Exhibitions

Review in New City

Geoffrey Todd Smith returns for his fifth solo show at Western Exhibitions with two distinct series of painting/drawing hybrids, both enmeshed in the artist’s fetishistic mark making, but with an entirely different structural appearance. After taking some time away from drawing for his last WX show in 2015, Smith has dusted off his gel pens to produce some of his most drawing-forward works to date.

In the first body of work, compositions are comprised of cascading fields of color and curvaceous forms, peppered with a virtual plague of dots. The undulating environment of flatly painted gouache shapes is then enveloped in a hand-drawn web of spikes, ruffles, and zig-zags. A cursory Rorschach-like inspection provides the audience with a glimpse into the narrative possibilities: cartoon eyes throwing shade, biting mouths adorned with sharp teeth copping clownish smirks, deep penetrating abysses, and psychedelic foliage inhabiting spaces vacillating between microscopic and grandiose.

The second half of the show is a group of mixed media works integrating painted, drawn, and collaged elements. Similar color choices and opulent mark making motifs reappear, this time patched together to articulate structured atmospheres of gridded dot formations. Smith begins with a cluster of small gouache and ink drawings on paper that are combined, rearranged and glued into new, collective compositions. Each segment is adorned with a hand-painted glossy border, made without the aid of masking tape, creating an overall surface that pulsates with rectangles competing for recognition in space. Each frame resembles a cinematic sequencing of time, allowing the viewer individual moments of surveillance in a composition packed with infinite moments of discovery. Further inspection of the machine-like borders, betrays subtle, quivering edges and an occasional brushy inconsistency to the paint that reveals a heartbeat and humanity.

Geoffrey Todd Smith’s solo shows include Luis de Jesus Los Angeles; Hyde Park Art Center and the Union League, both in Chicago; Nudashank in Baltimore and he’s been included in group shows at The DePaul Art Museum and Shane Campbell Gallery in Chicago, The Hughes Gallery in Australia, The Green Gallery in Milwaukee, the Illinois State Museum, Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles, DCKT in NYC, Circuit 12 in Dallas, and Baer Ridgway in San Francisco. His work is in the collections of the The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Hallmark Inc. in Kansas City, Fidelity Investments Corporate Art Collection, the Jager Collection in Amsterdam, Soho House Chicago, the South Bend Art Museum in Indiana and Harper College in Illinois and has been written about in The Seen, New American Paintings, Bad at Sports, art ltd, Juxtapoz, Chicago Tribune, and Chicago Magazine, who called him one of the “rising stars we should be collecting now”. Smith lives and works in Chicago.

The artist and the athlete. Often portrayed in movies and television as opposites, the reality is that arts and athletics overlap (of course they have done so for centuries) and each has an important perspective on our society. Hand-Eye Coordination: Sports and Art is a survey of Midwest-connected artists from the Hairy Who to today, who incorporate sports, its themes, implications, and content into their artwork.

Sparked by a 2010 essay published on ArtSlant titled “Who Will Curate a Major Sports Exhibition?,” which suggested that an area of major public interest and significant artistic production–sports–was overdue for new exploration, Western Exhibitions owner Scott Speh reached out to the author Abraham Ritchie to carry out his own suggestion. With artists whose approaches range from celebratory to critical, Hand-Eye Coordination is suggested as the start of a wider conversation about these two celebrated areas of human society: the arts and athletics.

Hand-Eye Coordination: Sports and Art opens with a public reception on Saturday, January 6 from 5 to 8pm and will run through February 17. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm.

Download essay by Abraham Ritchie, curator of Hand-Eye Coordination: Sports and Art

Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present a two-part solo exhibition, Un-Natural Parables, by pioneering feminist artist Faith Wilding. In Gallery 1, the gallery will present Natural Parables, a body of work last exhibited in 1985; large watercolor/drawing hybrids paired with oil-on-panel paintings shaped like pods. In Gallery 2 will be a new series of mixed-media watercolor paintings, Paraguay: Republica de la Soya, that reflect on the artist’s recent on-the-ground research into her birth country’s ongoing ecological crises. The show opens on Friday, November 3 with a reception from 5 to 8pm. The following day, Saturday, November 4, Wilding will be joined in conversation at the gallery by Shannon Stratton, the William and Mildred Lasdon Chief Curator at the Museum of Art and Design (NYC) at 4pm. Both the reception and the gallery talk are free and open to the public.

In 1941 Faith Wilding’s parents Edith and Harry Barron emigrated to Paraguay as members of the Bruderhof Anabaptist commune. Here, in a rural Bruderhof settlement, Wilding would be born and grow up with a rich relationship to a verdant environment, coupled with a communal upbringing where literature and music were as readily taught as animal husbandry and agriculture. Wilding has long mined this childhood in her work, grateful for a youth that was rich in community and ingenuity, but also deeply resistant to the strict gender norms and roles imposed by an otherwise quite radical Christian sect.

While well recognized for her early work co-organizing and exhibiting in Womanhouse and then later for her collaborative work with subRosa, Wilding’s robust painting and drawing practice has only recently been revisited. Truly the backbone of her practice, Wilding’s vivid works on paper often use imagery from nature as a metaphor for transformation. Her interest in exploring specific ideas of women’s transformation is as prominent as her inquiry into the metamorphosis of the natural world through human intervention and destruction. Wilding’s life-long examination of the body as political site and nature as political site marries an instinctive desire to reveal the ways in which humanity and the natural world are co-dependent. Her consistent commentary on humankind’s exploitation of the natural world and its subsequent weaponization anticipated art’s contemporary consideration of the Anthropocene as critical subject matter.

For Un-Natural Parables, Western Exhibitions will exhibit for the first time since 1985 Wilding’s Natural Parables series, originally produced in 1982 and last exhibited in Los Angeles. This work marked the culmination of years of Wilding’s early research into female mythologies, paganism, English Romantic poetry, illuminated herbals, bestiaries, alchemical manuscripts and female imagery. At the time she was seeking to create her own system of representation and illustrate an interconnection between beliefs, mythologies, dreams and fantasy worlds. Forty years later, Wilding made Paraguay: Republica de la Soya, a series that responds to the wanton destruction of Paraguay’s dense forests, verdant campos, meandering swamps and waterways through massive mono-cropping of GMO soy. With the help of an Art Matters grant, Wilding traveled back to Paraguay for the first time since emigrating in 1961 to study botanical collections and gardens. The resulting works on paper are part of a larger memoir project that Wilding is currently completing that reflects on her upbringing and her complex relationship to it.

Un-Natural Parables marries two distinct time periods in Wilding’s practice, connecting yet book-ending her early exploration and development of a feminist vernacular with the political concerns that emerged as part of a cyber-feminist practice that delved into reproductive biotech, labor, science and global capitalism. These two bodies of work are linked by Wilding’s continuous, sumptuous watercolor practice where captivating imagery and rich color vividly portray the fundamental inter-connection between humanity and the environment. This melding of the body with the earth through layering of washes, pencil, text, woven paper and occasionally collage, intensifies a message of connection, but also complicity – making it clear that environmental politics is not a “special interest”, but the politics of survival.

Faith Wilding is Professor Emerita of performance art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a graduate faculty member at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and a visiting scholar at the Pembroke Center, Brown University. Born in Paraguay, Wilding received her BA from the University of Iowa and her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Wilding was a co-initiator of the Feminist Art Programs in Fresno and at Cal Arts, and she contributed “Crocheted Environment” and her “Waiting” performance piece to the historic Womanhouse exhibition.

Her work has been exhibited extensively over the last five decades including the seminal survey WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, organized by Cornelia Butler, which traveled from the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles) to the National Museum of Women (Washington DC), PS1 Contemporary Art Center (Long Island), and the Vancouver Art Gallery.  Additionally, Wilding’s work has been exhibited at Reina Sofia Museum (Madrid); Centre for Contemporary Arts (Glasgow); Bronx Museum of Art (New York); The Whitney Museum of American Art (New York); the Armand Hammer Museum (Los Angeles); The Drawing Center (New York); Documenta X (Kassel); the Singapore Art Museum. Publications include By Our Own Hands: The History of the Women Artists Movement in Southern California, 1970-76 (Double X, 1977) and Domain Errors! Cyberfeminist Practices! (Autonomedia, 2003).  Wilding was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009 and has been the recipient of two individual media grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.  In 2014, she was awarded the prestigious Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award.   Most recently, her work was included in Fiber: Sculpture 1960 to Present exhibition that originated at the ICA in Boston; her Crocheted Environment, 1972/1995, was shown in Art_Textiles at The Whitworth Gallery in Manchester, England (and it graced the cover of the catalog); she currently has work in Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A., organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, as part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, up until December 31, 2017.

Faith Wilding’s work was recently the subject of a traveling retrospective, Fearful Symmetries, that featured a selection of works from her studio practice spanning the past forty years, highlighting a range of works on paper – drawings, watercolors, collage and paintings – exhibited together for the first time. Curated by Shannon Stratton and first presented at Threewalls in Chicago, the show traveled to Houston, Memphis and Los Angeles, where it was reviewed in the Los Angeles Times and LA Weekly and received a Critic’s Pick in Artforum. This is her first show at Western Exhibitions and her first in Chicago since the retrospective opened in 2014. Wilding lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island.

PRESS for “Un-Natural Parables”: Artnet | Chicago Tribune |  Chicago Reader | New City

Marshall Brown, urban designer and architect, has constructed three scenarios — one political, one economic, one cultural — for the future of the Chicago Circle. The heart of legendary architect Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago was the Civic Center, located on the city’s cardinal axis, Congress Parkway. Burnham’s Civic Center was never built. Instead of his monument to democracy, we have the Circle Interchange – third worst traffic interchange in America, responsible for the loss of 25 million driving hours per year. Brown’ show at Western Exhibitions, his first at the gallery, Center of the World, Chicago will feature models, photomontage, and a trio of original videograms that project histories of Chicago’s future as the center of the world.

“…By moving its capital to the center of the country, the U.S. reclaimed its position at the center of a world without borders. This mashup culture gave Chicago its new nickname, “Worldtown” – a new capitol designed not as a monument to America’s past, but as a laboratory for inventing its future.

…People worked more days for longer hours because of their personal investment. But work also became less laborious and more of a social activity. Most businesses, in order to maintain their flexibility and responsiveness, stayed fairly small. The Central Business District of Chicago became a vibrant center of 24/7 social development and cultural production. The CSSE somehow returned Chicago to the radical definition of what a city should be – a collective space of contestation, negotiation, and ultimately mutual benefit.

…The architect Daniel Burnham’s dream of the White City was rebuilt on the foundations of Ms. Winfrey’s stewardship. After Her hostile takeover of Google in 2025, the OM library over the Circle Interchange became the undisputed center of global knowledge and communication. The archive and its sister institutions renewed Chicago as a center of enlightenment on the level of Vatican City or Mecca. And thus The Oprah ascended from Icon to Guru to Prophet, by building a Radiant City of benevolence, beauty, wealth and power.”

Marshall Brown has been working on several projects in Chicago, including the Navy Pier redevelopment and a master plan for the neighborhood of Washington Park. In 2003 he founded the Yards Development Workshop, a studio that set out to hi-jack Frank Gehry’s Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn. MARSHALL BROWN PROJECTS is a versatile urban design and architecture studio based in Chicago. He constructs visions for large-scale urban environments and solutions for the creative integration of architecture, infrastructure, and landscape.

He also recently founded the urbanism, art and culture think tank NEW PROJECTS in collaboration with curator Stephanie Smith. Brown is on the editorial board of the Journal of Architectural Education and has lectured at the Chicago Humanities Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, University of Michigan, Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art, the Graham Foundation, and the Arts Club of Chicago. His work has been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit; Soapbox Gallery in Brooklyn; and at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in North Carolina. His projects and essays have appeared in several books and journals, including Art Papers, The Believer, Architectural Record, The Architect’s Newspaper, and The New York Daily News.

Rachel Niffenegger fabricates a ghostly erotic club displaying skeletal sculptures and distressed fabric shrounds, utilizing both rooms of the gallery.

Combining seductive unveiling with psychological and physical deterioration, Niffenegger presents works that complicate notions of the body, sculpture, clothing and painting. In Western Exhibitions’ front room, she presents three skeletal sculptures and a large tapestry painting in an atmosphere of performative eroticism that also recalls a minimalist dance club. Her back gallery will function as an exclusive space, resembling a private dressing room.

Niffenegger’s sculptures rest atop a tiled glass floor that itself rests atop debris from her studio. It’s at once slick and dirty, like a dance floor in Hades. Her sculptures are bone-like – warped steel rods, covered in epoxy clay – and curvaceous at the same time, exotic skeletons striking a pose. They are stripped of skin, clothes and identifying features. Placed on the glass floor, they gesture in front of a full wall painting that doubles as a backdrop, its stained fabric similar to the “garments” hanging in the back room.

In the back room dyed and distressed fabrics hang; painting hybrids Niffenegger has referred to in the past as “shrouds”. Hanging amid seating and illuminated by light from behind private curtain, the shrouds also function as clothing, skins and spirits, all referencing the residual imprint of the body. The work in both rooms focuses on the ephemeral state of the feminine figure in contemporary society as Niffenegger stages her effigies in various states of undress and distress. They flux between statuesque and formless, sentient and petrified through the restyling of elements: steel, fabric, and flesh.

Rachel Niffenegger recently returned to United States after a nine-month residency at DE ATELIERS in Amsterdam. While in Europe, she presented a solo show at Club Midnight in Berlin and was included in group shows at Museum for Modern Art in Arnhem and Bourouina Gallery in Berlin. She has been included in group shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Tracy Williams Ltd in NYC , Ceri Hand Gallery in Liverpool,  and in Chicago at Corbett vs. Dempsey, Andrew Rafacz Gallery and the Hyde Park Art Center. Chicago Magazine named her “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. Niffenegger, born in Evanston in 1985, received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois in 2012.

Elijah Burgher will present a group of new colored pencil drawings and acrylic paintings on canvas drop cloths that delve into the intersection of desiring fantasy and daily life. The pictures combine observations of the artist’s social world and spaces he inhabits with sigils, abstraction, mythology and the embellishments of imagination. Burgher’s new works summarize and extend the concerns he’s been exploring for the past five years, and range from multi-figure scenarios and portraiture to abstract compositions of personal symbols.

A mega-sigil, “Excremental Philosophy Illustrated, Vol. 1,” composed of a network of symbols from a personal alphabet of desire, presides over the exhibition. Resembling an electrical diagram or game board, it serves as a matrix of forms and esoteric map to the other works on view. In some of the latter pieces, a group of men wander the thresholds, corridors and cul-de-sacs of a maze, on the walls of which various symbols recur. They are akin to William S. Burroughs’ Wild Boys, only older–and perhaps more somber–in countenance. In fact, the figures are based on the artist’s friends and loved ones, as well as his own likeness. A handful of portraits picture mythological entities, countercultural figures from the past, and recently deceased friends—each calling to presence someone who would or could not otherwise appear.

The modestly scaled drawings nestle amongst large paintings of sigils on canvas drop cloths, hung flush to the floor, some on the wall, others partitioning the gallery space. These larger works allude to the artist’s work space, European ceremonial magic, as well as tensions within the history of 20th century abstraction. Fragments of a portable, soft architecture, the paintings extend the imagined labyrinth of the drawings into real space, functioning as both literal walls and figurative portals.

Elijah Burgher currently has a large painting installation included in The Temptation of AA Bronson at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, The Netherlands that runs through January 5, 2014. Burgher is profiled and his work has been included in Phaidon’s VITAMIN D2 hardcover survey of contemporary drawing practices. Work in recent group shows at Carthage College in Kenosha and at the Sullivan Galleries at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago was written about on Hyperallergic and New City Chicago. In 2011, he was a resident artist at both the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Fire Island Artist Residency. Burgher received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and BA from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY. He lives and works in Chicago.

Academy Records will present a screening of the movie “HEAD” (written and produced by Bob Rafelson and Jack Nicholson, and directed by Rafelson) at Western Exhibitions, with a short introduction by Academy Records principal Stephen Lacy.

In Paul Nudd’s show, Nudd’s fourth with the gallery, will present selections from four bodies of ongoing work – Mutant humanoid drawings; mutant portrait paintings; sputtering goo video; plus a 20 page catalog of the artist’s sketches.

Paul Nudd is a prolific artist. His output is not just a symptom of an artist and how he uses his time, but a central motif in the work itself, in keeping with the unchanged central themes of the work: primal sludge, growth and disease, systems of classification, mutation and life; patterning and mark making, too.

Nudd’s figure drawings are cartoonishly terrifying mutants, alien/human mash-ups besotted with tumors, warts, lesions, growths, male and female genitalia and mis-placed pubic hair spawn from a boatload (the artist’s word) of popular cultural forms: cartooning, horror, sci-fi, psychedelia etc, movies like “The Fly”, “Dead Alive”, “The Toxic Avenger” and The Thing from the Fantastic and canonical visual artists like Paul McCarthy, Öyvind Fahlström, Peter Saul, Ivan Albright and of course, Jim Nutt. A sub-series of new drawings are smaller; adolescent sized, or juveniles, less developed, but in the process of mutating. The exaggerated physical characteristics of puberty are showcased in these drawings – armpit hair, rampant acne, overall asymmetry, misshapen breasts, pubic hair, enlarged genitalia, gender confusion, hormonal shifts, mood swings abd erections. In these works, the repetition of pea-green and small internal lumps reference the pituitary gland, an adolescent’s albatross, here forming into something unhealthy, or dirty: a tumor.

Nine new videos presented on vintage monitors denote a return to lo-fi form, now with significant color shifts, durations and shorter cuts, and faster editing. The videos are endless cycles of spastic rupturing gunk and goo, reflecting Nudd’s artistic practice as a whole; a return of the repressed primal urge.

Paul Nudd’s mixed-media paintings on canvas offer up images of head-like entities emerging from colorful gobs of compositional grounds composed of thick swaths of paint. Nudd describes them as “portraits of people made out of paint.” The portraits appear to be inside-out, with seemingly random, yet tightly composed, areas heavily textured collage, what he calls “material cannibalism”, or a self-contained, enclosed system of the use of highly specific, yet arbitrary textured materials.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a 20 page catalog of the artist’s sketches, xeroxed on colored paper with a screenprinted cover with hand coloring in an edition of 100 and a CD that collects the artists infrequent sound works and in an edition of 100. AND frequent collaborator Keith Herzik designed a poster for the show.

For Check please, his second solo show at Western Exhibitions, Ryan Travis Christian presents graphite on paper drawings featuring his signature cartoon-style alongside a second suite of works on paper and sculptures that employ color. These new bodies of work introduce new elements and motifs (chevrons, spirals and lighting bolts), building on the artist’s already extensive and distinct visual vocabulary (zig-zag linear patterns, hallucinatory energy, optical illusions and fractured spaces).

Ryan Travis Christian’s drawings, (per critic Jason Foumberg) “though not literally animated, are full of motion, explosions, eye-bulges, jazz hands, frenetic patterns and formal gymnastics worthy of a Futurist’s kaleidoscopic vision of a speeding, pulsating humanity.” Smiling faces hide dark secrets in this world as the artist freely imitates retro cartoons such as early Disney and Looney Tunes. He references their slyly vicious humor by stretching, multiplying and isolating the eyes and limbs of his figures and placing them in exaggerated environments. Just as the Imagists did before him, Christian constructs surreal spaces while utilizing dark pop cultural sources as well as an aesthetic akin to visionary artists.

Ryan Travis Christian’s (b. 1983 Oakland, CA) first solo show at Western Exhibitions in 2011 was reviewed in frieze, art ltd, New American Paintings, Daily Serving, and New City. His first museum show at CAM Raleigh in North Carolina in 2013 was reviewed in Art Papers, Indy Week and featured by the Associated Press. Christian’s solo gallery shows include Guerrero Gallery in San Francisco, Halsey McKay in East Hampton, NY and Cooper Cole in Toronto, and has been included in group shows in London, Rotterdam, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Baltimore, Dallas and Los Angeles and has curated exhibitions at many of these same venues. New City named Christian as one of Chicago’s “Breakout Artists” for 2010 and named by the same publication as one of Chicago’s “Top 50 Artists’ Artists” in 2012. He lives and works in the Chicagoland area.