from 5 to 8pm and will run through May 16th, 2012. Gallery hours are Wednesday through Saturday, 11am to 6pm and by appointment.

Since 2005, in paintings, drawings and prints, Richard Hull has been re-working a kidney-shaped form derived from a horse’s tail. In his last show at Western Exhibitions in 2010 the tail/kidney was doubled, influenced by the concept of a Klein bottle, a non-orientable surface with no identifiable “inner” and “outer” sides. This allowed Hull to explore spatial relationships, both metaphorically and formally, between the geometric dualities of empty and full spaces. In these new paintings, he doubles and triples and quadruples the tail/kidney shapes; now resembling looping flower petal forms, using them as building blocks for a sort of portrait. The bulbous loops are accentuated by minute, repetitive, often concentric actions within the large masses.

Humid, earthy colors dominate, reinforcing the corporeal sensibility in the head-like images. Ruby red grapefruit swim with deep crimsons, dancing with fecund browns. Subtle bits of impasto clash with oily, smudgy swooshes that look almost like highly refined finger-painting. This particularly delicious effect is achieved by transparent oil paint wobbly traversing over beeswax, a sophisticated technique that gives the appearance of sweaty immediacy. His “heads” rest on angular props, something akin to furniture.

Hull views the images as stolen portraits, each with different personalities. The imagery is possibly borrowed from Velázquez’s “Las Meninas” masterpiece from the 1600’s. A reproduction of the famous Spanish painting sits on a stack of magazines in his studio and the artist admits that it may have subconsciously affected his color choices; the flowery bonnets and elaborate ruffles in the clothing may have found their way into the exuberant forms in Hull’s canvases. Giuseppe Arcimboldo, the Italian painter from the 1500s is another unmistakable influence on Hull’s current practice, as his portrait heads were composed by piling images of fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish and books.

Richard Hull’s paintings, drawings and prints are in the collections of several museums including The Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Smithsonian Museum, Washington, D.C.; Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and The Smart Museum, Chicago. He has exhibited his work at The Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City; The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT; Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, OH; Portland Art Museum, OR; The Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland, OH; Herron Gallery of Art, Indianapolis, IN; Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI; Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Evanston IL; and The Painting Center, New York, NY. He joined the legendary Phyllis Kind Gallery before graduating from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago in 1979 and had numerous shows in both her New York City and Chicago locations. Recent exhibitions include a solo show at Wake Forest University, a mini-survey at the Rockford Art Museum, and the group show, “Somebody Else’s Dream” curated by John McKinnon at the Hyde Park Art Center. Hull recently interviewed legendary Chicago painters Jim Nutt and Gladys Nillson for BOMB Magazine and has an upcoming collaboration with jazz/improvised music master Ken Vandermark, a 1999 MacArthur Fellow, at the DePaul Museum of Art. Hull lives and works in Chicago.

Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present our third solo show with John Parot, whose poetic investigations into gay urban living manifest themselves in vibrant paintings, collages and sculptures, and psychedelic visions, personal reflection and Warrior symbols prevail amidst idiosyncratic patterning and geometries. The show opens on Friday, May 25, 2012 with a free public reception from 5 to 8pm and will run through June 30, 2012. Gallery hours are Wednesday through Saturday, 11am to 6pm and by appointment.

In John Parot’s new show “Excavation,” he further explores his fascination of ancient Egyptian tomb art as well as his love of the psychedelic age. Parot’s large-scale works and paintings evoke remnants from a lost burial chamber – he urges the viewer to focus on their patterns and color, trying to seduce with their possible histories. His intricate patterns of gouache, often lovingly painted on smiling disembodied heads, clipped from fashion and porno mags, carry both tribal and retro-futuristic connotations. He has now enlarged this signature patterning from his often-intimate scale to greater dimensions by painting directly on thick roofing paper. The patterns become objects in and of themselves and the results, for the viewers, are akin to walking into one of Parot’s drawings. The new works touch upon psychedelic visions and personal discovery. With his references to tomb artifacts Parot conjures a more reflective tone, taking stock of his desires and identity.

John Parot’s work has been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Jack Hanley Gallery in San Fransisco, Locust Projects in Miami, and Light & Sie in Dallas and it has been discussed in BUTT Magazine, Artcritical, Beautiful/Decay, the Art:21 blog, The New Yorker, Time Out Chicago, Artnet Magazine, NYFA Quarterly and Art on Paper. His 2010 show at Western Exhibitions was reviewed in The Chicago Tribune and New City. His 2007 show at Western Exhibitions was named on of the top five shows of the year by New City. Parot is a 2004 recipient of grants from the Illinois Art Council and Artadia. He received his MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and he lives and works in Los Angeles.