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Exhibitions


Adriane Herman

May 25, 2012 - June 30, 2012

Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present our third solo show with ADRIANE HERMAN. 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.

For the past several years, Adriane Herman has taken artistic inspiration from her collection of over 1000 found, gifted, and bartered “to do” lists, re-presenting these scraps of paper on a significantly larger scale in a variety of media, from inlaid burnishing clay panels; screenprints; photo-etchings; embossments; vinyl decals; to virtually any mediated medium. This re-creation of other people’s list reveals, to her, certain universal aspects of humanity, such as our common need for food, shelter, water, human companionship, entertainment, and — in most cultures — toilet paper. Herman’s unique and editioned objects trace the trajectory from intention to action, highlighting and monumentalizing the tasks that vie for our time, energy, and attention.

Herman states:
Since lists are generally written with the self in mind as intended reader, they embody honest, unfiltered documentation of what humans today are doing (or at least intending to do) with our most precious resources of time, energy, and attention. Forces such as advertising are still in play, as manifest by the prevalence of brand loyalty in many of the thousand plus lists I have collected. However, by and large, sifting through these intimate yet anonymous documents of human aspirations, procrastination, and accomplishments both large and small reveal us to be — depending on your perspective — reassuringly individualized or damnably idiosyncratic, despite shared experience and struggles.

Anchoring the show will be “Coping Mechanics,” an ink-jet print stitched together from nine photographs that measures 16.25 x 70 inches. It depicts nine of the most personal and revelatory, even voyeuristic, lists in Herman’s collection, each of which directly or indirectly reveals its writer trying to deal with something challenging. Some of these are quite literal and self-explanatory, while others operate more abstractly and suggestively when taken out of context. “Dually Noted” is a wallpaper installation created collaboratively with Brian Reeves, which consists of a grid of ink-jet reproductions of lists from Herman’s vast archive. Other works in the show re-present individual lists, such as “Home,” a lithograph that utilizes the transparency of Japanese paper to “note” the contents of both front and back of a hand-written list of items the writer wished to retrieve from his mother’s house after she passed away. The screenprint “Passion Aggression” counters with humor, valorizing a mother’s enumerated list of tasks her offspring had better accomplish “or else” – signed “Have a nice day. Love, Mom.”

Adriane Herman’s recent solo shows include the Kansas City Jewish Museum of Contemporary Art; Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan; Weymouth Mercantile in Nova Scotia; Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita, Kansas; and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockport, Maine. Recent group shows include A+D Gallery at Columbia College Chicago; International Print Center in New York City; Adam Baumgold Gallery in NYC; the Portland Museum of Art in Maine; and the The Dalarnas Museum, in Falun, Sweden, among several others. Her print portfolio, “Sticky Situations” was recently written about by Susan Tallman in Art in Print. Herman’s work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of Art, Adobe Systems in San Francisco, Hallmark Cards in Kansas City, the Herbert F Johnson Museum of American Art in Ithaca, New York, the Progressive Corporation in Cleveland, and several other collections. Herman has lectured at over fifty institutions and lives and works in Portland, Maine.


Indirect Observation

July 7, 2012 - August 18, 2012

Western Exhibitions is pleased to present “Indirect Observation”, a 3-person group show featuring works based on idiosyncratic observations and notational processes, that will include embellished found object artist books by Sally Agee, hand-drawn maps of Cincinnati by Courttney Cooper, and artist books – essentially illustrated novels and novellas – by Andy Moore.

The show opens on Saturday, July 7, 2012with a free public reception from 5 to 8pm and will run through August 18, 2012 (and by appointment until September 1). Gallery hours are Wednesday through Saturday, 11am to 6pm and by appointment.

SALLY AGEE has been making and exhibiting work in the New York City metropolitan area since the early 1980s and is known for her hooked rug “paintings” that address issues of gender politics and conflicts as played out in the mass media. Currently she makes artist books, as she recently stated: “Passing by a dumpster on a street in Brooklyn one day, I saw a discarded book, apparently a diary of an unknown teenager. It reminded me of my own adolescence. There was humor, it was full of feeling, it was poignant. I couldn’t put it down. Its anonymity drew me in. I started embellishing it, and soon it was mine.”

Marshall Weber, curator and creative director of Booklyn, talks about this first artist book:
Found on the Street” – “it is nothing less than a 21st Century illuminated manuscript. Agee’s elaborate treatments (she calls them embellishments) of a diary of a young girl writing from the 1980’s are empathetically sincere and incredibly evocative. The artwork is an enigmatic mix of naïve and intelligent urban folk approaches that seem tuned in to the tradition of mediaeval illuminations and the exuberance of contemporary underground comix. It’s almost as if Robert Crumb, Maira Kalman and Jean Pucelle were channeled into one artist.

COURTTNEY COOPER draws large elaborate and exuberant maps of Cincinnati, by hand, from memory. Gluing together pieces of found paper from his job at a grocery store, Cooper’s obsessive drawings, rendered with ballpoint pens, map out neighborhoods in his hometown in remarkable detail. He often walks the streets of the city, committing all the places he visits to memory, a process that he has been using since he was a child. His maps depict more than just streets and monuments, often addressing the season in which it was made, current events and projects occurring locally, such as the WEBN fireworks or Oktoberfest or the Taste of Cincinnati, even going back into the drawings to update them when new buildings are constructed or torn down. Throughout the sprawling maps are written thoughts and phrases hidden beneath the landscape and revealed within the open white space of the paper.

Cooper has exhibited extensively in the Greater Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky area including the Contemporary Art Center and The Carnegie Visual and Performing Arts Center, Covington, KY and is a studio resident at Visionaries + Voices, a non-profit arts organization that provides support for artists with disabilities, offering them professional studio space and the opportunity them to grow professionally and personally. Courttney Cooper mini-documentary by V +V work-study intern Sam Pennybacker:
http://vimeo.com/36694123

ANDY MOORE’s intensely illustrated artist books blur boundaries between fiction and autobiography, novels and diaries, as his characters (stand-ins for Moore himself?) pursue answers to their unremitting ambiguities and doubts relative to community, God, love, parenthood and daily life. Pages in Moore’s books start with ink drawings; he then adds colorful, even garish washes of paint; and finishes with text that is heavily worked and re-worked, evidenced by layers of scotch tape and correction fluid. Covers can be just as striking – “Brian’s Story”, his follow-up to the epic tome “John’s Luv”, wears a disassembled teddy bear as front and back cover.

It’s impossible not to feel a connection while leafing through Andy Moore’s thick book, John’s Luv (2003-2010), a definite highlight of the exhibition and a work that could easily take hours exploring. The book itself defies the category “artist’s book,” which still seems too reproducible for this unique multi-media endeavor. Every page is illuminated in a variety of styles and media, which unexpectedly recalls the work of William Blake. Bandaged with tape and subjected to revisions upon revisions, like memory itself, the book chronicles John’s life and his attempts come to grips with the biggest questions in life: God, death, relationships to loved ones and the community, art and how to live in a conscious way. The narrative is so honest, so personal that it is hard to tell where John leaves off and Moore begins, which is a part of the point.
— From Abraham Ritchie from his review of “People Don’t Like to Read” in ArtSlant, July 2011

Andy Moore’s recent solo show at Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois-Chicago was reviewed in the Chicago Tribune, ArtSlant and Chicago Art Review. His first show in Chicago was at Beret International and he has since shown in many local venues, including Kavi Gupta Gallery; TBA Exhibition Space; Western Exhibitions; and Dogmatic Gallery. From 2000–2004, Moore was one of four co-owners of the artist-run space Deluxe Project in Chicago. Andy Moore has an MFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago and lives and works in Chicago.


Looker

September 7, 2012 - October 20, 2012

In his third solo show with Western Exhibitions, GEOFFREY TODD SMITH returns with a group of vivid, intensely patterned abstract paintings in a show titled “Looker,” which references both the viewer’s participation and the attractiveness of each painting. The show opens on Friday, September 7 with a free public reception from 5 to 8pm.

Smith employs seemingly simple structures in his work. Common geometric elements – circles, ellipses, ovals and dots – inhabit a tight grid in visually confounding and colorfully explosive compositions. In addition to his signature intricate and intimate gel pen patterns atop gouache-painted shapes, Smith has begun to experiment with a variety of surfaces and paints – adding texture, dimensionality and glossy enamel – in a new series of paintings on panel.

Within Smith’s colorful, fetishistic surfaces lurks a devotion to the challenges of abstract beauty and its ability to confound expectation and provoke desire. Smith searches, meanders and daydreams to find vibrant and colorful discoveries to entice the audience, of which he is also a member. Each composition is treated like a game with self-imposed rules and limitations regarding color and form. Though there is a grid present, its rigid structure and predictability operates as a foe to Smith’s often erratic and unplanned compositions. The hard fought arrangements of directions, distractions, material integrations and interferences result in a record of the struggle.

Two paintings in this show provide clues to Smith’s thought and working process. A Wester Easter (enamel, acrylic and gouache on panel, 20 x 16 inches) consists of four segments rotating around a central black form. Within this center shape, matte black voids contrast with glossy black dots that appear to rise above the surface. The surrounding sections string ellipses together to form stuttering stripes that alternate browns and grays with cool mint, cream and fleshy pinks. Zig-zagging strands of bright glossy blue glide lightly above the softer tones, acting as symbolic energy emanating from the dark mysterious center.

Sneak Charmer, an all-gouache painting divided into thirds, references the horizon with its alternating bands of cold blues and earthy browns. The middle segment, like a storm system cutting through a calm sky, provides interference with harsh bands of interspersing blues and grays. Each third of the painting has additional layers of vibrating strands that both direct and distract. Wavy repetitive bands stream across the top, signaling a loss of horizontal hold. Colorful strands that end in arrow points punctuate the other two sections of the painting. This complex composition strives for a disjointed, hypnotic experience.

Geoffrey Todd Smith’s intensely patterned and intricate painting/drawing hybrids have recently been included in solo shows at Luis de Jesus Los Angeles and Nudashank in Baltimore and in group shows at The Green Gallery in Milwaukee, the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, Geoffrey Young Gallery in Massachusetts and Baer Ridgway in San Francisco. He will have work up concurrently with this show in “Afterimage” at the DePaul Art Museum, running through November 18. His work is in the collections of Hallmark Inc. in Kansas City, the Jager Collection in Amsterdam, the South Bend Art Museum in Indiana and Harper College in Illinois and has been written about in art ltd, the Chicago Tribune, and Chicago Magazine, who called him one of the “rising stars we should be collecting now”. Smith lives and works in Chicago.


Twelve Galleries Project

July 7, 2012 - August 18, 2012

Curated by:
Alicia Chester
Karolina Gnatowski
Kate Ruggeri

The Quarterly Site #11: Line-of-Site exhibition hosted by Western Exhibitions uses the term men as an inceptive concept. For this installment of the Quarterly Site Series, Twelve Galleries Project invites three women to curate an exhibition. Rather than reversing the dynamic of the male gaze upon women or the audience upon artwork, the curators complicate and expand these expected lines-of-sight to encompass collaborative relationships between artists. Whereas a “line-of-sight” is the imaginary line between an observer’s eye and a distant point, a “line-of-site” is the trajectory from an artillery piece to its target, denoting a physical rather than visual connection. Thusly, Quarterly Site #11: Line-of-Site pairs artist duos Sarah Belknap & Joseph Belknap and Christalena Hughmanick & Sarah Jones. Each collaborative uses physical objects and performances to publicly display and mediate personal relationships.

Twelve Galleries Project began as a roving exhibition series featuring the work of emerging artists over the course of one year. With each new month, a new location was selected and a new gallery was formed, producing 12 site-specific exhibitions from JANUARY all the way through to DECEMBER gallery.
For its second transitory venture, Twelve Galleries Project presents the Quarterly Site Series. The Quarterly Site Series focuses its attention to the efforts of curators and current Chicago galleries. Every quarter over a three year period, within an existing Chicago gallery, three curators will collectively organize a themed exhibition. Specific to the Quarterly Site Series is collaboration. With the exception of a predetermined theme that is conducive to varied interpretation, there are no rules. Because there are no rules, each group of curators has the possibility to develop a unique model of curatorial practice.

Quarterly Site #11: Line-of-Site is the second to last exhibition of the Quarterly Site Series.

For more information, please visit: www.twelvegalleriesproject.org


Fashion

September 7, 2012 - October 20, 2012

Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present a new video by Josh Mannis in Gallery 2 in a solo show that will run from September 7 to October 20, 2012, with an opening reception September 7th from 5-8 pm.  Gallery hours are Wednesday through Saturday, 11am to 6pm and by appointment.

In Fashion, Mannis performs a repetitive dance to a house music soundtrack wearing a black short sleeve shirt, a pair of Dockers, a windbreaker and a mask. The homemade costume is used as a prop with which, and a space within which choreography are improvised, refined and re-presented. The image of the performance is copied and layered several times over so that several dancers populate the screen in staggered succession; altogether creating varied graphic effects on an all-black background.

In a review of his recent show at Anthony Greaney Gallery in Artforum, Nuit Banai writes:

… Mannis is most impressive in his video work, through which he embraces the simulacral as the very condition of the creative act. . Mannis uses irreverent pastiche to reprocess the ciphers of contemporary experience and carve out an original image zone where new rules might yet be formulated. Yet he is also acutely aware that in an era when “acting out” is a democratic prerogative facilitated by such distribution platforms as You Tube and Tumblr, the gallery still functions as “the law” by sanctioning the name of art.

Josh Mannis’ solo show at Anthony Greaney Gallery, Boston, MA, in spring 2012 was reviewed in Artforum, Art Papers and The Boston Globe. Solo exhibitions include Variations, Thomas Solomon Gallery, Los Angeles (2010); Dawn of Man, 40000, Chicago (2006) and Iron Eagle, Small A Projects, Portland, OR (2006). Mannis was included in No Soul for Sale, with the Suburban (Oak Park, IL) and Milwaukee International (Milwaukee, WI) at the Tate Modern, London (2010); Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock & Roll Since 1967, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, (traveling 2007-09) and For Those About to Rock, the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh (2005). He received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005. Mannis lives and works in Los Angeles, California.


The Secret Choreographer: For Lost Walls

October 27, 2012 - December 8, 2012

Western Exhibitions is pleased to present our third solo show with Nicholas Frank, The Secret Choreographer: For Lost Walls (After Brätsch & UB) with Nicholas Frank. This show, a single channel video installation refracted into mutliple images by sculptural intervention, opens on SATURDAY, October 27 with a free public reception from 5 to 8pm.

The Secret Choreographer’s current project is to haunt the spaces of art shows just as they pass into art history. Dances are composed to correspond to the work featured as backdrop, stage set, prop, foil and director. History is itself a complex choreography; The Secret Choreographer embodies its movements.
This first installment in a new sequence of The Secret Choreographer’s ongoing activities, the video For Lost Walls (After Brätsch & UB) features a dance designed for its backdrop, a suspended Kerstin Brätsch painting-on-clear acrylic backlit by a portable tanning-light set in place by United Brothers; the event from which this ‘set’ derives occurred at the Green Gallery West in Milwaukee in 2011. As with other current entries in The Secret Choreographer’s (TSC) performance/video document sequence, For Lost Walls performs the dual purpose of memorializing a fleeting show/performance/event now lost to history, and catalogues the process of observing the transformation of a present event into historical consciousness. Likening this process itself to an act of choreography by a ‘secret’ director or unseen/unknowable collective entity, the dance-work of The Secret Choreographer mimics and refracts it.

Collaborator Nicholas Frank’s sculptural setting for the video is designed specifically to complexify the movement and perceptual equation set up by TSC’s scenario, to offer a framing device meant to bring the performance document into a ‘continuous present,’ Frank’s catch-all term for photographic representations of any sort, and for history’s photographic tendencies.

Frank has recently presented this installation at The Green Gallery East in Milwaukee and Lump Gallery in Raleigh, North Carolina. Amy White, reviewing the show for Raleigh’s Independent Weekly, provides an apt summation of the project:

The video is projected through a complex sculptural apparatus of upside down, L-shaped pedestals and Plexiglas, so that the projection is interrupted by luminous geometric lines and the phantom image of an unidentified abstract painting. The video appears in full form on one wall and refracts prismatically against other surfaces in the space, kind of the way histories are skewed by multiple retellings and false representations.

In addition to the recent Lump and The Green Gallery shows, Frank has shown at the John Riepenhoff Experience at Pepin Moore in Los Angeles, The Poor Farm in Manawa, Wis., the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art in Wisconsin, 47 Canal and Small A Projects (now Laurel Gitlen), both in New York and Tanzschuleprojects in Munich. Frank was the chief curator at the Institute of Visual Arts at UW-Milwaukee from 2006 to 2011 and is a co-founder of the Milwaukee International, creators of the Milwaukee International Art Fairs and the Dark Fairs. Frank recently wrote a catalog essay for Michelle Grabner’s retrospective at INOVA. He lives and works in Milwaukee, Wis.


Voting with your Pocketbook

October 27, 2012 - December 8, 2012

In his third solo show with Western Exhibitions, MARK WAGNER continues his exploration of the US Dollar as material, from cutting up the bill for elaborate collages, to drawing, painting, and printing on it. Subverting and subduing the almighty dollar thusly, the symbol reverts to its simplest identity… that of ink on paper.

The show opens on Saturday, October 27 with a free public reception from 5 to 8pm.

Portraits of the Barack Obama and Mitt Romney hang side by side, installed in a stylized voting booth. On close examination, viewers see that their faces are literally made of money. Cut up US dollar bills form their entirety… Federal Reserve seals become pupils, leaves and hollyhocks stand in for hair, framing and line-work twist to form the contours of each face. Given the materials used, it is unclear whether one should stuff a vote or a donation into the ballot box. “Voting with your Pocketbook” offers a critique of the US democratic process and its fixation on finance. Can a competition waged over ginormous campaign war-chests, PACs, and Super-PACs, really said to be democratic?

The exhibition hosts hundreds of overprinted and drawn on dollar bills. Some hang individually, others are taped together into larger sheets. Coarsely pixelated pop imagery, overprinted grids, bar graphs, and Rorschach ink blobs accompany pop poetry texts of consumption and redemption. All together the drawings emphasize that the US dollar and country of its origin represent vastly different things to different people.

Brooklyn based artist Mark Wagner has been referred to as “the Michael Jordan of glue” and “the greatest living collage artist”. His collage and artist books are collected by dozens of institutions. They have shown at Metropolitan Museum of Art, The National Portrait Gallery, The Getty, and The Walker Art Center. His monumental currency collage “Liberty” will be on view at the Haggerty Museum in Milwaukee from August 22nd to December 22nd, 2012.


In the Garden

December 14, 2012 - January 26, 2013

For his second solo show at Western Exhibitions, “In the Garden,” Dutes Miller presents an installation of new works on paper and sculptures that invokes an ecstatic vision of nature in which homosexuality is not only included but is the norm. Miller re-imagines Eden as gay cruising grounds, a carnal paradise populated by homosexual fauna that hunt one another amongst phallic flora. Although playful and imaginative, his recent work critically engage with the mythologies surrounding human sexuality.

The show opens on Friday, December 14 with a free public reception from 5 to 8pm.

Continuing his exploration of appropriated sexual imagery, Miller’s new works on paper consist of pages torn from gay porn magazines, which the artist has altered by painting over the men with acrylic and gouache. In the resulting images, the figures sometimes stand out starkly, other times they disappear into their environments. The effect is whimsical, evocative, and eerie. The anonymous figures, identifiable mainly by the color with which each is individually embellished, evoke aspects of gay sexual practices such as cruising and the coordination of desire by strict typology. These works also allude to the continuing invisibility of actual homosexual desire in mainstream media despite increased acceptance of gay culture.

Miller’s gallery of monochromatic men overlooks a garden with an Astroturf floor, planted with strange fungi and over which distended fruit dangle. These fleshy plant forms comprise clusters of cast wax fingers and objects produced by filling condoms with silicon or plaster. A fountain, “Lingam” provides the centerpiece of Miller’s polymorphous perverse patch, its title referencing phallic sculptures that represent the Hindu deity, Shiva. Other works on view augment the charged atmosphere of sexuality, nature, and spirituality. “Dicks In,” for instance, shows a collaged arrangement of anuses in the form of a mandala. In several works, such as “Target Practice #2” animal forms predominate, suggesting a zoology of queer desire.

Dutes Miller’s first solo show at Western Exhibitions in 2009 was reviewed on Artforum.com, Time Out Chicago, New City and the Chicago Tribune and was named one of the “Top 5 Shows of the Year” by the Chicago Art Review. Miller’s work has been included in exhibitions at White Flag Projects in St. Louis (reviews here and here) and the Ukranian Museum of Art, 40000 and COMA, all in Chicago His collaborative work with his husband Stan Shellabarger, as Miller & Shellabarger, won a 2008 Artadia Award and a 2007 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award.. Miller & Shellabarger have been written about in Artforum.com, Art & Auction, Frieze, Artnet, The Art Newspaper, Flash Art, TimeOut Chicago, and the Chicago Sun-Times. Miller received a BFA from Illinois State University and is an accomplished pastry chef. He lives and works in Chicago.


Leah Mackin

December 14, 2012 - January 26, 2013

Leah Mackin’s meditative black abstractions on white paper are born of drawing, photocopying and printmaking techniques, as she combines the objectivity of the machine with the subjectivity of artistic decision-making. Mackin runs her original drawings and folded paper sketches through a copy machine several times, making subtle manipulations to the image with each pass; the resulting geometric and moiré patterns are rendered in dense toner on paper. Her delicate abstractions reference the smudgy half-tones of newspaper reproductions, “happy accidents” that occur in printmaking and even the work of Andy Warhol and Christopher Wool. Mackin often presents the drawings in artist books finding that the bound format allows for variations within repetition while mimicking the duplication process of photocopying.

This is Philadelphia-based artist Leah Mackin’s first show at Western Exhibitions. Chicagoans have previously seen her work in “The World As Text” at Columbia College in 2011. Her work has been presented at sophiajacob in Maryland and at numerous galleries in Pennsylvania including The Print Center and Space 1026. She has work in the collections of the University of Pennsylvania Rare Book and Manuscript Library and The Print and Picture Collection at the Free Library of Philadelphia. Mackin is a member artist at Space 1026 and holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Printmaking and Book Arts from The University of the Arts.

The show opens Friday, December 14 with a free public reception from 5 to 8pm and will run through January 23, 2013. Gallery hours are Wednesday to Saturday (and usually Tuesdays too), 11am to 6pm.


Deb Sokolow

March 15, 2013 - April 20, 2013

For her second solo show at Western Exhibitions, DEB SOKOLOW will exhibit a 28-footlong drawing as well as a selection of separate but tangentially-related items inspired by a recent two-month stay at the mountaintop artist residency, Nordisk Kunstnarsenter Dalsåsen, in Norway. The show opens on Friday, March 15 with a free public reception from 5 to 8pm and runs through April 20, 2103.

In Gallery 1, unframed collage drawings, artists books and a three-dimensional floor piece will focus on a variety of seemingly disparate topics: the inner workings of an international art theft organization known as “The Association”, a walk through nature which becomes less pleasant when rock formations begin to resemble the faces of former bosses, unexplained shrouded lumps on the floor, and the secret history of unconventional ingredients, such as troll meat, appearing in Philly cheesesteak sandwiches.

In Gallery 2, disparate elements from Gallery 1 will be given context within a much larger story. “All Your Vulnerabilities Will Be Assessed” is a long, panoramic narrative on multiple papers consisting of handwritten texts, erasure marks, blocked out information, photocopies, diagrams and architectural floor plans with flap-like walls protruding from the papers’ surfaces. The story is narrated with the voice of Sokolow’s ubiquitous protagonist, also known as “you,” a somewhat unreliable individual, who, in this particular story, exists as an artist and disgruntled security guard on staff at the Art Institute in Chicago.

This narrator, along with other artists from various countries, have been invited to spend two months at a retreat on a mountaintop in rural Norway with the premise that a quiet, secluded environment will be provided for making art. Unbeknownst to those invited, the retreat is actually a recruitment center for an international art theft organization called “The Association” and the selection process is neither based on artistic merit nor exhibition credentials but on the sole qualification that each artist selected must also be an unhappy security guard working at an art museum with a weak security system and vulnerable masterpieces.

During the two months at the retreat, the artists are slowly brainwashed into believing that The Association has the connections and power to make each of them famous in exchange for staging art thefts inside the museums they work at. Along the way, each artist is put through a series of mental and physical tests as part of the art thief recruiting process. The story also touches on chilling plans to harvest Norwegian trolls for meat to be used in Philly cheesesteaks, a poisoning and other murderous schemes.

Part truth, part fiction, and part comedy, Sokolow’s complex visual tales are based on well-researched facts expanded by the fantastical mind of the narrator, who the artist identifies as “you,” making the reader/viewer an active participant in the almost-convincing events… Collaged and drawn images including portraits, photographs, diagrams, and maps accompany the awkward, handwritten text. The size of the text matters: the largest text, or “primary” narrative voice, tells the main story; the smaller “secondary” text conveys what you (as the paranoid or unreliable narrator) are thinking; and an even smaller “tertiary” text reveals what you are really thinking but would never dare verbalize. The artist’s hand is intentionally imperfect, with the graphite smudged, covered with Wite-Out™, and even masked by black bars, mimicking declassified government documents.
— Patricia Hickson, Emily Hall Tremaine Curator of Contemporary Art, excerpt from the 2013 essay for Sokolow’s MATRIX exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.


HEADS OF FAMILY

April 26, 2013 - June 1, 2013

Eli Jones is an Atlanta based sculptor predominantly working in clay. Jones’s work is no-frills and direct, unapologetically personal. He proudly calls himself an “Emotionalist”. HEADS OF FAMILY is the artist’s first solo exhibition, and included are clay busts and a new medium for Jones, paintings. At first imagining these large-scale un-stretched works on canvas as merely backdrops for his busts, he soon found these paintings were necessary counterpoints to the sculptures.

Responding to a period of tremendous loss, these busts are representations of seven family members, each of them dying within the past three years. Jones, also a pianist and accomplished songwriter in several Atlanta based bands, wanted to memorialize these men by sculpting their essence and showing them to the world on pedestals, the sculptural version of what he has done for loved ones through songwriting. He approached each bust very differently style-wise, and the manner points to the expressive portraits of George Condo and Andre Ethier. One blocky and almost cubist, another traditionally sculpted, almost Hellenistic, and one comically and cartoonishly mustachioed, Jones states, “these men, although linked by blood, were as different as you could possibly imagine. It felt vital that I approach each of them with a divergent methodology, a different poetry.” He unified this series by painting each of them a flat black and showing the busts in an almost eerie positioning, with their heads turned away from the viewer. Jones is trying to capture that delicate period of time right after a loved one dies. They are painfully fading into the shadows of the past, yet being exalted and remembered perhaps more vividly than when they were alive.

Jones’s paintings are a bit more mysterious, hinting at gravesites and ghosts. All imagery floats on flat black grounds, colorful and precise rips and tears through the canvas appear to be rainbow-like connections between earth and heaven. Another pull towards finding peace with what is now gone. Both fanciful and sensitive reveries, these paintings fall in a strange space between somber and euphoric.

Eli Jones lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia. He was born in 1977 in Memphis, Tennessee and graduated with a degree in Studio Art from Georgia State University. Jones makes a living playing piano and being a personal chef. Until recently, he was content quietly making sculptures in his backyard and garage. Jones is now ready to exhibit his work, and will continue to labor over a 25-foot tall carved wood sculpture twelve years in the making entitled “Help Me!”.


I WANT BLOOD

April 26, 2013 - June 1, 2013

ROBYN O’NEIL returns to Chicago.

In her first solo show at Western Exhibitions, Robyn O’Neil presents new works on paper: oil pastel and graphite drawings, portraying expressionistic scenes populated by disembodied floating heads, monks, ears, mysterious female figures, faceless busts and other enigmatic characters. In gallery 2, she has curated the first solo show by Atlanta-based sculptor, Eli Jones. Both shows open on Friday, April 26 with a free public reception from 5 to 8pm, and run through June 1, 2013.

More than just a new body of work, O’Neil reveals entirely new imagery and concerns (and uses, shockingly, some color), while retiring the mysterious sweatsuit-clad men who have populated her epic and emotional drawings for the past 12 years. The retirement of the middle-aged sweatsuit men, from her “End of the World” series, begun in 2001, comes after the two-year creation of O’Neil’s most ambitious work to date, a massive triptych aptly titled HELL, last presented in New York City in 2011. The making of HELL took a heavy psychic toll on O’Neil as she barricaded herself from the outside world in order to complete this project. She saw this time and this piece as a period of self-punishment and repentance which forced her, in her own words, to “restructure absolutely everything”. We strongly urge you to listen to her interview on the podcast, The Artist’s Conversation, where O’Neil speaks candidly, incredibly so, about the hell of HELL.

Hey Robyn, This new work could be read as a sort of reversal of your apocalyptic themes of the past 12 years. I see tectonic plates floating around, tribal encampments dotting spare landscapes. Looks to me like the beginning of time, or what comes after HELL. These new figurative drawings are moody and nervy, in a good way, depicting a kind of psychological surrealism. Some of these drawings — the landscape-y ones with what looks to be clouds over mountains, remind me of Arthur Dove (one of my faves). I know that you are reticent to discuss just what, exactly, is going on in this body of work, but it seems to be, to me, about death and re-birth, mental landscapes (thought-scapes?) rendered visible for the first time. Ghosts and remembrances, evidence of struggles. I keep coming back to the word moody — I love how moody these drawings are, so dark with the chiaroscuro, so restless with the snippets of surreal imagery and energy. Brooding even.
— cobbled together from emails written to the artist by Western Exhibitions

Robyn O’Neil’s last solo show in Chicago was in 2009. She was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1977 and currently lives in Los Angeles, California. O’Neil has been included in numerous group exhibitions throughout the US and internationally. Some of the venues in which she has exhibited include the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, American University Museum in Washington, DC, and The Museum of Contemporary Art in Tampa, Florida. Her work was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including an Irish Film Board Award for a film written and art directed by her entitled “WE, THE MASSES” which was conceived at Werner Herzog’s Rogue Film School. Although some of her favorite things include The Karate Kid, Lifetime Movie Network, and Dawson’s Creek, she claims to maintain a fairly average intelligence.