Exhibitions

Western Exhibitions celebrates ten years as a bricks-and-mortar gallery with the group show We do what we like and we like what we do presenting new or never-seen-in-Chicago works by gallery artists:

New landscape painting by Dan Attoe | Two new sigil paintings shown at the 2014 Whitney Biennial by Elijah Burgher | 28 foot-long drawing by Ryan Travis Christian previously shown in his solo show at CAM Raleigh | New works on paper by Lilli Carré | Cincinnati skyline drawing by Courttney Cooper | New Nicholad Frank Biography page by Nicholas Frank | Richard Hull’s largest crayon drawing yet | Mixed-media target painting by Dutes Miller | New photo edition from Miller & Shellabarger’s crocheting performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago | A sheer, slitted and stained shroud previously exhibited in New York City by Rachel Niffenegger | Two minimal drawings of flies exhibited previously in San Francisco by Paul Nudd | Delicately massive drawing of a tree trunk by Robyn O’Neil | Square-shaped walking book, shown on the floor, by Stan Shellabarger | New intricate abstract painting by Geoffrey Todd Smith | Mixed-media diptych on panel by Deb Sokolow exhibited previously in her solo MATRIX show at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art | Custom Uncle Sam and Old Yeller bongs last seen at the legendary Drunk vs. Stoned show at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise by Ben Stone

Western Exhibitions is pleased to present Helsingistä, a two-person exhibition and featuring the work of Helsinki-based artists Valpuri Kylmänen and Ari Pelkonen, curated by Jamilee Polson Lacy. This exhibition is the first in-depth presentation of the artists’ work in the United States.

Helsingistä focuses on Kylmänen and Pelkonen’s ongoing experimentation with printmaking traditions, collaborative processes and gestural renderings of life. Kylmänen will display the latest series of her signature lithographic prints, in which bizarrely staged and slightly abstracted still life tableaus figure prominently. Pelkonen will include a small body of work which includes his most recent “woodcut paintings”—woodcut printing on canvas combined with layers of acrylic paint—of eerily cropped and abstracted human figures alongside a new video work. Having been instrumental to one another’s practices as both traditional printmakers and experimental fine artists for over a decade, the two artists will honor their cooperative history with the unveiling of their first fully collaborative artwork: a set of tonal printed wallpapers, which will serve as a dramatic backdrop for the exhibition’s entire installation.

Helsingistä is jointly supported by Western Exhibitions, Twelve Galleries Project, the Arts Promotion Centre Finland, and Frame Visual Art Finland.

Valpuri Kylmänen’s lithographs depict objects and scenes that are visualizations of outrageous word combinations sourced from quirky, everyday conversations—phrases like spaghetti and pizza in the bathtub; violent violets; pushing the cushion; no parking from here to corner and so on are translated into beautifully silly still lifes. Further demonstrating the human folly and everyday comedy that inspires her work, the artist messily draws and handprints each artwork, using whimsical pastel color palettes on lightly tinted papers.

Kylmänen (b. 1980, Rovaniemi, Finland) is an artist, educator and master printer living and working in Helsinki, where she co-owns and operates Helsinki Litho, an internationally renowned fine art lithography workshop. Her lithographs and installations are included in numerous museum and private collections, and have been shown throughout Finland, the EU and Southeast Asia. Kylmanen holds a MFA from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts and trained as a master printer at the Tamarind Institute for Fine Art Lithography.

Ari Pelkonen works with mix of traditional printmaking and abstract painting. He continues to explore this technical and aesthetic cross-looming, which he calls “woodcut painting,” in order to find the middle ground between the spontaneity of gestural abstraction and the slow, methodical tendencies of printmaking. As a result of the dissonance between such techniques, Pelkonen’s portraits of the human body are quite melancholic and, at times, haunting.

Pelkonen (b. 1978, Pori, Finland) is an artist and educator living and working in Helsinki. His cross-disciplinary artwork is included in numerous museum and private collections, and has been shown throughout Finland, the EU and Japan. In 2012, upon being named the Finnish Young Artist of the Year by the City of Tampere, the Tampere Art Museum published a catalog raisonne and presented an eponymously titled retrospective exhibition of his work at the Tampere Art Museum. Pelkonen holds a MFA from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts.

Jamilee Polson Lacy lives in Chicago and Providence and works as a writer, a curator and the founding director of Twelve Galleries Project. Currently, Lacy is director and curator of Providence College Galleries, managing editor for the Bad at Sports blog, and co-author (with Meg Onli) of Remaking the Black Metropolis: Contemporary Art, Urbanity and Blackness in America, a research survey and archive. She has engaged in solo and collaborative projects with A+D Gallery at Columbia College Chicago, The Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City, Hyde Park Art Center, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Sister Cities of Chicago and Western Exhibitions, among others. In addition to numerous catalogue essays, interviews and articles, Lacy has published Color: Fully Engaged, a book of interviews and essays on contemporary art and color and rises Zora: An Exploration of the Urban Labyrinth, which details Kansas City and its artists as adventurous partners. She has also written for Flash Art, Umelec Magazine, Art 21 Online and Art in America Online. Lacy holds two undergraduate degrees in art history and studio arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Masters of Comparative Art and Literature from Northwestern University.

The interdisciplinary work in Lilli Carré’s second solo show at Western Exhibitions takes the maze as a point of inquiry and departure. She will present work in the form of drawings, book, and animation, exploring the human fascination for constructing mazes specifically to spend time getting lost within them, and for the hope or delight of resolution.

Mazes offer an unusual kind of headspace, providing ways to experience losing awareness of oneself while being extremely focused on where one is at the same time. For Carré, mazes are ways to set up and depict structures of time, play, and choice; structures created to lose, find or study oneself. Carré’s graphic investigations draw upon the human obsession with mazes of all forms, across time and different cultures, in both myth and experience.

In Gallery 1, Carré presents a series of complex mazes as overhead diagrams that she draws for herself, and then immediately attempts to solve. She separates the solution from the maze, letting the structure and the solution exist as separate images. The solution line drawing marks the particular path of impulsive decision-making, a path of thinking through a nonstop series of decisions, like any regular day in our lives, or as a trail and shape of a lifetime of choices from beginning to end.

Two large-scale drawings and an accordion book approach the maze form as fragmented imagery, dislocated from an original context. The space of the page is divided by a series of corners, edges, and panels, to be read as a diagram more akin to how time is read on a comics page. Figures are obscured as they weave through and interact with the lines and panels around them, which act as physical walls and borders on the page. A monitor in the gallery shows a looped animation of a crowd briskly moving through a blank, congested maze-like space from above. Figures face and swerve around each other, all focused on their own path.

Gallery 2 will feature a looped projection of a hand-drawn animation, leading the viewer on a journey through a maze in the first-person perspective, reminiscent of a maze in a video game or of the gallery space itself. As the viewer is lead through the virtual space, the figures and shapes on the periphery flicker, morph, and pass by, evoking the sensation of feeling lost, confused, electric and untethered when in an unfamiliar place.

Lilli Carré (American, b. 1983), an interdisciplinary artist currently living in Chicago, is best known for her comics, animated films, and commercial illustration. Her creative practice employs a wide range of media including printmaking, artists’ books, drawing, and ceramic sculpture. Her animated films have been shown in festivals throughout the US and abroad, including the Sundance Film Festival, and she is the co-founder of the Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation, now in its 5th year. Her most recent collection of comics, Heads or Tails, will see its second printing from Fantagraphics Books in January 2015. Her work has appeared in The Believer Magazine, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Best American Comics and Best American Nonrequired Reading. Her recent BMO Harris Chicago Works solo show at the MCA Chicago was reviewed in the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Reader. She has been included in shows at the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin, the Museum of Cartoon Art in San Francisco, and the DePaul University Art Museum in Chicago.

Stan Shellabarger‘s performances, prints, and artist books are born from everyday activities — walking, breathing, writing — taken to extreme measures, as he accumulates massive amounts of marks, recording discrete units of time and space that amplify the traces that humans leave on the earth. Repetitive actions lead to extremely subtle marks emerging as visible artistic interventions into his chosen object (book, print, ball of twine). This work addresses issues relating to the body and its environs and employ predetermined alternative drawing methods that result in minimal abstract objects. For his fourth solo show at the gallery, Shellabarger presents a print installation, several new walking books, sculptural balls of twine, and a new photograph.

The centerpiece of this exhibition, both an homage to and a critique of Minimalist artist Carl Andre’s signature sculpture, “Plain”, was created by walking on a 6 x 6 foot square comprised of 36 cold-rolled steel plates, laid out to resemble the Andre piece,of which both the MCA and the Art Institute of Chicago each own a version. Shellabarger paced a serpentine path across the steel plates while wearing shoes affixed with heavy grit sandpaper to his soles. He then printed each plate like one would a drypoint print. The prints are assembled in order to recreate the path trod upon the plates, and is presented on a low pedestal just above the gallery floor.

Andre invites viewers to walk upon his sculptures so that they can register, on a sensory level, the feel of different materials (such as steel and aluminum) and the distinction between standing in the middle of a sculpture and remaining outside of its boundaries1. Shellabarger takes this disruption several steps further. While viewers are encouraged to walk upon Andre’s sculptures, Shellabarger aggressively abrades the surface of his ersatz “Plain”, bringing into play elements of chance and romantic notions of gesture, anathemas to standard Minimalist aesthetics.

A new artist book captures marks and scratches made by the artist and his husband as they locked and unlocked the door to their apartment over the course of three years. Shellabarger will also present several “Walking Balls” in the show, balls of twine that are literally physical representations of time passed and a new photo documenting a discrete performance by Shellabarger, enacted when a new house was built across the street from his building. Shellabarger would pass by a wooden fence constructed on this property nearly every day, dragging sandpaper down the length of the fence, doing this twice a day, going and coming. The photograph captures the subtle line that began to emerge as a result of this activity, an act that was stopped once the owners stained the fence.
Stan Shellabarger’s show at Western Exhibitions in 2011 was reviewed in The Chicago Tribune and Art Practicaland works from that show were acquired by The Art Institute of Chicago, The Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Baltimore Museum of Art, The National Gallery of Canada and The Newark Public Library. His solo shows include a pine-needle installation at the Hyde Park Art Center, a 12 x 12 New Work/New Artists exhibition at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art in December and he has been included in group shows at Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Nice, France, Minneapolis Institute of Art, inova in Milwaukee, the Chicago Cultural Center, University of Buffalo and the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. His work has been reviewed in Art in America, artforum.com, ArtUS, New City, and Artslant. Shellabarger received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and lives and works in Chicago.

Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present our third solo show with RICHARD HULL. The Chicago-based artist will exhibit a series of crayon-on-paper abstract portraits in Gallery 1 and in Gallery 2, a new oil-on-wax-on-canvas painting, two never-seen-before paintings started over ten years ago, and a huge unframed drawing.

Richard Hull joined the Phyllis Kind Gallery before his graduation from the School of the Art Institute Chicago, where many of Chicago’s legendary Imagist painters showed in the late-1970’s, including Roger Brown, Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke, Christina Ramberg and Karl Wirsum. He was known then for painting “abstracted architectural interiors where towers, gabled roofs, and arched doorways combine with geometric solids and intersecting planes to form a framework in which various figurative elements are situated.” (1). Hull calls his recent paintings and drawings (2011-2015) “stolen portraits.” His crayon drawings, in particular, are portraits in the form of hairdos, each one expressing a distinct visual personality rather than a representation of a particular individual. This quasi-figurative direction started with, of all things, drawing a horse’s tail for an exquisite corpse in a performative collaboration with MacArthur award-winning saxophonist and composer Ken Vandermark and the illustrator and printmaker Dan Grzeca. Hull has also been influenced by the concept of a Klein bottle, a non-orientable surface with no identifiable “inner” and “outer” side. In subsequent works, he has doubled and mirrored the tail/kidney shape, while exploring spatial relationships, both metaphorically and formally, between the geometric dualities of full and empty spaces. In Hull’s stolen portraits, horse tails now resemble looping flower petal forms – building blocks for portrait-like structures. The bulbous loops are accentuated by minute, repetitive, often concentric actions within the large masses.

The common crayons Hull uses for this body of work give each drawing a visceral, physical presence that is also transparent and ephemeral, and the heavy build up of wax allows for sgraffito, a scratch-like mark-making technique, to be applied to the various layers of color. Given that he thinks of the drawings as hairdos, it is not surprising to learn that he sometimes uses a comb to make the marks. The crayon drawings have been the primary focus of his studio work the past two years but they are not studies for paintings; Hull stated in a recent interview on Inside/Within: “I did the paintings before I did the drawings. The paintings lead me to the drawings.” The rigorous crayon drawings are distillations of the ideas achieved through Hull’s investigation of the more fluid, sensual materials associated with oil painting.

A new massive “stolen portrait” painting hanging in Gallery 2 shares space with two paintings that were each started around 10 years ago and have recently been reworked. These earthy works revisit and readdress the issue of landscape and the figure in it. They differ from his recent portrait paintings in that the delineation between the figure and ground becomes blurred; the image is overtaken by the paint. Joining these paintings is a large pencil drawing “Passage” that Hull started with the idea of making a million discreet marks, vaguely thinking of a body of water or an undulating terrain, while really describing nothing except perhaps the passage of time.

Richard Hull (b. 1955 Oklahoma City, OK, lives and works in Chicago, IL)

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.; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art Kansas; 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 Contemporary Art Museum, 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.

Elijah Burgher‘s (b. 1978, Kingston, NY) drawings, paintings and prints utilize ideas from magick and the occult to address sexuality, sub-cultural formation and the history of abstraction. Citing early 20th century occultist Austin Osman Spare’s system, Elijah Burgher makes sigils—emblems to which magical power is imputed. By recombining the letters that spell out a wish into a new symbol, Burgher’s pictures of sigils literally encode desire while embodying it abstractly through shape, color and composition. For this show, Burgher will be presenting new abstract pressure prints made at Chicago’s Spudnik Press. Burgher’s work has been included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial; the 2014 Gwangju Biennial as part of AA Bronson’s “House of Shame” installation; and in group shows at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Hales Gallery in London; Cabinet in London; Exile in Berlin; Rhodes College in Memphis, TN; and the Sullivan Galleries at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been written about in New York Times, Art in America, ArtReview, Artforum.com, New City and Daily Serving and was been included in Phaidon’s VITAMIN D2 hardcover survey of contemporary drawing practices. He lives and works in Chicago.

Dana Carter works across media often using ephemeral materials that convey the passage of time. In The world is mystical, dangerous and delicious, Carter will present works made by evaporating saltwater on fabric. Carter’s visceral hybrid objects look like images from satellites or gleaming mountains at night. The fabric is used as a physical representation of darkness and the crystalline forms give the viewer a sense of being disoriented in the landscape. Carter’s light, fabric and video installations have been exhibited at Elmhurst Art Museum, Il; MassArt, Boston; American Institute of Architecture, New Orleans; Iceberg Projects, Chicago; Devening Projects, Chicago; Center for Print Studies, Columbia University, NY; Vox Populi, Philadelphia; Locust Projects, Miami; Gallery 400, Chicago; Glass Curtain Gallery, Chicago; Cleve Carney Art Center, IL; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; The Bioscope, Johannesburg, South Africa; and Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales, Havana, Cuba. Her work has been written about in the Chicago Tribune; Chicago Reader; Architect’s Newspaper; New City; Times-Picayune. Carter lives and works in Chicago.

Pamela Fraser‘s (b. 1965) loosely graphic paintings are subtly detailed, simple compositions. Her abstracted forms appear like an innocuous symbolic language that infuses flat colored shapes with a playful, sometimes humorous sensibility. She recently expanded her painting practice to include sculptural forms, both wall-based and in site-specific installations. In The world is mystical, dangerous and delicious, Fraser will be presenting one of her first forays into ceramics, an interlocking irregularly-shaped diptych of black and white panels perforated with triangular patterns. Solo exhibitions include Galerie Schmidt Maczolleck, Cologne; Galleria Il Capricorno, Venice; The Blaffer Museum of the University of Houston; Casey Kaplan Gallery, NY; and Golden Gallery, Chicago. Fraser is a recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award and continues to be featured in national and international publications. Fraser’s work is represented by Galerie Anke Schmidt in Cologne, Germany. She lives and works in Barnard, Vermont.

Leah Mackin’s (b. 1985, Philadelphia, PA) work investigates the ephemeral nature and malleability of photocopied paper. In the book objects, paper is photocopied onto itself to create abstracted, bound compositions. In a new construction for The world is mystical, dangerous and delicious, folded and conformed paper is presented in a table vitrine. For Untitled (Swipe) toner is unfixed and removed by the touch of a finger. Her work has been presented in group shows at the Slusser Gallery at University of Michigan, the Printer’s Ball event in Chicago, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Quarter Gallery at University of Minnesota, and & Pens in Los Angeles. In 2012, Mackin presented a solo exhibition, Frequency Illusions at Western Exhibitions. Mackin lives and works in Chicago.

Dutes Miller‘s (b. 1965, Pennsylvania) work critically engages with the mythologies surrounding human sexuality, especially an exploration of the male body as it manifests itself in gay desire, in its evident state of arousal, its protuberances, its emissions. The new woven collages in this show obscure bodies in a tangle of patterned elements. Dutes Miller’s work has been reviewed in artforum.com, the Chicago Tribune, New City and the Chicago Reader. Groups shows include White Flag Projects in St. Louis, the Ukranian Museum of Art and 40ooo in Chicago. His collaborative work as Miller & Shellabarger won awards from Artadia and the Luois Comfort Tiffany Foundation and has been in galleries and museums across the country. Miller lives and works in Chicago.

Rachel Niffenegger‘s (b. 1985, Evanston, IL) work focuses on the ephemeral state of the feminine figure in contemporary society, addressing notions of the body, sculpture, clothing and painting; alluding to both physical and psychological violence. Niffenegger will be showing a steel and epoxy clay sculpture from a new series of intimately scaled, open-form busts. This achromatic portrait suspends a mesh synthetic wig and various features from a bone like hook. Rachel Niffenegger recent solo shows include Western Exhibitions in Chicago and Club Midnight in Berlin and has been included in group shows at Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; Museum for Modern Art in Arnhem; Bourouina Gallery in Berlin; Tracy Williams Ltd in NYC; Ceri Hand Gallery in Liverpool; and in Chicago at Corbett vs. Dempsey, Andrew Rafacz Gallery, and the Hyde Aprk 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 lives and works in Chicago.

Corkey Sinks (b. 1983, Dallas, TX) works in a variety of media including sculpture, textiles, and printed matter. Through constellations of escapist fantasies, self-help culture, and geometric pattern-making, Sinks seeks practical and psycho-spiritual alternatives to the mainstream. Sinks is showing large hand-cut, heat-fused plastic piece besotted with black and clear triangles, a uncanny object that resembles both a quilt and tarp. Recent exhibitions iin Chicago nclude BLACK CAULIFLOWER, with Jamie Steele at Roots and Culture; Events, Coincidences, and Repercussions, a solo exhibition at Elastic Arts Foundation; New Collaborative works by Corkey Sinks and Jesse Butcher at Adult Contemporary; and RANCH, curated by GURL DONT BE DUMB at Iceberg Projects, Chicago IL. Sinks is co-founder of Walls Divide Press and lives and works in Chicago.

Deb Sokolow’s (b. 1974, Davis, CA) text-driven drawings combine research, fiction and humor to speculate on topics relating to politics, conspiracy theory and human nature. The drawings in The world is mystical, dangerous and delicious ruminate on recent interactions with ghosts. Recent group exhibitions include the 4th Athens Biennale in Greece, The Drawing Center in New York City, Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen in Germany, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia and Western Exhibitions in Chicago. Sokolow’s 2013 solo exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Some Concerns About the Candidate, was reviewed in The New York Times, and her work has been reproduced for Creative Time’s Comics project, for Swedish art magazine, Paletten, and in Vitamin D2, a survey on contemporary drawing. Sokolow lives and works in Chicago.