Skip to content

Exhibitions


Dogman Lives on the Ground

April 18, 2025 - June 7, 2025

Article: Frieze 7 Shows to See During EXPO CHICAGO 2025 by Annette Lepique, April 22, 2025

Western Exhibitions is pleased to present Jessica Campbell’s solo show, Dogman Lives on the Ground. Campbell’s third show with the gallery brings together works — textiles and drawings — that grapple with the death of a close friend of the artist, made in posthumous collaboration with this friend. This exhibition reflects on the pain, absurdity and humour of friendship and love, and life and death. Please join us for an opening reception on Friday, April 18, from 5 to 8pm. The show runs through June 7 and gallery hours are Tues-Sat, 11am to 6pm.

“Dogman Lives on the Ground” is a simultaneously silly yet serious turn of phrase that was typical of the artist’s friend Lee McClure. To paraphrase his brother Renny’s definition, presented at Lee’s funeral in 2023, a dog is a stupid, sweet animal who is at its core both good and very bad at once. A man, on the other hand, is an abomination, an extremely creepy, extremely manipulative, violent jerk of some kind, like Genghis Khan, who is simultaneously self-assured and proud of his accomplishments like making gizmos, constructing fancy buildings and going into outer space. “Living on the ground” is a way of countering these achievements. We can go into outer space, but at enormous cost and limited frequency. We can do brain surgery, but can also forget to take the scissors out of your brain. So, “living on the ground” is a reminder that most of us, most of the time, are just living on the ground.

Three modest cotton warp and wool weft weavings document the shared affinities and sense of humour that Campbell shared with her friend and former partner, Lee, as well as tribulations of making sense of a life cut short before the age of 40 and her place in that life. Piggy Bank Lee Brought Me Back From Halifax, depicts a brittle, kitschy plastic pig with a cartoonlike face, a gift from Lee. From the artist:

It’s the kind of cute object that I found myself often drawn to, and that I was drawn to for the course of the twenty plus years that Lee was in my life. This object, cheap, mass-produced, otherwise insignificant, has enormous significance for me now. It’s a reminder that Lee knew me, knew my interests, cared enough to travel across the country with this bank for my enjoyment. Weaving is a time-consuming and labourious process and using this process to reproduce objects that were gifted to me from Lee is a chance to ruminate on them and their symbolic weight. By remaking a mass produced, cheap plastic object in this manner, there is greater significance afforded to what might otherwise disappear on a thrift store shelf.

A series of 8 works on paper framed by curtains made from her signature technique of collaging carpet remnants form the spine of the show. The hybrid wall-works that incorporate a combination of collage elements and drawing marks related to the recent work of Campbell, with shapes and patterns pulled from Lee’s work shows Campbell attempting to make drawings that make material the experience of shared ways of thinking and the pain of loss.

She titles a piece in this series (im not lazy i dont think but i havent got a shred of entrepreneur in me), which is the last text message that Lee sent her, three weeks before he died in December of 2022. From Campbell:

A prolific cartoonist, painter and writer, after Lee’s death, I culled together some of his published works to put together a book (Boo Hoo), which I had printed to give away at his funeral. In doing so, I revisited his of the past twenty years and was reminded of our shared artistic affinities. We came of age together, went to art school together, developed as artists, thinkers and writers together. The way he draws a chair is the same as how I draw a chair. There were patterns and methods in his work that I found indistinguishable from my own, and, at this point, I cannot remember who influenced whom. This was a bittersweet realization: in part, I am extremely grateful to have some of Lee’s way of thinking intertwined with and indistinguishable from my own, but the perpetual reminders of our shared experiences and modes of work is also an extremely painful reminder of loss.

This show is an attempt to reconcile with the impossibility of Lee’s death through a series of works made for him, reflecting on his life and prolific work as an artist, writer and comedian and his relationship with the artist, his close friend and former partner. Bringing together textiles, drawings, and works made in posthumous collaboration, this exhibition reflects on the pain, absurdity and humour of being a dogman who lives on the ground.

Jessica Campbell is a Canadian artist and humourist based in Toronto, working in comics, fibres, painting, drawing and performance. Her Chicago Works show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 2018-2019 was reviewed in Art in America, Hyperallergic and Juxtapoz.  She is the author of three graphic novels, Rave (Drawn and Quarterly, 2022), Hot or Not: 20th Century Male Artists (Koyama Press, 2016) and XTC69 (Koyama Press, 2018). Her comics have appeared in the New Yorker, Hyperallergic, Drawn to MoMA, and the Nib, among other publications. Her solo and two-person exhibitions include the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, Patel Brown in Toronto, SPACES in Cleveland, Field Projects in NYC, Roots & Culture in Chicago and La Galerie Laroche/Joncas in Montreal. Her work has been included in group shows at the John Michael Kohler Art Center in Wisconsin, the Art Gallery of Hamilton in Ontario, The Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton, the ICA in Baltimore, Richard Heller Gallery in LA, moniquemeloche in Chicago, and Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Campbell received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014.


Assembly

February 28, 2025 - April 12, 2025

Western Exhibitions is pleased to present Geoffrey Todd Smith’s solo show, Assembly in Galleries 1 and 2 at our Chicago location. This group of recent works on paper shows the artist turning his attention to invented portraiture alongside the abstract works that led to this departure. Please join us for an opening reception on February 28, 2025 from 5 to 8pm. The show runs through April 12 and gallery hours are Tues-Sat, 11am to 6pm.

Geoffrey Todd Smith’s, Assembly, as the title suggests, is a gathering of invented portraits, as well as a reference to the way every character is constructed.  Each playful visage is developed from colorful, interlocking shapes into a bifurcated humanoid form and adorned with a skin of spikey hand-drawn marks. There are no bodies, garments, props, or environments to provide clues about each entity’s circumstance. Instead, Smith constructs the heads with a variety of cartoonish anthropomorphic features, occasional animal references, and geometric voids that imbue the images with a cold, robotic stare. Like a screen actor in a close-up, each persona relies only on nuanced expressions which change moods depending on where the viewer’s gaze settles within the multi-eyed portrait. In the end, a cheeky title is given to each work, providing a sense of the artist’s mindset, but offering no concrete narrative.

In Gallery 2, Geoffrey Todd Smith will display a selection of abstract predecessors to his recent portraits. While making these works, he was consumed with creating an ornamental floating object. Beginning with a large penciled-in oval contained within the rectangular page, the artist gradually accrued a symmetrical grid of frilly, decorative shapes working to the oval’s edge. As Smith began adorning the first of these ruffly gouache underpaintings with a field of zigzags and spikes, he noticed the hint of a stylized face staring back at him. As he continued to embolden this motif, each work became a sort of decorative mirror with multiple sets of embedded eyes, eventually leading him to make the logical leap to portraiture.

Geoffrey Todd Smith (b. 1973, Cleveland, OH) has work in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, U.S. Department of State in Washington, DC Santa Barbara Museum of Art, The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, The Progressive Insurance Art Collection, Hallmark Inc., Fidelity Investments Corporate Art Collection, Soho House Chicago, the South Bend Art Museum in Indiana, and Harper College in Illinois. His work has been shown at the Indianapolis Museum of Art; Hyde Park Art Center, The Union League, DePaul Art Museum and Shane Campbell Gallery in Chicago; Luis de Jesus Gallery and Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles; The Hughes Gallery in Australia; The Green Gallery and Real Tinsel in Milwaukee; TOA Presents in Minneapolis; Left Field in Los Osos, CA; The Front in New Orleans; Illinois State Museum, and the Elmhurst Art Museum in Illinois. His work has been written about in Hyperallergic, The New Criterion, New City, The Seen, New American Paintings, Bad at Sports, art ltd, Juxtapoz, Chicago Tribune, and Chicago Magazine. Smith lives and works in Chicagoland.

For his 16-year survey at (northern) Western Exhibitions, the gallery commissioned an essay by Dominic Molon, the Richard Brown Baker Curator of Contemporary Art at the RISD Museum in Providence, Rhode Island. From an excerpt of “A dot, a line, and a pattern walk into a bar …” Molon wrote:

A painting such as ‘Show Me All of Your Piercings and I’ll Tell You All of My Dreams’ possesses a stoic restraint in its use of white, black, gold, gray, and brown, and tightly alternating patterns. Contrast this with the fluidity and off-centeredness of ‘Unmemorable Tryst with a Hypnotist,’ which layers differently patterned circular, ovoid, sunburst, and square forms (among others) with curving lines of varying thickness in a seemingly inchoate jumble.   Philip Glass meets David Lee Roth … Stephen Wright meets Sam Kinison … Michael Snow meets Mel Brooks and so on.  Smith fascinatingly alternates the personality of his paintings within his own oeuvre, making the inconsistency of their temperament and tone an absolute constant in his practice.  


A Lazy Love

January 10, 2025 - February 22, 2025

Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present A Lazy Love, our first solo show with Ella Weber. After a long day’s work, Weber would often treat herself to a free 90-minute massage at Nebraska Furniture Mart. During the pandemic lockdown, she used her government stipend to purchase a 2D Luxury Zero Gravity Massage Chair to use from home, the chair becoming a temporary substitute for human touch. In a series of surreally hyperreal graphite drawings and a video, Weber explores the relationship between labor and rest, love and loss. See more from the artist herself below.  Please join us for the public reception on Friday, January 10, from 5 to 8pm at our Chicago location alongside Julia Schmitt Healy in Gallery One. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm.


“Dad, what is the definition of lazy?”
“Me,” he said while reclining in his chair, the game on TV.

A Lazy Love explores the relationship between labor and rest, love and loss. In a consumer culture of constant production and work, inevitably comes the question, “What’s next?”

Honestly, I just want to sit. I want to rest.

After a long day’s work, I like to treat myself to a free 90-minute massage at Nebraska Furniture Mart, “America’s Largest Home Furnishings Store.” While vibrating in a massage chair for sale, I let the voices of couples shopping for La-Z-Boy recliners drift me back into the middle class. I call this Lazy Boy Poetry.

Oh my word this feels so nice. My back is in heaven.
Sit in it with me. I don’t want to lose you.

As the dialogue of couples searching for the perfect chair washes over me, I contemplate my own love life from afar. In my relaxed position, I begin to see each La-Z-Boy recliner as a literal lazy boy. Like the dating app of my past, chair after chair is for sale, screaming try me, feel me, buy me. Swipe left, swipe right. What’s next?

What am I looking for? What makes a good chair? The most compatible partner?
Do I have a type? Am I too comfortable? Is this the one?

Woven into the fabric of each La-Z-Boy recliner, I render the faces of past relationships. Through drawing, as a type of meditation and reflection, these delicate graphite drawings reveal an intimacy through time. Similar to how memory fades, the empty chair references the loss of what was, while simultaneously embodying a former lover. After 40 hours of labor, each drawing is “finished,” yet left incomplete to reflect upon a lazy love.

Love is sad, at least at the end.

During the pandemic lockdown, I used our government stipend to purchase my own massage chair to use from home. This 2D Luxury Zero Gravity Massage Chair became a temporary substitute for human touch. In the video, A Massage Chair Without a Body, the machine is programmed to vibrate, mechanically inhaling and exhaling unaware of its lack of a body to embrace. Koi fish swim in and out of the scene, revealing a feeling of longing for love and friendship, as the leather chair morphs into the skin of my grandmother’s chest searching for breath on her deathbed.

Through drawing, text and video, the viewer is invited to sit in the space between transactional and relational love, while ultimately asking where does one find rest?

As St. Augustine famously said, “Our hearts are restless, until they rest in you.”

 


Ella Weber is a basement-based artist who uses humor, performance, and storytelling within her mutli-faceted practice. Playfully upending the existential fabrics of daily life, Weber transforms her minimum-wage day jobs into her studio. Across the counter and screen, Weber blurs the line between employee and customer, performance and reality, art and life.  Weber’s recent solo exhibitions include the Plains Art Museum in North Dakota, The Union for Contemporary Art in Nebraska, and Munson in Utica, NY. Group exhibitions include the Everson Museum in Syracuse, Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, ICNY in New York, among several others. Residencies include MASS MoCA, The NARS Foundation, Rogers Art Loft, PrattMWP, Ox-Bow School of Art, The Wassaic Project, and Anderson Ranch. Her debut novel The Deli Diaries was published with Latah Books in 2023. Weber received an MFA from the University of Kansas and she lives and works in Omaha, Nebraska.

Stay tuned, Weber will be presenting a performative artist lecture presented as a Stand–Up Comedy–Microsoft PowerPoint –TED Talk–poetry reading,  inspired by her debut novel, The Deli Diaries, at the gallery at some point during the run of this show. More info is forthcoming.


Looking Back: Work by Julia Schmitt Healy from 1970-1981

January 10, 2025 - February 22, 2025

For our third exhibition with Julia Schmitt Healy, Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present a selection of work from across the entire decade of 1970s that focuses on Healy’s idiosyncratic approach to portraiture. Culled from multiple bodies of work, in multiple mediums (painting, watercolor, collage, trapunto, lithography), made in multiple locations (Chicago, Ethiopia, Ireland, Nova Scotia New York), Healy’s portraits (or at times, anti-portraits) riff on nostalgia, superficiality, aging, pareidolia, societal mores, domesticity and pets, all through a distinctly Chicago Imagist lens. Please join us for an opening reception on January 10, from 5 to 8pm. The show runs through February 22 and gallery hours are Tues-Sat, 11am to 6pm.

Julia Schmitt Healy conjures her works not from reality, but from essence, in her words “something that comes from the unknown”. Recontextualizing portraiture is a persistent theme across her work as she has often stated that she is “not interested in getting it exactly right”.  Her 1970 series of paintings and watercolors, Empty People, flips portraiture on its head, literally. Facing the subject away from the viewer collapses the canon of spectacle/spectator perspective. No longer about the face, posing, and lighting, Empty People Series presents a pictorially framed and divided encounter for reflection.

In the early 70s wrinkles emerge as a key motif, as Healy reflects on aging, memory, nostalgia, and the corporeal body. The graphic depiction of the wrinkles appears as rhythmic repeated striations across not just her subject’s bodies but also as on overall field in watercolors, paintings, and crucially, trapunto textiles, and not just limited to human bodies — automobiles, pets, even mountains get her wrinkled treatment. Her textile paintings exist somewhere between painting, pillows, and soft sculpture; the undulous material apt for engaging in the sagging and wrinkling body. This turn toward craft materials was a bold one at the time, applying quilting techniques to fine art disciplines.

Healy’s captivating wood-grain drawings, lithographs, and wallpaper collages, privately referred to as Housewife Works, depict women made of woodwork, betraying her fascination with domesticity. Created with woodgrain-paneled wallpaper randomly discovered in a shop in Canada, Healy made subtle and witty collages that continued to explore faces and figures in unconventional silhouettes illustrating the head of a lady, a wrapped mummy head, a surprised ghost with a knothole for a mouth and a coffin. She can trace her fascination from childhood, finding faces as she would gaze at the wood of her bedroom walls, practicing the definition of pareidolia: the science of looking for faces in everyday objects.

Julia Schmitt Healy (b. 1947, Elmhurst, Illinois) received a BFA and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied with Ray Yoshida and Whitney Halstead. After graduation, Healy moved to Africa, where she traveled and lived, then later toured Europe and moved to Nova Scotia, Canada with her first husband. Her work was represented for many years by Phyllis Kind Gallery in New York and Chicago, as well as Susan Whitney Gallery in Canada. While in school, she co-curated a mail art show with artist Ray Johnson, called “Intercourse” at the Wabash Transit Gallery. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Everson Museum (Syracuse, NY), Queensborough Museum (NY), Staten Island Museum, Confederation Art Gallery (Canada) and The Canada Council Art Bank. Julia Schmitt Healy lives and works in Port Jervis, New York.,


Walking Books

September 5, 2008 - October 11, 2008

Western Exhibitions is moving, and we’re thrilled to be inaugurating our new gallery space with a solo show of new work by STAN SHELLABARGER. After 4 years in a near west-side industrial complex, Western Exhibitions will transfer its operations to the 119 N Peoria Building in Chicago’s West Loop gallery district. The gallery will be joining its new neighbors in holding receptions on Fridays. Shellabarger’s show will open with a public reception on Friday, September 5, 2008.

Stan Shellabarger’s performance and book work addresses issues relating to the body. The artist often takes mundane, everyday activities like breathing, walking and writing to extreme measures in endurance-based performance work: walking from sunrise to sunset on solstices and equinoxes, counting every breath he takes in an 8 hour time span, filling notebook after notebook with his signature. Shellabarger’s work amplifies the traces humans leave on the earth, as in his walking performances, or on objects, as in his Lightswitch and Mousepad books.

For his second solo show at Western Exhibitions, Shellabarger will show several new Walking Books, works that marry his performance and book-making impulses. To make the Walking Books, the artist paces on long sheets of rag paper with graphite-soled shoes. His footsteps create a luminous graphite/gray drawing that betrays the pattern of the surface trod upon. The verso side of the drawing simultaneously becomes a beautiful blind embossment of this same surface. He folds the paper accordion style and affixes the ends to waxed MDF panels that function as the covers of the book. Shellabarger started this series of books this summer and made 5 of them at the Volta art fair in Basel in June. The books in this show capture several different surfaces form multiple locations, including a particle-board platform in Basel, Switzerland, a parking lot in Portland, Maine, the floor of Western Exhibitions old location and several others. Shellabarger will make a new book on each Saturday during the run of the show, either in the gallery proper, or somewhere in the surrounding West Loop neighborhood.

This will be Stan Shellabarger’s second proper solo show with Western Exhibitions. His last show was reviewed in Art in America, artforum.com and ArtUS. Shellabarger has been invited to do performances at the VOLTA show in Basel, Switzerland, the Time-Based Art Festival in Portland, Oregon; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Illinois State University in Bloomington, Illinois; The Suburban in Oak Park; and the Center of Contemporary Art in St. Louis and has had a 12 x 12 New Work/New Artists solo exhibition at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art in December 2005. He also makes work collaboratively with his husband Dutes Miller. Together they won a Tiffany Foundation Award in 2007 and their show at Western Exhibitions in 2007 was reviewed in Time Out Chicago, New City and the Chicago Sun-Times. Their performance work at the 2008 Volta fair was covered in Artnet and at the NEXT fair was covered in Art & Antiques.


Drifting Shore

November 1, 2024 - December 21, 2024

Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present Drifting Shore, our first solo show with Zhi Ding. Please join us the public reception on Friday, November 1, from 5 to 8pm at our Chicago location alongside a show celebrating the gallery’s 20th anniversary in Gallery One. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm.

By observing and exploring her father’s simplified and idealized vision of the American Dream in a new series of small paintings, Zhi Ding not only reveals a romanticized and tailored American fantasy deeply rooted in the hearts of his generation but also uses it as a basis to further explore the human desire to escape and search for utopia, along with the paradox embedded in these dreams. The exhibition’s title implies this—the shore is both a point of departure and arrival. Drifting suggests less autonomy and more randomness, as one is controlled by a higher power. The “drifting shore” symbolizes a visible/tangible yet unattainable anchor point—a homeland that cannot be returned to, a destination that cannot be reached. It is not a real endpoint, but a vessel for carrying certain fantasies and hopes.

Certain motifs drift through the exhibition: a floating lawn, a red-roofed house with no doors, and burning cigarettes. The pristine lawn and the red-roofed house embody the American Dream as imagined by Ding’s father and his generation in China. At the same time, they reveal a certain longing and a concrete vision of a utopia that lived deep in the hearts of their generation. For Ding, one of the most familiar images of her father is of him smoking alone. She combines this personal memory with the vision of a perfect lawn, which symbolizes her father’s idealized version of himself in a better life, to create these melancholic yet absurd images. The burning cigarettes, a symbol of his identity and habits, clash with this idealized vision, foreign to the polished suburban life they admire; creating a tension — a sense of fragility and combustibility—this dream feels precarious, as if it could be destroyed at any moment.

In “In Silence, In Tears,” a blurred face and a simplified red-roofed house stand opposite each other, filled with longing but unable to connect. In “Brave the Wind and Waves,” a figure rides on a floating lawn that mimics a magical flying carpet—portraying the American Dream as a vessel for escape and fantasy for Ding’s father and his generation. Through these works, Ding explores the complex reality of the American Dream—layered with longing, fragility, illusions, and alienation. It’s a utopia built from idealized elements, offering solace while concealing the struggles beneath the surface.

Zhi Ding (b. 1992, Jiujiang, Jiangxi, China) recently opened her first solo show in Hong Kong at MOU PROJECTS. She obtained her BS in Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Pittsburgh in 2017, her Post-Bacc in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institution of Chicago in 2021, and her MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of Art Institute of Chicago in 2023. Ding currently lives and works in New York City.


20 Years of Western Exhibitions

November 1, 2024 - December 21, 2024

Article: Chicago Reader The past and future of Western Exhibitions by Kerry Cardoza, Nov. 5, 2024

Performance: Saturday, December 14, from 12 to 4pm, as part of the 1709 W Chicago OPEN HOUSE, Miller & Shellabarger will perform Untitled (Pink Tube).

Untitled (Pink Tube) is an ongoing non-theatrical performance by Miller & Shellabarger (Chicago-based artists and married couple Dutes Miller and Stan Shellabarger) started in 2003 in which they simultaneously crochet at opposite ends of a long tube of pink yarn. The tube is a metaphorically-loaded object that both unites and separates them. As the tube grows, it keeps them tethered together as it pushes them apart. Pink Tube is a lifelong artwork, always performed in public, always together.

– – –

Western Exhibitions is humbled to announce our second show of the 2024 Fall season at our Chicago location, an exhibition that plumbs the history of the gallery through archival materials, press releases and the gallery owner’s to-do journals. Please join us for the opening reception on Friday, November 1 from 5 to 8pm. The show, 20 Years of Western Exhibitions, will run in Gallery 1 through December 21. In Gallery 2 during the same time frame, we are showing paintings by the New-York-by-way-of-China artist Zhi Ding, a new artist to us. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11am to 6pm.

Western Exhibitions, started by Scott Speh as a nomadic space in 2002, put on shows in other people’s spaces, friends’ lofts and Speh’s apartment. Western Exhibitions participated in the second Stray Show, one of the first satellite fairs, in tandem with Art Chicago. (“Stray” was a term coined by Chicago critic Chuck Mutscheller in 2000 to describe the spaces involved in the resurgence of the alternative art scene in Chicago during the late ’90s.) The gallery then moved into an actual space, a shared “loft” with Lisa Boyle in 2004. They co-habited two locations in West Town the next four years until Speh finally quit his day job in 2008.  The gallery moved into the West Loop, then the heart of Chicago’s contemporary art gallery scene, at the behest of Shannon Stratton, who was moving her seminal not-for-profit gallery Threewalls into a larger space in the 119 N Peoria Building and asked us to take over their old lease.

A couple years prior, through the help of friend (and patron) Jason Pickleman, the gallery sold several artists books by Miller & Shellabarger to Lew Manilow, the legendary Chicago arts patron who helped found Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art (and was a political activist proud to be on Nixon’s enemies list.) In planning the first show in the new space by Stan Shellabarger which would focus on his artist book practice, Speh asked Pickleman, who had designed the catalog for the Manilow artist book collection, to tell Lew about the show. Jason replied “YOU call him.” So Speh did, with great trepidation, in September 2008. The call was brief as he stumbled to remind Manilow who he was and what Lew had bought from the gallery. Manilow quickly cut Speh off to say “I can’t talk to you right now, the stock market is collapsing.” Speh groaned to himself: “How did I pick the worst time ever to quit my day job?”

And somehow, the gallery muddled through The Great Recession, participating then in a disastrous Armory show in March 2009 while the market was at its very bottom (the booth looked great, mind you; it was disastrous because nothing sold). The gallery moved into the old Tony Wight Gallery space around the corner on Washington Boulevard, then moved again with the other two galleries in the Checkered Cab building, Document and Volume, to our current location on Chicago Avenue. Most of the rest of the Chicago gallery scene followed us to West Town. Western Exhibition opened a second location in 2022 in Skokie, yes, Skokie! All told, the gallery has had 6 locations and 3 logos; participated in over 60 art fairs, near and far; and has put on 233 shows that have included 425 artists. We are proud to also report that the gallery’s very first intern (a position she created herself), Jamilee Lacy, continued on into a successful curatorial career and is now Executive Director of the Frye Art Museum. So today, we look up from our laptop to realize that the gallery has been in business for 20 years. How’d that happen?!

20 Years, 6 Locations, 3 Logos, 233 Shows, 425 Artists

Image: Postcard from our first brick-and-mortar show, courtesy of Artist and Exhibition Ephemera: Collection of Anthony Elms because the gallery founder wasn’t smart enough to save any for posterity.


A List of Wishes

October 20, 2024 - December 22, 2024

(northern) Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present a solo show devoted to Elijah Burgher’s works depicting sigils. Burgher’s paintings, drawings and prints sit at the intersections of representation and abstraction, image and language, and the real and imagined. Drawing from the occult, mythology, daily life and ancient history, he has created an intimate code of symbolism that traces the personal and cultural dynamics of desire, belief and subcultural formation. A List of Wishes will begin on Sunday, October 20 during regular gallery hours, 12-4pm at our location in Skokie, (northern) Western Exhibitions, 7933 N Lincoln Ave., Skokie, IL. Gallery hours are Thu-Sat, 12-6pm, Sun 12-4pm.

William S. Burroughs wrote, “It is to be remembered that all art is magical in origin – music, sculpture, writing, painting – and by magical I mean intended to produce very definite results. Paintings were originally formulae to make what is painted happen.” For more than fifteen years, Burgher has taken up Burroughs’ statement as both subject matter and thought experiment in his studio practice. A List of Wishes gathers works by the artist that depict sigils–graphic ciphers of power and desire that are employed in ritual magick settings. Drawn from a prolific period for Burgher that straddles his time in Chicago and Berlin, the works range from large acrylic paintings on canvas drop cloths to meticulously wrought colored pencil drawings and ghostly pressure prints in which his carefully delineated sigils fracture into fragments of color–or, to use another phrase of Burroughs’, “word and image dust.”

Sigils are pictorial symbols to which magical powers are imputed, such as demonic seals in medieval grimoires and Dutch hex signs. In his work, however, Burgher cites early twentieth century British artist and occultist, Austin Osman Spare, who invented a method for creating sigils by recombining the letters that spell out a given wish into a newly invented and ultimately illegible glyph–in other words, a magical monogram of desire. Spare’s system offers Burgher not only an elegant method for secreting specific intentions in abstract form but summoning contexts both sexual and subcultural. The elder artist believed the most expedient way to cast a sigil’s spell is to visualize it during the ego-shattering moment of orgasm; and his ideas were taken up by contemporary countercultural occult movements such as Chaos Magick and Genesis P-Orridge’s Temple of Psychic Youth. Moreover, Spare’s mutilation of language dovetails with the literary techniques of Burroughs’ cut-up method and Surrealist experiments with asemic writing, both of which were intended to subvert language itself as a medium of power. Burgher maps these connections amongst art historical, esoteric, literary and queer contexts in his engagement with sigils through drawing and painting.

In Gallery 1, eight of Burgher’s large paintings on canvas drop cloths will envelop viewers in a riot of line and color. These works are made on the floor of the studio with paint rollers, referencing both ceremonial magic and the history of 20th century abstraction. When exhibited, the paintings have generally been suspended from the ceiling and away from the wall, partitioning the space and creating a soft, portable architecture while also alluding to mazes and labyrinths; and other times on the floor, suggesting carpets and gardens. Here they will be hung densely and hugging the wall, calling to mind a temple. A selection of Burgher’s works on paper feature in Gallery 2. The composition of Hex Centrifuge combines Bauhaus-era abstraction with Snakes & Ladders game boards and a tromp l’oeil semen stain. Burgher’s geometry dissolves in Eden Flag (Meet Murder My Angel) into haphazard mark-making, mapping the revenge of impulse on system. His prints, on the other hand, all uniquely created from a matrix of stencils using the imperfect and unpredictable process of pressure printing, dissolve the precision of his drawings in operations of chance and recombination that, at their most extreme, result in fields of broken color that evoke shattered stained glass.

Elijah Burgher (1978, Kingston, NY) was featured in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, the 2014 Gwangju Biennial (as part of AA Bronson’s “House of Shame”), and The Temptation of AA Bronson at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam; had a solo show at Ivan Gallery in Romania in 2018; and was recently included in shows at Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva, Switzerland The Drawing Center in New York City, LAXART in Los Angeles and the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa. He has been a resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Fire Island Artist Residency. His work has been discussed in The New York Times, Art in America, Frieze, ArtReview, Artforum.com 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, Ivan Gallery in Bucharest, and P.P.O.W in New York City. He lives and works in Berlin.

Download a preview

 


Great!

September 6, 2024 - October 26, 2024

Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present our first solo show, “Great!” with Cathrine Whited, whose deadpan drawings transform mundane and everyday items into revered icons. The show will open with a free public reception on Friday, September 6, from 5 to 8pm at our Chicago location alongside a solo show by Aya Nakamura in Gallery One. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm.

When asked for a show title she said “Great!” after much thought. After double-checking that she wasn’t just saying great and that the title should be “Great!” And she indeed thought that should be the title.

Whited’s charming, slyly simple drawings combine image and text to document and archive the world around her, with subjects ranging from household objects to food to cartoon characters. Her process starts with making a list — “What’s in my fridge” or “Things that make up a sandwich” — as a jumping off point. Each item on the list is drawn with graphite and colored pencil, distilled to its essential elements, and labeled underneath, akin to a Victorian-era scientific journals and classifications of nature. Whited is meticulous in this process as an index of erasure is often visible, marking her desire to render the image, and especially the text, perfectly. Her subject-centered renderings are neat, clean, and void of background and are a vehicle for viewers to isolate, experience, and analyze our collective everyday interaction with often overlooked objects and culture that surrounds us.

For this show, Whited utilized a list of every piece of furniture in her room, so we are privy to ornate (for her) drawings of her desk/table, ceiling fan, shelves, bed and more. Chuck E. Cheese, the family entertainment chain of restaurants, has long beheld Whited’s psyche as she’s made dozens, if not hundreds of drawings of the animatronic characters that enliven the pizza palace. These are some of her most exquisite drawings, with erasure after erasure, struggling to perfectly capture the likeness and especially render the text, the residue of this labor evidenced by richer surfaces than most of her work. We’ll be showing portraits of RoboDog the Dog Robot, Pasqualy P. Pieplate the Bunny, Jasper T. Jowls the Cowboy Beagle, Cheeto the Leopard Gecko, and Chuck E. Cheese the Ratolphin. A third series catalogs the hijinks occurring when Cathrine has a sleepover at good friend Candi’s house, most prominently their desire to grow human tails that wag.

Cathrine Whited 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 that allows them to grow professionally and personally. Whited has been included in shows at the Cincinnati Art Museum, Western Exhibitions in Chicago and Skokie, The Riffe Gallery in Columbus, Weston Art Gallery in Cincinnati, The Carnegie Art Center in Covington, KY, Indigo Hippo in Cincinnati, and Summertime Gallery in Brooklyn. Her work has been written about on the website Elephant, The Columbus Dispatch and Hyperallergic, and has been featured on Bounty Paper Towels. She lives and works in Cincinnati.


Sight Lines

September 6, 2024 - October 26, 2024

Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present Sight Lines, our second solo show with Aya Nakamura, featuring colored pencil drawings on handmade paper that revolve around the variability of vision, informed by her daily mediation practice, and reimagining and approximating inner visions and dreams. The show will open with a public reception on Friday, September 6, from 5 to 8pm at our Chicago location, alongside a solo show by Catherine Whited in Gallery Two. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm.

Aya Nakamura is intrigued by the ways in which vision changes based on external conditions (too much or too little light), on how the eye sees (with myopia, hyperopia, AMD, glasses refracting light in bands of yellow and blue, also known as chromatic aberration), and on internal states (of turmoil, peace, boredom). She has observed that while her brain interprets visual data, it also generates its own sights and insights, which is especially apparent at night in the scenes that unfold when asleep or half awake. At times her vision feels saturated, brought to a happy hypnosis by a dense crop of plants, while at other times it feels empty, as though the landscape has retreated to an impossibly far distance. Sound, on the other hand, focuses her vision suddenly and violently. Through meditation, Nakamura becomes aware of a vision that is charged with worldly references and tries to separate the associations from the visual information. It is a daily practice that is dotted with moments of inattention and unwelcome forms edging into her consciousness.

Her drawings aren’t necessarily 1:1 representations of these experiences—they are abstractions that reimagine and approximate them in roundabout ways. Viewers are greeted with the drawing Brick, an apt starting point as it refers to the brick wall across from Nakamura’s apartment that faces her as she begins a sit. Bio-patterns emerge as she lowers her eyelids, perhaps inspiring the drawing Hot Visions, a riot of intertwining red and white lines that reverberate atop an intense green field. While those two drawings have unique shapes, Warming is on a square sheet and is about coming together as a community, remembering loved ones, alive and dead, maintaining hope, all the warming effects bought about by the practice. Another shaped piece, Sit, was inspired by watching waves wash ashore in Karatsu Bay. After making the piece, she turned the paper upright to reference the sitting body performing a successful sit—the body grounded, with thoughts and sensations washing in and out with the breath. As much as Nakamura’s drawings are beautiful abstractions, they are also visceral in their making and their imagery, imbued with a corporeal life source.

While Nakamura’s imagery starts with a line as the basic compositional element, her drawings truly begin with the paper that she makes herself, stating “I want the substrate to be in relationship with the drawing.” Sometimes the shape of the paper is based on the image she has in mind, while other times the form of the paper leads and the drawing responds. Her paper can end up being rectilinear, like a traditional sheet, or shaped, like an Elizabeth Murray canvas. At times, Nakamura creates negative space by hollowing out internal pockets in her paper.

Aya Nakamura’s first show at Western Exhibitions in 2022 was reviewed in New City. She has shown at venues in the United States and abroad, recently at Secrist Beach and Heaven, both in Chicago, and at The Hangar and Dawawine in Beirut, Lebanon; Supa Salon in Istanbul, Turkey; Mana Decentralized in Jersey City, NJ; and MPSTN in Fox River Grove, IL. She is the recipient of the Denbo Fellowship from Pyramid Atlantic Art Center and the George and Ann Siegel Fellowship from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a member of Chicago API (Asian, Pacific Islander) and Artists United (CAAU). Nakamura was born in Japan and educated in France and the United States, holding a BA in Fine Arts and Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania, and a MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Nakamura currently lives and works in Chicago.

Review in New City by Alan Pocaro: https://art.newcity.com/2024/09/27/soft-spirits-a-review-of-aya-nakamura-at-western-exhibitions/


Suitable Video: Works from the Suitable Exhibitions Archive

January 2, 2010 - February 6, 2010

Suitable Video Vol. 1: Curator’s Note
by Scott Wolniak

This program loosely organizes work by a number of artists who showed at Suitable Gallery, a DIY exhibition space located in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood, during its 5 year run between 1999 and 2004.  It speaks more of a community of artists than of a curatorial agenda.  The process of selection and compilation began as a straightforward effort to survey all the video work shown at Suitable.  Substitutions and omissions occurred in response to logistic and aesthetic concerns.  The resulting program ultimately sought balance and watchability over purity or completeness.

The content is disparate and varied.  There is no thematic or conceptual agenda, although several arise retrospectively which may reflect the tastes involved in Suitable’s original gallery programming.  Subject matter found in these pieces include humor, failure, the abject and degenerate, the performative, roll playing, the body, art history, art spaces, art materials, counter-culture, process, time, death and love, to name a few.  There is a tangible sense of utility in much of the work- they do not seem fussed over, they communicate directly.

A good example of this directness is found in Kirsten Stoltmann’s “I Spill my Guts Everyday for Nothing”, 2002.  The trope of Hollywood special effect is combined with conventions of early Feminist performance video to darkly illustrate emotional vulnerability.  The fact that Stoltmann is spilling ‘real’ guts, procured from a butcher, out of her duct-taped prosthetic tummy is almost too disturbing.  The look of it is nasty, for sure, but we are only given a quick glimpse, as it slides out of the ruptured skin and hits the floor with a splat.  It is in the extended view we have of her face that the true horror/ humor is revealed.  As she confronts the camera, pallid and pasty, there is tension between her facial-expression and the resonant splat from guts hitting that black-and-white tile floor.

The hand-made and the gross come together again in videos by Paul Nudd and Charles Irvin.  Nudd is famous for brewing up pools of slime and mucous from art supplies and food.  They are playful, like a child blowing milk bubbles, but the effect of viscous ooze quickly turns real, abject, snotty and stomach turning.  Nudd managed even to disturb himself with his piece “Worm Death”, 2000, in which an anonymous phallic drone protrudes from a wet mustardy crevasse, and loudly oinks.

Irvin’s 1999 video “O’Malley’s Head” is a long trance-inducing piece about a baby and a head.  Documentation of a cute, cooing baby playing with a ridiculous wide-eyed, decapitated head (presumably O’Malley’s) is edited to over-the-top Gerber-baby squawk, creating an experience that is kitsch and funny, but mostly just mental.

“Macho-Shogun”, 2000, by Reed Anderson and Daniel Davidson’s is a juvenile B-movie fantasy brought to life with the methods and materials of an Ab-Ex sculptor.  An entire city constructed from cardboard and paint is destroyed in battle between two robot-creatures (also made of cardboard and paint).  In an especially dramatic slow-motion fight sequence, the hairy legs and wrestling-suit of a performer are sited through the sloppy seams of one of the cardboard robot suits.  This humorous moment reveals the artists behind the action, contextualizing the performers and the scale of the set, and allowing us to remember that through all of the smoke and fire and smashing, this is a construct of ludic delight.

Another moment of pure play comes in Ben Stone’s “High Five”, 1999.  This piece takes the form of a home movie, a document of low-stakes backyard competition.  Three friends run a small course then high-five each other, with a cheesy little digital effect for flourish.  Everyone cheers and the piece is over in 40 seconds.  It is so sweet; it makes me want a juice box.

An interesting sub-narrative for this program can be found in the media itself.  These works were made during a transitional time for video, as the standard was shifting from VHS to miniDV circa Hi8 and Digital8.  There was no home DVD authoring, and certainly no projectors.  It is funny to think that most of the video shown back then was displayed on crummy little monitors with built-in VHS players.  Tapes would be prepped for auto-rewind, and viewers would experience art through awkward apparatus.

Some of works literally embody these historical phases in their media identities, such as “Shooter” by Marc Schwartzberg, for which the conversion sequence reads Hi-8 to VHS to miniDV to DVD.  This piece certainly cannot be harmed by quality loss, as the content is already so far outside of what might be considered ‘good’.  Acts of half-baked posturing, sidewalk intimidation and spitting are captured on a shaky hand-held camera then set to the music of Motorhead.  The resulting video is like of a C-grade A/V project made by a high school burnout.

Other works reflect format conversions visually.  Degraded resolution can reveal a history of over-dubs and bad signals.  Sarah Conaway’s piece “Two Dogs and a Ball”- a cover of William Wegman’s piece of the same title from the late 60’s, gains from its degree of quality loss.  In this case it is brought it closer to the chopped and fuzzy original.  This lack of fidelity is kind of comforting- a magnetic patina to antique vintage moving images, evoking authenticity and contrasting today’s pixel perfect HD.

The newest work in the program is “Inevitable (NTSC Version)” by Siebren Versteeg, from 2008, which functions as a departure.  Produced four years after Suitable closed, this piece was included to refer back to Versteeg’s 2001 solo project in the gallery but also to look ahead, thinking about the possibility for future manifestations of Suitable Video.  This piece speaks poetically of the kind forward and backward technological trajectory that this program engages, traversing between old-school manual work with hands and tools, to low-res pixels and, eventually, high-definition multiplicity.


In Praise of Darkness

April 21, 2007 - May 26, 2007

Vincent Como’s show in Western Exhibitions Plus Gallery, “In Praise of Darkness”, is an exploration of physical space as it relates to two-dimensional objects and the history of painting. The show will consist of a large drawing containing copious footnotes, a small wall-hanging sculptural piece, a giant hand-bound book of drypoint prints and a series of 40 framed drawings.

Como is interested in the color black as a vehicle for “pure information” and is particularly concerned with the history and objectivity of Painting, referring often to the works of Kasimir Malevich and Ad Reinhardt. He restricts his artistic activity to a spare aesthetic to explore concepts as divergent as history, folklore or the sciences, and exposes the dialogue that occurs between the idea, physical medium and presented object. By utilizing the trope of the Painting and its surrounding lexicon, Como explores the two dimensional object and the space that it both occupies and provides in order to challenge the viewer’s understanding of the subject.

Dark Matter is the first in a series of large-scale works that reference properties of black holes, art history, theory and science through the use of accompanied footnotes.  It pulls from Robert Fludd’s renaissance thoughts on primal matter as well as contemporary theories of dark energy and visible light.

4.5 Cubic Inches (Volume of the Inside of My Head) represents the physical space inside the head of the artist as a solid cube of cast black sumi ink, while Untitled (Black Book) presents a large book of black content requiring a very physical engagement with the text.

History of Painting is a series of 40 drawings of period picture frames with a unifying central black image where the portrait, landscape, or abstraction would reside in order to question the impact of contextual elements on artistic intent.  The disconnect between black as pure information, a pigmented representation of some-other, or an event (such as darkness) is where these ideas meet, and where they strive to bridge those gaps in order to develop a new and comprehensive theory about the structure, function and autonomy of Black.

This is Vincent Como’s first solo show at Western Exhibitions. He will have a (semi) simultaneous show in Chicago at VONZWECK gallery, titled “Black: Theories and Ongoing Research”, that Como considers both a footnote and endnote to his show at Western Exhibitions. Como’s work has been seen at the ArtLA art fair in 2006 in a solo artist booth presented by Dogmatic and his last solo show in Chicago was in 2004 at Standard. He has been included in group shows at Barrow and Juarez Gallery in Milwaukee, the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts in Michigan, Gallery 400 in Chicago, and in the group show “Perfect”, organized by the Chicago Cultural Center and traveled to the Illinois State Museum and the Art Museum at the University of Memphis. Como has been an artist-in-residence at Cliff Dwellers and Anchor Graphics, both in Chicago. His work has been discussed in Art Papers, the Memphis Flyer, Dialogue, New City and the Chicago Tribune. Como received his BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1998. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.