Exhibitions

Dutes Miller & Stan Shellabarger’s first-ever joint show at Western Exhibitions opens on April 22 and will include collaborative artist books, photos and documentation of collaborative performances, a re-staging of work first performed in 1999, and selected individual works by both artists.

Miller & Shellabarger’s performances act as metaphors for the bittersweet rhythms of human relationships. Their work shifts between moments of togetherness to moments of separation, between spaces of private and public, amidst protection and pain and visibility and invisibility.

“Between the Sheets”, which premiered at the 1999 Cleveland Performance Art Festival, will be re-staged in Western Exhibitions main gallery. Positioned in the darkened gallery, atop a translucent mattress lit from below, Miller and Shellabarger will sew themselves “into bed”. The work reclaims the bed, often the locus of the outrage and disdain expressed by the moral majority and the Christian right toward queers, as a site where people turn to each other for compassion, comfort, and safety. Shellabarger states, “Sewing ourselves into the bed’s sheets, we are both vainly seeking safety while experiencing entrapment, exposing the conflict queers face in a society that is violent and discriminatory towards them.” This performance will take place at 8pm during the opening reception and will be filmed and projected onto the bed for the run of the exhibition.

In addition to Between the Sheets, Miller & Shellabarger will show an accumulation of a thousand paper cranes from the performance Untitled (Origami Cranes). In this recent work, the artists sat next to one another on a bed in the window of a Chicago futon store and folded paper into origami cranes over the course of three Saturdays, 8 hours at time. As they sat together, participating in a shared activity, a barrier of cranes built a wall of separation between them.

This show will unveil a new Butter Book, an on-going project where Miller & Shellabarger collect, clean and bind into a book every wax paper butter wrapper from each stick of butter they consume in a year. Miller is a pastry chef and Shellabarger an eager consumer of his partner’s creations. The book’s pages, filled with butter wrappers, both attract and repel the viewer into the beauty of the domestic and the material.

Another new book collects oversized silhouettes the couple has been making of each other for the past two years. Their profiles face one another across each two-page spread, documenting the different stages of their distinctive facial hair and sometimes featuring bizarre hats.

Miller & Shellabarger will install recent individual projects on the south wall of the gallery: Miller’s visceral and lurid watercolors and collages of body parts and Shellabarger’s photographs of airplane contrails and walking performances from the 2006 solstices and equinoxes.

This is Dutes Miller and Stan Shellabarger’s first collaborative show at Western Exhibitions. Recent performances by the duo include Origami Cranes, performed in 2006 at the 44/46 Performance Festival in Chicago, Crochet, an on-going performance recently performed at Illinois State University and NUB, presented at the Center of Contemporary Art, St. Louis in 2002 and in Slop’s Supermarket Outlet at Gallery 312 in Chicago, 2001. Stan Shellabarger’s solo exhibition at Western Exhibitions in 2004 was reviewed in Art in America, artforum.com, Art US and Ten by Ten. Dutes Miller’s recent group shows include “Where All the D*cks Hang Out” at Western Exhibitions and “Vomitorium with Agitprop” at 40000 in Chicago. Miller and Shellabarger live and work in Chicago.

At Western Exhibitions, on monitors throughout the gallery, we’ll be showing selected “deaths” filmed by Death by Design, Co. at Gallery 400 in January 2006. Visitors to Gallery 400 had the opportunity to construct, enact, and document a custom on-screen horror movie death scene of their choosing for a small fee. Clients formulated their own on-screen “Hollywood” death from a menu of hair-raising choices: eaten by zombies in the woods; attacked by an army of giant rats; mauled by a mutant badger; or blasted by a space cowboy. Come see some of your favorite Chicago art personalities, like Alex Jovanovich and Duncan MacKenzie, “die” a most gruesome, disgusting and ultimately hilarious death! Props and f/x from the productions will inhabit the space, as will a random “corpse” or two. Visit with Death by Design, Co. masterminds at their horror conference table to perhaps plan your own on-screen death. Professionally edited DVDs of the first twelve death scenes will be available on a point-of-purchase basis at the gallery. Autographed glossies of the DxD ladies in action will be on hand as well as special appearances by other horror film personalities, like Ari Lehman, the first Jason Voorhees, from the “Friday the 13th” horror classic!  A small amount of Special Edition discs contain Bonus Features including behind-the-scenes footage, a slideshow of still images, DxD bloopers and the gut-busting Death By Design, Co. company presentation.

Chicago-based artists Michelle Maynard and Teena McClelland, through Death by Design, Co., offer a safe vehicle for exploring ideas on myth, storytelling, cinematic illusion, celebrity, and our own mortality. They achieve this by incorporating the formal appeal of splattered gore with a narrative structure and providing a humorous encounter with death through extreme situations and stunning visuals.

Both artists received MFAs from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005. Michelle Maynard recently premiered the final cut of her feature film “Throb” at Western Exhibitions on Halloween. “Throb”, an independent sci-fi/horror/comedy, tells the story of a centuries-old entity that pulsates, mutates, infects and slimes its way into the teenagers of the city of Woodbury, USA. Teena McClelland, the female lead in “Throb”, has been included in shows at the Linda Warren Gallery, artLedge and the Van Harrison Gallery in Chicago. She received an Illinois Art Council Artist’s Fellowship Award for New Performance Forms for 2005.

Western Exhibitions is pleasantly engorged to present “Where all the D*cks Hang Out” in our Plus Gallery in a show that opens on Saturday, December 16. This show of collages prominently featuring male genitalia is presented concurrently with “Death by Design” in our main gallery. Death and D*cks: can you imagine better holiday season programming!

We were inspired to organize “Where all the D*cks Hang Out” during a trip to Cleveland this summer where we saw an unconscionably dense installation of penis-themed collages by Dana Depew in the basement of the Asterisk Gallery. Depew affixes large and small d*cks onto vintage inspirational plaques, 70’s style shadow box frames, 19th century black and white photos and Norman Rockwell reproductions and we’ll showcase DePew’s perversities on an entire wall in the Plus Gallery.

The artists in “Where all the D*cks Hang Out” come to genitalia collage from a variety of perspectives; gay, straight, lesbian, trans, male, female, whatever. Ryan Travis Christian embellishes art from the antiquities with the member in question; Joe Hardesty’s heavy metal three-fingered devil horn symbol is rendered completely from d*cks found on the web; Rich Lane surreptitiously inserts the subject into contemporary ads and catalog pages; Dutes Miller sexy surreal juxtapositions combine c*cks with lyrical linear work and plantforms; John Neff will show genital blueprints from his recent and ongoing Trans. Portrait and Pornographic Pantograph projects; John Parot’s “Cock Blocked” ink and gouache collage drawings are based from recent events; Tomiko Pilson’s fanciful, illusory landscape featuring masked women, snakes and you-know-what is inspired by the myth of Medusa and examines rapture and castration anxiety; Liz Roth waxes nostalgic on penises that have surprised her in drawing classes; Stan Shellabarger seamlessly inserts gay porn images into banal 1980’s magazine advertisements; Shannon Stratton constructs fantastical penises using etching images from ironwork and decorative ornament patterns.

On July 29, Western Exhibitions opens two new group shows, “Paintallica” in the main gallery and an artist book show, “Experiences and Activities” in the Drawing Room, with a free public reception from 6 to 9pm. These shows will run through August 26^th, and gallery hours are Wednesday-Saturdays, 12-6pm.

Paintallica is a roving collaborative group of artists founded and directed by Dan Attoe, Jamie Boling and Bill Donovan. The sole mission of Paintallica is to mold random crap into something cool. Paintallica shows, influenced heavily by pop culture, incorporate drawing, painting, sculpture plus things, as well as stuff. Their materials come from Wal-Mart, lumberyards and garbage bins and their members from all over.  For their show at Western Exhibitions, the men and women of Paintallica will utilize the talents of a video artist, a cartoonist, an editor of a nudist magazine, a ceramicist/Iraq war vet, a video game designer and a Fulbright scholar/designer, among other trained artists.  Four of them ride Harleys. There is no predetermined direction to a Paintallica installation, which always start with a drawing session, followed by a trip to get supplies, then an all-nighter of alchemy.  The resulting collection of artifacts easily fills a space and often incorporates the gallery walls, ceiling and floor.  Some elements are site specific and some exist independently.

From the Paintallica manifesto:

Don’t be fooled though, we don’t give a shit about your art, your politics or your whiny, black-horn rimmed, Prada-wearing ass.

We are Paintallica.

Western Exhibitions is reconfiguring the gallery into 5 distinct spaces for its fall season opener, 5 SOLO SHOWS, thus giving each of the following artists, Mike Andrews (Chicago), Jimmy Baker (Cincinnati), Carl Baratta (Chicago), Paul Fuchs (Wisconsin) and Ben Stone (Chicago), an autonomous exhibition.

Mike Andrews’ multiple-medium, drippy, gloppy sculptures (or drawings/objects/spatial paintings) might be mistaken for the spawn of an illicit encounter between Eva Hesse and Arturo Herrara. Flavorpill.com (Chicago) called his latest sculpture “a glorious mishmash of twigs, silk flowers, plastic beads, and latex paint.” His work has been most recently exhibited at Artists Space in New York and the Lobby Gallery in Chicago. Andrews, who lives and works in Chicago and received his MFA from Cranbrook, tells us: “I know the work is ready when I’m slightly embarrassed of the material combinations and their potential for metaphor”.

In Jimmy Baker’s mixed media installation “Cemetery Gates”, a rubberized raven acts as a foreboding omen of destruction as it sits perched high on an Ikea drawer handle attached to the wall. The raven looks down toward Gothic cut-cardboard gates that open outward to showcase a vitrine encasing archived monuments to outmoded American packaging design. Baker’s mixture of painting, installation, sculpture and heavy metal and punk music focuses on the gap between science fiction and environmentalism, and the points at which the two overlap. Baker’s work has been included in shows at Foxy Productions in NYC, Publico in Cincinnati, Black Floor Gallery in Philadelphia and currently in a show at Roberts and Tilton Gallery in Los Angeles. Baker studied painting at the Columbus College of Art and Design and received his MFA from the University of Cincinnati. He lives and works in Cincinnati.

Carl Baratta’s intricate paintings of oddly bucolic battle scenes draw inspiration from Persian miniatures, glam-rock fashion, and kung-fu movies. Baratta will show new drawings, studies and sketches in our newly re-christened Drawing Room Gallery in the WX’s back space. Baratta showed work in our summer show, recently at Gallery 2 and Contemporary Art Workshop (both in Chicago) and has an upcoming group show in NYC and a solo show at Gallery J2 in Tokyo. Baratta lives and works in Chicago and recently received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He tells us recent work may feature a dragon vomiting smaller versions of itself and more glamorous monsters.

Paul Fuchs has bottled-up all your fears in the Plus Gallery for his solo show at Western Exhibitions. For “Cryptozoological Gung” Fuchs is unveiling a collection of sculpturally-mounted paintings, drawings, and one multi-media mindbend all behind a frilly-shiny doorway of doom.  Paul says: “My art is about my feelings. At this point in time I am feeling monsters. Not scary monsters: look closely at these creatures and you will see the apologetic phenomenon known as ‘your reflection’. I’ve looked at these creatures and every time my heart aches- it can be difficult to confront your feelings.” Fuchs is a Wisconsin based artist and a founding member of the art group Jibangus, who screened its first feature length movie, “The Yungling” with Western Exhibitions in March 2005. A review of “The Yungling” in the Minneapolis/St.Paul City Pages mentions, “There are simply too many fucked-up images to catalogue here (and why ruin the fun?)”

Ben Stone, creator of Nuptron 4000 (recently featured on WGN nightly news), transforms 2-dimensional illustrations of women, rip-offs of the classic Patrick Nagel style, typically found in hair salons, into distorted 3-d reliefs. Stone is fascinated by how these depictions of beauty, frozen from the 1980’s, are both grotesque and kind of hip. Translating a flat image into low relief similarly intrigues him, saying, “It seems the more 3 dimensional I make them, the stranger they become.” Stone’s hand-crafted pop sculptures and video work have been shown at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, DiverseWorks in Houston, Gallery 400 and Van Harrison Gallery in Chicago and solo shows at Suitable and Ten-in-One. This summer Stone’s Nuptron 4000, a seven-foot tall, 250 pound robot performed at Stone’s wedding ceremony in 2004, was shown at the Hyde Park Art Center. Stone received his MFA from the University of Illinois-Chicago. He lives and works in Chicago.

Stan Shellabarger pays intense attention to the body’s everyday activities, particularly walking and breathing. At WX, Stan will drag his hand across the gallery walls for 6 hours every Saturday, eroding a groove through the drywall, eventually exposing the pink styrofoam panel insulation behind the wallboard. Stan will also present artist books that reflects an obsessive-compulsive approach to cataloging the body: a year’s worth of fingernail and toenail clippings, hair collected from the bathtub drain, 3 years worth of butter wrappers used by Stan’s husband Dutes Miller in everyday cooking. Despite the visceral nature of these books, they are surprisingly elegant. In the past year, Stan has celebrated both the vernal and autumnal equinox by walking in a circle for 12 hours and during an 8-hour performance, documented every breath he took by marking the exhalation with charcoal on 26 sheets of 18 x 24 paper. These drawings and documentary photographs of the walking performances will be a part of the show.
Shellabarger’s recent activities include two walking performances in Chicago’s Humboldt Park, on the both the Vernal and Autumnal Equinoxes, a crocheting performance with husband Dutes Miller at the 2004 Stray Show, an installation and breathing performance at Chicago’s Suitable Gallery as well as performing and showing sculptures in “Here and Now” at the Chicago Cultural Center. Shellabarger and Miller were featured artists of the Twelfth Annual Cleveland Performance Art Festival and Stan was presented a special exhibition award at the Second Annual Indianapolis Installation Festival. Stan received the Blockstein Emerging Artist Award from the Madison Art Center, in conjunction with his inclusion in the 1996 Wisconsin Triennial exhibition. Stan received a MFA from the University of Wisconsin in Madison in 1996 and his BFA from Illinois State University in Normal in 1991. He lives and works in Chicago, Illinois

In this big-ass summer group show, WESTERN EXHIBITIONS’ artists plus an artist of their choosing will adorn the brand new WX space with drawings, paintings, works-on-paper, collages, reliefs, photos, ephemera, and other stuff.

Dan Attoe plus Jamie Boling & CeCe Cole

Tina Carroll plus Adam Kidder (NY)

Nicholas Frank plus Peter Barrickman (WI)

Paul Fuchs plus Jeffrey Schwarz (CA)

Joel Gaydos plus Jim McWilliams (OH)

Amy Hauber plus Mark Klassen (WI)

Adriane Herman plus Jonathan Price (ME)

Jibangus plus Melissa & James Buchanan (WI)

John Neff plus Anonymous (CA)

Miranda Patau plus crust and dirt (CA)

Stan Shellabarger plus Dutes Miller (IL)

Christian Uhl plus Michelle Rosenberg (NY)

Aaron Van Dyke plus Jay Heikes (CT)

Pedro Velez plus Gean Moreno (FL) and Stefano Pasquini (Italy)

Mark Wagner plus Dylan Graham (NY)

Plus director Scott Speh will choose some new favorites (all from Chicago):

Francis Fitzpatrick

Eric Lebofsky

Deva Maitland

Kumiko Murakami

Amanda Ross-Ho,

Justin Schaefer

and maybe more!

After two years of functioning as a “portable” gallery inhabiting various environs throughout Chicagoland, Western Exhibitions has finally found a home at 1648 West Kinzie, at Ashland Avenue, a block south of Hubbard and a few blocks north of Lake. WX shares space with the brand new Lisa Boyle Gallery.

Ben Stone transforms two-dimensional images from American popular culture into bizarre three-dimensional sculptures. Past bodies of work include relief busts of 1980s nail salon beauties based on the style of Patrick Nagel; a three-dimensional rendering of a giant octopus playing the bagpipes; and a bust and a life-sized, legless Mary Lou Retton with her arms upheld triumphantly.  For his first solo show in Western Exhibitions’ Main Gallery, Stone takes his often hilarious and colorful pop sensibilities into a dark place, using familiar imagery to investigate personal psychological dramas addressing Stone’s self-worth as an artist.

For the show’s sculptural centerpiece, Stone re-creates a frame from a classic Mad magazine cartoon using wood, steel and resin-coated polystyrene. Five large cartoon characters (Fester, his family, and big, lummox sidekick Karbunckle, originally from the sick and twisted pen of Mad legend Don Martin) are frozen mid-air after a catastrophic collision with a rollercoaster. In Stone’s sculpture, the characters are represented suspended above a giant cartoon explosion replete with “action lines” and musical notes.

To Stone, this image of a dysfunctional family caught in a tragic situation partly of its own making, recalls painful memories from his youth. According to the artist, the suspended figures symbolize his arrested emotional development after a traumatic family event at a point in Stone’s life when the primary measure of one’s artistic achievement among his elementary school peers was based on how well one could mimic a Mad Magazine cartoons. Stone is also attracted to physicality of the humor in the Martin strip, a gross sexuality that Stone heightens when translating the flat image into three dimensions.

Other works in the show include a video depicting Stone receiving a restraining order taken out against himself and a large vinyl wall appliqué combining multiple Calvin and Hobbes cartoons of the sort often found in the windows of pickup trucks.

Ben Stone’s handcrafted pop sculptures and video work have been shown at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, DiverseWorks in Houston, Gallery 400, Van Harrison Gallery in Chicago and solo shows at Suitable and Ten-in-One. Western Exhibitions included his work in “5 Solo Shows” the gallery’s fall season opener in 2005. That summer Stone’s Nuptron 4000, a seven-foot tall, 250 pound robot who performed Stone’s wedding ceremony in 2004, was shown at the Hyde Park Art Center. Stone received his MFA from the University of Illinois-Chicago. He lives and works in Berwyn, Illinois.