Exhibitions

For his third solo exhibition at Western Exhibitions, Dutes Miller presents New Relics from the Pleasuredome. Miller’s sculptures, made from common materials and found objects, combine fantasy and male sexuality, examining the spaces where the artist’s inner life, queer subcultures and mass media intersect. An essay by Matt Morris will accompany the show, available as a take-away at the gallery. The show runs from June 3 to July 8, 2017 and opens with a reception, free and open to the public, on Saturday, June 3 from 5 to 8pm.

The sculptures that comprise Dutes Miller’s New Relics from the Pleasuredome are coated in a thick residue of intuition and personal mythologies lavished over one another. Preferring the dimensionality of bewitched forests filled with Radical Fairies over more austere strains of artistic conceptualism, Miller shares an instinct for magic as a creative strategy for contesting norms and celebrating alterity with such queer artistic touchstones as art-shaman AA Bronson and shapeshifter Gensis Breyer P-Orridge. His objects are the delightfully deformed offspring of Niki de Saint Phalle’s voluptuously femme goddess sculptures who dance naked and uninhibited through the streets of Germany. They are the offshoots (if you catch my meaning) of Louise Bourgeois’ Fillette, a “dick move” some would say, dubbed a “little girl;” Miller likewise spins his forms through realms material, spiritual, and psycho-sexual—accreting a panoply of carnal fantasy into brutish, buoyant idols. He has built in ecstasy a series of moderately scaled sculptures in which erotic possibilities are exaggerated, multiplied, and mutated into horned and horny creatures.

Two guardians grace the gallery entrance: fluorescent, enormous butt plugs erect before the audiences that penetrate the gallery installation beyond them. In exchanging traditional painting surfaces for these twisted cherubs sculpted in papier-måché and plaster, the vibrant loads blown over Miller’s suggestive forms reframe a longer history of action painting as symbolic personal expenditure. A metallic violet gourd is stiff over a slumping plaster stand, most resembling the euphemistic “eggplant emoji” used in text messages to signal tumescent phallicism. Talismanic figures proudly present their receptive assholes, oozing with swirls of glittering red and purple. A beast with two backs slops under viscous layers of ashen grey—a somber joinder between priapic orgies and gatherings for grieving losses in LGBTQIA communities, such as last summer’s massacre at Pulse night club that reminds us that we dance and fuck in the face of danger.

In the 1487 Malleus Maleficarum, or “Hammer of Witches,” a text that served as a manual for the Inquisition’s attack on women judged to be witches, perhaps its most ludicrous accusation was that witches robbed men of their penises and kept the abducted members alive and crowded into a great bird’s nest, with special attention called to the formidable endowment of the village priest. While such an incredible, bawdy tale reads starkly out of place amidst the Malleus’ proceedings, today it might be a fairytale rendition of Dutes Miller’s abstracted bottom boys who are barbed with the dicks of their former conquests. Sometimes tri-podded on a “third leg,” sometimes adorned with bruised, pendulum testicles, Miller’s miscreant faerie changelings wear patriarchy’s castration anxieties and generously genderfluid counter-narratives across their backs. The enchantment enacted by Miller’s sculptural receptacles begins at their orifices—open, incorporative, hungry—and the pleasure they derive from taking it all inside of them, a universe pulled across a prostrate and settled into each work’s inner vessel, filling them up.

Dutes Miller’s work has been written about on artforum.com, Hyperallergic, the Huffington Post,  Chicago Reader, Time Out Chicago, New City, and the Chicago Tribune. Miller’s work has been included in exhibitions at several national venues including White Flag Projects in St. Louis and the Ukrainian Museum of Art 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 and has been written about in Art in America, Artforum.com, Art & Auction, Frieze, Artnet, The Art Newspaper, Flash Art, and the Chicago Tribune. Miller received a BFA from Illinois State University. He is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and lives and works in Chicago.

Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present The Dead Know Everything, a solo show by gallery artist Elijah Burgher, his first solo show since moving to Berlin from Chicago one year ago and his third show at Western Exhibitions. Burgher will show new colored pencil drawings that ruminate on friendship, death, flags, gods, demons and paradise.

Notes on “The Dead Know Everything” by Elijah Burgher:

Flags for imaginary communities (or yet-unimagined or even unimaginable ones). Flags coming apart, shredding into pure color. Flags too complicated to function as such, festooned with solar-anal wheels and hexes on living death, devils of distraction, doubt and other daily dangers. Alchemical primaries: red, yellow, black, white. Silver, gold, bronze, lead, shit. Esoteric primaries: red, purple, green. Emerald green, jade green, pine green, spring leaf green. Fantasies of sunlight, nude flesh and friendship. Frei Korpur Kultur. Seductive psychopomps and ancient grinning demons. Dead friends. Bill with corpse paint (red). Tom playing dead in some bushes along Hollywood Beach (green). Mark in my studio, showing off her black nail polish (purple). The dead know everything.

Most of the “flags” are based on a symbol I have been calling “Eden.” It doesn’t symbolize anything in particular, having morphed from a logo for an imaginary cult to a sort of signature and on to a glyph for a mysterious machine. It’s a placeholder for meaning, a vessel to be filled with significance through use. Some of the flags are simple, geometric abstractions, reminiscent of Bauhaus textiles. I’ve added forms to others, pinning symbols to them, criss crossing conduits and decorative details, burying them under “bells and whistles.”

Eden (as a concept as well as a landscape), snakes and ladders and rainbows, “the dead know everything,” psychopomps and demons… these all refer to religious ideas, shamanistic ones in particular. A paradisiacal past. Imagery of ascension to a celestial zone of gods and spirits or descent to an underworld peopled by evil entities and ghosts. Snakes and ladders imagery, from the board game, feature in two pieces (“Eden flag w/ solar-anal emblems and hexes” and “Death of Humwawa.” Snakes and ladders are figures of infernal descent and heavenly ascension respectively, and can be found in various shamanisms from across the globe. The original Indian boardgame and its later Victorian version had a moral significance: ladders represented virtues and snakes represented vices. I am not interested in the moral lessons, just the beauty of the gameboard and the cosmological symbolism.

William Pisarri (1971-2007), Tom Daws (1970-2013) and Mark Aguhar (1987-2012) were three dear friends that I lost while living in Chicago. I wanted to draw each of them while they were alive, and then committed to portraits of them after each passed. Perhaps it took leaving that city to finally bring myself to make these pictures? Each died too young. Bill was a member of the Flying Luttenbachers, a great noise band from Chicago. He and Rebecca Walz were best friends in high school. She introduced me to him. Before he passed, we’d started to make some improvised noise music together. Tom was Doug Ischar’s partner. He worked in the film industry, doing special effects, splitting his time between LA and Chicago. I made a video documenting a ritual with him. Mark was an artist, pursuing her MFA at UIC. I danced with her regularly at Chances and other queer parties around the city. I gave her scabies once. She told me I was a crust punk. I made her a sigil, which she had tattooed in magenta on her forearm.

Gods & demons … The portrait of Hermes is based on a statuette in the collection of the Yale Museum of Art. The surface is scarred and stained with age, which combines weirdly with his subtle “come hither” look. Hermes, importantly, escorts dead souls to Hades. It is my intention to underline this jarring amalgam of time-battered body and seductive pose in the figure of the penultimate psychopomp by straightforwardly representing this sculpture. Humwawa and Pazuzu are both ancient Mesopotamian demons. Humwawa is the intestine-faced monster that Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill for the thrill of adventure in the Gilgamesh epic. Pazuzu, a chimerical demon whose likeness was originally used to scare off other demons, is best known in contemporary times as the spirit that possesses the 12-year-old girl Regan in The Exorcist.

“Grünewald” is a multi-figure composition based on days spent in the sun with AA Bronson, his partner Mark, and my husband Jonathan this past summer. Grünewald is a park on the western outskirts of Berlin with a large gay nudist section where men cruise openly. It’s both Edenic and demonic. And, again, friendship as a thread that runs through the show.

Elijah Burgher was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial (selected by Anthony Elms), the 2014 Gwangju Biennial (as part of AA Bronson’s “House of Shame”), The Nothing That Is at the Contemporary Art Museum of Raleigh, North Carolina, and The Temptation of AA Bronson at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam and his work has been shown in Berlin, London, Paris, Stockholm and Mexico City. He’s been a resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Fire Island Artist Residency and his work has been discussed in The New York Times, Art in America, Art Review, Artforum, Secret Behavior and was included in VITAMIN D2, the hardcover survey of contemporary drawing. He received a MFA from the School of the Art Institute, Chicago and a BA from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY. Elijah Burgher is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and Horton Gallery in New York City. He lives and works in Berlin.

For more images and information, contact Scott Speh: scott@westernexhibitions.com (312) 480-8390

Ryan Travis Christian’s surreal personal narratives are fueled by the absurdity of life in his small, suburban-Chicago hometown. The untidy lifestyles of contemporary humanity are all hanging out, including heavy petting, drugs and alcohol, beaten-up cars, fireworks and death. Inspired by Ub Iwerks, George Condo, the Hairy Who and— new to this body of work— vintage political cartoons and hand-drawn animation, Christian comes to terms with his sources sordid past while embracing their richness and flavor.

In his third solo show at Western Exhibitions, “This Shit Is For The Birdies,” Christian’s idiosyncratic vision has expanded to include commentary on current crises in the nation and world at large. Tackling hot political issues such as immigration, depression and the American dream, Christian’s historical precedents become a mirror reflecting many common concerns of the present, warts and all.

Musing on the technological and material obsolescence of his inspiration, Christian’s recent work doubles down on the paradoxical relationship between childish cartoons and ominous messages. Using dense layers of graphite pencil to create graphic images of condoms, brick houses, and Mickey Mouse, his high contrast figures are rendered in slow motion and set against hazy sfumato-esque landscapes and inside of melting, skewed spaces. A series of small daily drawings touch upon a vast array of topics, such as the economy, violence, the environment, gender, class, hope, doubt, and the afterlife; a large floor sculpture takes the form of a drinking bird toy, that perpetual motion gag gift that mimics a bird bobbing for a drink; and for the first time, monochromatic patterned paintings feature vibrating optics, quivering silhouettes and cream cheese smears of titanium white oil paint.

Ryan Travis Christian’s solo shows include the Contemporary Art Museum in Raleigh, NC; 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. His work has been written about in frieze, art ltd, Art Papers, New American Paintings, Daily Serving, Indy Week and the Associated Press. 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. DAZED recently named Christian as one of the “top ten artists working with monochrome.” He is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and lives and works in the Chicagoland area.