Exhibitions

Western Exhibitions presents a solo show by Nicholas Frank debuting three new projects: photographs of tourists taking photographs of tourists presented in unique, artist-designed frames; an album that collects skips from Frank’s personal vinyl record collection; and a sound sculpture using an authentic Milwaukee County Department of Public Works garbage can. The show opens on Friday, December 11, 5 to 8pm and runs through January 23, 2016.

I’ve long had an ambivalent relationship with photography, specifically snapshots. A decade or so ago, when visiting over the holidays, my mother wanted to show my new sister-in-law some family photos. When my brother and I expressed utter disinterest, my mom snapped, “What’s the matter with you, don’t you like pictures?” I guess not. Like the narcissist within all of us, sure, I dig looking at photos of myself over the years but I don’t have much compulsion to record my life through images (though Instagram is changing this somewhat). I’ve long wondered why people have their photo taken in front of monuments, historical sites, paintings in an art museum; this fascinates Nicholas Frank, too (more on this in a minute). Back to my mother: she visited Chicago recently and I met her and my brother’s family in Millennium Park. She asked us to stand in front of “The Bean” for a photo. I died a little inside.

Nicholas Frank has long been interested in photographs. The first time I saw his work was in the mid-1990s at the Madison Art Center in a survey of the state’s contemporary art called “The Wisconsin Triennial.” He showed meticulously carved-up snapshots – a rock or a log, cut out from a standard-sized pre-digital photograph, this tiny snippet then affixed to a long pin, so as to create the illusion of the logs and rock floating away from the wall, free of any context. As a grad student at UW-Madison, grappling with art with the capital-A then, I was struck dumb by this simple and unassuming gesture. It was easily the most memorable presentation in the show, and I still don’t really know the meaning behind it. Thus began my interest in Nicholas Frank and his work, stemming from his interest in the snapshot. Strange bedfellows us.

For Post-Self, his fourth solo show with Western Exhibitions, Frank recognized that the selfie has relegated to the past a certain quaint ritual, when tourists had to ask someone to help them get pictures of themselves in front of famous locations (or anywhere, really). The subject stands frozen, looking awkwardly like they’re facing a firing squad, about to be ‘shot’—unsure of which exact uncandid instant would be preserved forever. Picture after picture of the self, in front of things. With the shift in agency of selfies, needing no enabler, this inversion of subject is finally clear. Any photo really is about oneself—the backdrop changes, but we travel to every exotic locale in order to witness our own constancy.

Frank’s Pre-Selfies photographs depict people taking pictures of people, in the late moment (c. 2006-2009) just before selfies became pervasive. They are in unique, artist-designed frames that employ planar perspectives within each photograph. What selfies and pre-selfies share is that they are momentary removals from the flow of awareness, the program stopping to regard itself, again and again, like skips in a record, momentum resetting continually, a song taking a snapshot of itself. A companion piece, Greatest Skips, is an LP of skips from the artist’s personal vinyl record collection, two 15-minute compositions of these minor incidental compositions.

Both of these projects are interruptions in communication, mini-revolts or removals that reset the purpose of shared space and time. The new sound sculpture Tipsy Grouches (Communitarian Hypothesis) further explores the subject. Using an actual Milwaukee County Department of Public Works garbage can and stencil, and made with Alec Regan (of American Fantasy Classics, a Milwaukee conceptual art fabricator), as an argument between theorist Alain Badiou and members of New York’s Platypus group on the textures of social responsibility, and the meaning of revolutions as both destructions and resettings of order.

Nicholas Frank is an artist, curator and writer residing in Milwaukee. He ran the Hermetic Gallery from 1993-2001, co-founded the Milwaukee International in 2006, programmed INOVA (Institute of Visual Arts) from 2006-2011, and is currently Curator-In-Residence at the Poor Farm. Recent solo projects include NADA New York with Green Gallery and Untitled Art Fair with Nathale Karg (both 2013), Peregrine Program and Western Exhibitions (both Chicago, 2013), and dual solo exhibitions at Lump in Raleigh, NC and the Green Gallery in Milwaukee in 2012. Frank teaches New Studio Practice at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design. He lives and works in Milwaukee.

Geoffrey Todd Smith continues the 2015 fall art season for Western Exhibitions with a solo show presenting an eclectic group of anecdotal abstract paintings. For the time being, Smith has set aside the fetishistic drawing style he has cultivated since 2001 in favor of equally rigorous and sumptuous, hand-painted surfaces with colors that alternate between glossy, acidic hues and delicate, feathery whispers of pastel tones. Some compositions continue Smith’s seemingly impenetrable optical fields, while other paintings give way to gentle open spaces as soothing respites from the relentless buzz. He distills the essence of personal visual experiences along with unreliable, fading memories of game show sets, a Grand Canyon postcard, the motion picture Tron, misinterpreted street signs, Rubik’s Cube, psychedelic posters, 80’s video games, recurring ocular migraines, nude pantyhose and a sculpture by studio mate and fellow Western Exhibitions artist Ben Stone.

The show will open on Saturday, October 24, with a free public reception from 5 to 8pm, and runs through December 5. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11am to 6pm.

This is Geoffrey Todd Smith’s fourth solo show with Western Exhibitions. Smith’s solo shows include Luis de Jesus Los Angeles; Hyde Park Art Center and the Union League, both in Chicago, and Nudashank in Baltimore. His work has been included in group shows at The DePaul Art Museum in Chicago, The Hughes Gallery in Australia, The Green Gallery in Milwaukee, Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles, DCKT in NYC and Baer Ridgway in San Francisco. 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. Geoffrey Todd Smith lives and works in Chicago 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”. On Bad at Sports in 2015, artist and critic Kevin B. Blake writes :
Geoffrey Todd Smith is a prime example of an artist who uses his practice to induce introspection, which manifests materially as abstract paintings. His titles often reflect his accumulation of shared experience and an insight into the immediacy of his process, while the images conjure a methodology for achieving the internal gaze. His most recent project was executed under a set of rigid parameters that maintained a control of scale, considered material applications, and required an immense dedication of time.

Miller & Shellabarger open the 2015 fall art season for Western Exhibitions with a solo show of recent work that continues their explorations into physicality, duality, time and romantic ideals. Their collaborative work – performance, photography, artists books, sculpture and cut paper silhouettes – documents the rhythms of human relationships, speaking both to common experiences of intimacy as well as the specifics of queer identities. The show will open September 12th, with a free public reception from 5 to 8pm, and runs through October 17th. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11am to 6pm.

Continually redefining the physical and psychological space that their intertwined bodies occupy, Miller & Shellabarger have been working with the silhouette for ten years. The project started with one artist tracing the other’s profile, cutting it out, and compiling the portraits into oversized artist books. In time, the silhouettes became increasingly complex, moving off the page and morphing into garlands and veils of patterned silhouetted bodies strung across space. Greeting viewers in this exhibition will be their largest veils to date, a suspended mass of contorting bodies reminiscent of a Japanese shoji screen or Victorian lace curtains, dividing but not obscuring the gallery space.

Surrounding the veils will be two new series of photographs. The first series involves in situ magic-eraser-drawings of the artists’ intertwined initials, “S&M.” Miller & Shellabarger made a stencil of this cypher and overlaid it atop resonant spaces in their shared home – their desk, the kitchen, the wall that abuts their bed – and erased through the stencil the accumulation of their daily life (dust, dirt, etc), imprinting the monogram into their shared existence. This is an ongoing trope in their work, the turning of domestic actions onto themselves – in this case, cleaning – to intervene in their own physical traces.

Another new photo series explores the physics phenomenon of “spooky distant action,” in which images of each artist twirling in space with lit sparklers at dusk are overlaid atop one another, akin to a multiple exposure photograph. Mimicking the entanglement of two particles (even at great distance), the artists’ bodies whirl in tandem, creating a particle trace of their two mirrored selves.

In Gallery 2, the artists present a row of handkerchiefs embroidered with plucked strands of their beard hairs. The embroidered images stem both from the artists’ own personal symbology and from fraternal organizations like the Elks, the Oddfellows, the Shriners and the Boy Scouts of America. Additional projects in the show include the latest volume in the artists’ silhouette books, two new black-on-black cutouts featuring a web of tangling limbs and a series of microbead silhouette prints.

Miller & Shellabarger will also be presenting their ongoing performance (since 2003) Untitled (Pink Tube) at Western Exhibitions during gallery hours on September 19th, on the occasion of EXPO Chicago. In this non-theatrical, durational piece, they simultaneously crochet at opposite ends of a long tube of pink acrylic yarn, a metaphorically-loaded object that both unites and separates them. They’ll be debuting a new photograph of the crocheting performance in this show, an image taken of them performing at the site of their 2014 wedding in Palmer Square Park in Chicago.

Miller & Shellabarger have had solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Chicago Cultural Center, INOVA in Milwaukee, the University Galleries at Illinois State University, and Gallery Diet in Miami. Their work has been included in group shows at Diverseworks in Houston, the Institute for Contemporary Art in Portland, ME and they have performed at the Time-Based Arts Festival in Portland, Oregon; Hub 14 in Toronto; the Hyde Park Art Center; and the Suburban in Oak Park, Illinois. 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 Newark Public Library, Indiana University Art Museum and the National Gallery of Canada. Dutes Miller and Stan Shellabarger also maintain separate artistic practices. They live and work in Chicago.

Western Exhibitions is pleased to present Sub-Scheme, a collection of recent works by the Rhode Island School of Design MFA 2015 Painting Class, featuring Anthony Bragg, Irmak Canevi, Andy Giannakakis, Suzy Gonzalez, Michael R. Leon, Jon Merritt, Whitney Oldenburg, Sarah R. Pater, Fernando Pezzino, and Katie Darby Slater, selected and organized by Chicago-based critic and curator Stephanie Cristello. Sub-Scheme opens on Friday, July 24 with a free public reception from 5 to 8pm and runs through August 30, 2015. Summer gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11am to 5pm.
What remains after the act of painting? If we were to use an antiquated mode of thinking, the question would be: what kinds of images are being painted today? In Sub-Scheme, painting is a product of an underlying system—a series of independent schemes that at once use the medium for its historical references, while activating its new approaches as contemporary commentary. As a medium, painting is nuclear fallout. Its imprint is marked all over alternate modes of making; its past influence permeates future growth, absorbed by newer technologies, at the same time it adapts to present systems. Departing from the image of the soft white trace of a chalk outline used in forensics, this exhibition starts with a metaphor that addresses the limits of what is left in space after an act.

If painting is not in the room, its influence is.

Beginning with the constant of the substrate—under, below, beneath the painting—sub- is also commonly used as a prefix to describe a quality that is less than perfect, i.e. the handmade gesture. As a trope depicting the awkward positioning of a body traced with meticulous precision, the concept of a chalk outline here becomes a foil for painting as a standard practice that has faced its many deaths (transformations). What marks are manufactured by a medium still so tied to the concept of its creation in a studio? Sub-Scheme is representative of the source of everyday life—while the basic technology of paint has not changed, its context and consumption within a digital world has. The Internet is everywhere, but it is also real; made up of a series of underwater cables that connect seemingly invisible waves of information. The physical traces of otherwise formless communications still exist. From counterfeit brand-images and the persistent high-low dilemma of pop, to crude nouveaux primitivism and post-internet painting, this exhibition presents new ways of thinking ‘underground.’

COMPRESSION brings the work of Elana Herzog and Luanne Martineau into dialog; both artists whose methodology is that of compression – blending and merging material into surfaces and forms that encode matter and image into enmeshed objects. Compression reduces volume: entangling and constraining material into condensed amalgams of form. Curated by Shannon Stratton, the Mildred and William Lasdon Chief Curator at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City, COMPRESSION opened on Friday, July 13 and will run through August 18. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm. Please contact info@westernexhibitions.com for images and more information.

Based in New York, Elana Herzog works predominantly with found textiles, paper pulp, and other cultural detritus, dematerializing and fragmenting forms and images, ultimately leading to a scrambling of representation. Her papermaking incorporates a variety of found materials to build surfaces that waver from dense to deteriorating. The tension in her work between constructed strength and threadbare fragility summons a kind of psychological analog, where the layering and compression of experience and knowing over time is both the foundation and the unmaking of the self.

Herzog has had solo exhibitions at the Sharjah Art Museum, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates; the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Connecticut; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University; The Boiler (Pierogi), Smack Mellon, Lmak Projects, Morgan Lehman Gallery, and PPOW Gallery in New York City; and Diverseworks in Houston, Texas. De-Warped and Un-Weft, a survey of Herzog’s work since 1993, was at the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art in Missouri in 2009. Group shows include the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs, New York; the Weatherspoon Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina; The Kohler Museum in Sheboygan, Wisconsin; and at The Brooklyn Museum and The Museum of Arts and Design New York City. Herzog received the Anonymous Was A Woman Award in 2009, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award in 2007, NYFA Fellowships in 2007 and 1999, the 2004 Lillian Elliot Award, the 2003 Lambent Fund Fellowship and the 1999 Joan Mitchell Award. She is a recipient of a 2017 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.

Montreal-based Luanne Martineau works in paper weaving, collage and needle-felting to produce compressed objects that literally embody her subject matter. Martineau’s practice has long satirized modernist ideals – in terms of material, form and taste – taking up instead, objects that embrace distortion and mess as a means to challenge Western cultural archetypes of the “good.” Martineau’s entangled objects reject the well-behaved, instead encoding the body, sexuality, illness, raunchiness and impropriety into her felted and woven forms.

Martineau’s work has been exhibited across Canada and internationally, with most recent group exhibitions at the National Gallery of Canada, the Vancouver Art Gallery, The Power Plant, The Banff Centre for the Arts, and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Recent solo exhibitions include Foreman Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Windsor, Rodman Hall Arts Centre/Brock University, and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. In 2007, Martineau was the recipient of the Shadbolt Foundation’s VIVA Award for the Visual Arts, and in 2009, she represented British Columbia and the Yukon for the Sobey Art Award of Canada.

Jessica Labatte’s second solo exhibition at Western Exhibitions, Shade Garden, continues her explorations into paradoxes and illusions within photographic images. Labatte’s two interrelated series of color photographs explore photographic notions of the visible and invisible, the present and withdrawn as they champion beauty in the everyday as a radical gesture in our contemporary moment. An exhibition catalogue will accompany the show with contributions by Elizabeth Chodos, Michael Milano, Elisabeth Holland Rose Smith, Jeff M. Ward and interview with Labatte by Eric May.

Almanac for Shade Gardeners is a series of floral still lifes —small and medium sized prints installed in a salon-style fashion in the gallery alongside three monumentally scaled prints— that mark impermanence in the everyday domestic space of her home and garden as Labatte has photographed every flower that bloomed over the course of one growing season. The pictures incorporate indexes of nurturing and the clutter of objects and materials that accompany parenthood and artistic practice within domestic spaces. Challenging myths of artistic practice and motherhood espoused by early feminist artists, Labatte’s photographs look to depict new definitions of feminist art practice.

The second series of photographs capture the experience of being in the garden, as color and dappled light are constantly in flux. In seemingly abstract works, color, light, and shadow explore an imagined virtual space beyond traditional notions of photographic representation. Drawing inspiration from Hilma af Klint and early photographic abstractionists such as László Moholy-Nagy, her Shadow Plants photographs meditate on color, time, and sensation. To create these brightly colored images, Labatte uses film and a large format camera to capture multiple exposures of collaged color paper. Her process allows one image to fuse with another, obscuring and revealing forms, textures, and the fleeting effects of light and shadow, creating a metaphorically virtual space for the visible and invisible within society, photographic image making, and art.

Jessica Labatte has two photographs currently on view in Picture Fiction: Kenneth Josephson and Contemporary Photography at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago through December 30, 2018. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, FL; Elmhurst Art Museum; Hyde Park Art Center; Higher Pictures, NYC; Golden Gallery, and Horton Gallery, NYC and has been reviewed in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum.com, and Chicago Magazine. Labatte received an MFA and a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and lives and works in the Chicagoland area.

Press for Shade Garden:

Chicago Tribune
Chicago Magazine
Crain’s