Exhibitions

Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present Jade Yumang’s first solo show with the gallery, Open House Spatter. Yumang marries sculptural craft and literary appropriation by working from two 1964 articles on homosexuality and relating them to the gendered site of suburban living in the mid-20th century. Using monochromatic colour schemes and gay spatter patterning, Yumang recreates materials and objects that reference domesticity. Fabric-stuffed hands, arms, legs, and feet swell and curve to interact with textile versions of everyday household objects and attire. In seemingly innocuous sculptures, creeping limbs reach, encircle, and become entangled in the artist’s domestic constructions, separating the idea of queerness form a purely sexual state (as often dramatized and stigmatized in mass media) and instead, asking questions about everyday life in North America. Open House Spatter opens with a free public reception from 5 to 8pm on Friday, November 4 and runs through December 17, 2022. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm.

Tiered floor sculptures bedecked with dust ruffles share floor space with hanging arrangements combining slats resembling window blinds with fabric covered panels, all surrounded by rectilinear wall pieces featuring shelves and wallpaper. Handwoven scarves, chiffon curtains and crocheted lattices wend their way through these intricate structures, all of which are punctuated with severed legs, hands, feet and anatomical hearts along with the tools that cause such carnage — knives, cleavers and axe, all rendered in vibrant color and pulsating patterns. The east wall of the gallery will be pierced with 50 fabric knives, some stabbing severed body parts into the wall.

Yumang’s sculptures in Open House Spatter are based on two articles published independently from each other in 1964. “The Homosexual Next Door: A Sober Appraisal of a New Social Phenomenon,” by Sidney Katz in Maclean’s painted a sympathetic image while “Homosexuality in America” by Paul Welch in Life presented a residual McCarthy era undertone, comparing homosexuals to Communists and labelling them as a problem. Both articles frame a similar view that homosexuality can only be tolerated if it parallels itself to a traditional heteronormative practice of marriage. With the expansion of suburbs in the same late-1960’s era comes the rigid nuclear family archetype that both maps out and expels queer ethos into city dwellings (“gay ghettos”) or rural areas (“lesbian lands”). Prevalent during this push for domestic bliss were home décor advertisements. One of which were asbestos vinyl floor tile designs called “gay spatter” with whimsical colour combinations, which the patterns on the sculptures are based on. As well, occult, erotic, horror films rife with queer anxiety were gaining ground to reflect the abandoning of the Hays Code and a foreseeable change of the dynamics of queer kinship, haunted by the fear of the toxic nuclear family. Here random body parts reach, creep, crawl, slither, and taunt the foundation of the home.

Jade Yumang’s work has been exhibited at Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA; BronxArtSpace, Bronx, NY, The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York, NY; District of Columbia Arts Center, Washington, DC; Equity Gallery, New York, NY; INVISIBLE-EXPORTS, New York, NY; and ONE Archives, Los Angeles, CA. Yumang is the recipient of several grants from Canada Council for the Arts and British Columbia Arts Council. He was born in Quezon City, Philippines, grew up in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, immigrated to unceded Coast Salish territories in Vancouver, BC, Canada, and lives in Chicago, IL, USA. Jade is an Assistant Professor in the department of Fiber and Material Studies at School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

*listen to the above press release in the below narrated walkthrough of Jade Yumang’s show:

Knee-deep in the cosmic overwhelm, Jessica Labatte’s third show with Western Exhibitions, unveils the complex material layers of Labatte’s artistic practice — various photographic series, sculptures, video, wallpaper ­­— during the constant companionship of working from home and the birth of her second child.  The title of the exhibition is borrowed from Diane Ackerman’s poem, “Diffraction (for Carl Sagan)” and speaks to the emotional spectrum of inwardness and expansiveness, overwhelming joy and deep sadness experienced by Labatte during the pandemic. Domestic and natural objects conjure themes of accumulation, change, chance, stasis, winter, play, and resilience. Charting daily and seasonal milestones, the works seesaw between the inspired beauty of the world as seen by a child and the exhaustion of parenting in seclusion. The show opens with a free public reception on Friday, September 16, 5 to 8pm and runs through October 29, 2022. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm.

Inspired by artist-built environments of the Midwest, Labatte and her family activate their home and transform simple everyday materials into imaginative still lifes, sculptures, and abstractions, erasing the boundaries between high and low creative expression in both material and authorship. No longer relegated to the basement, the artist’s studio now permeates the entire house, bringing improvisational creativity and iterative production into the shared domestic space.  Using snow, flowers, chenille stems, ice, feathers, construction paper, polymer clay, and pompoms to experiment, play, and create together, Labatte’s family are active collaborators in her creative process, highlighting the intimacy of shared artistic curiosity that co-exists with caretaking routines.

In her considerations of what items (found, inherited, made) to keep, transform, or discard, Labatte has been exploring and questioning not only her family traditions, gender roles, and societal expectations through the perspective of raising her children, but also her own artistic materials and processes. The large-format camera and film are still present, with dust specks and all, but so are lumen prints, digital photographs, Photoshop collage, video, and sculptures made in collaboration.  These works explore the different ways generational time, environmental conditions, weather patterns, and family habits can create microclimates and microcultures within domesticity.

The exhibition is a curation of shared experiences of the world through the lens of the artist, but also a reflection of the values and habits Labatte wants to pass on to her children.  Much like Suzanne Simard’s “Mother Tree” which communicates via mycorrhizal networks to nurture arboreal offspring and the surrounding community through difficult times, Labatte seeks to embrace her own family history while discarding, transforming, and adapting. Learning to embrace failure, fracture, and the turbulence inherent in societal change necessitates attentiveness, mindfulness, and a symbiotic engagement with the natural world.  The works in the exhibition are examples of this practice.

Jessica Labatte’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, FL; Elmhurst Art Museum; Hyde Park Art Center; Higher Pictures, NYC; Golden Gallery, and Horton Gallery, NYC, among others. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Chicago Magazine. In Artforum, Zachary Cahill wrote “If the process sounds complicated to understand, that’s because it is, though the end results aren’t. The photographs are visually generous and are marked by blasts of color that register the living quality of time itself.” Labatte received an MFA and a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and lives and works in the Chicagoland area.

Michael Pellew’s never-ending love affair with pop music and rock-and-roll returns to Western Exhibitions with over 200 drawings of album covers from his favorite artists presented as cassette tape inserts, free-standing paintings of rock stars, and drawings of Pellew interviewing stars about cassette tapes and classic rock.

The show, Pellew’s second solo at Western Exhibitions, opens on Friday, April 29 with a public reception from 5 to 8 pm, and runs through June 18, 2022. Gallery hours are Tuesday-Saturday, 11 am to 6 pm.

When asked about his current fixation on cassette tapes, Michael Pellew answered, “this is how I listened to music as a kid.” This spawned hundreds of drawings replicating album covers in cassette format, 8 by 4 inches, folded to fit into clear plastic cases. These album covers reflect Pellew’s musical catholic tastes: a LOT of heavy metal, hair metal, classic rock, post-punk, goth, new wave, grunge and pop artists abound. Pellew provides a thesis statement on the inside cover for a speculative compilation album titled METAL MASSACRE: “Welcome to Metal Massacre, you’re all gonna see different album cover designs that I made fresh out of google and goddamit you will be ready for the goods.”

Mingling throughout the gallery are near-life-sized cut-outs –acrylic paintings on mdf – of five of Pellew’s favorite musicians: a wider-than-wider David Byrne from the “Stop Making Sense” era, Michael Jackson in a tuxedo, Alice Cooper with his signature spooky eye make-up, and a bouffanted-up-to-there Amy Winehouse. Prince and Taylor Swift join the party as wall paintings.

In five pencil and marker drawings done in his classic cartoon-figures-with-word-bubbles style, Pellew presents himself interviewing an array of pop music personalities including Bruce Springsteen, Britney Spears and Robert Plant, among others, asking them about their tours, favorite cassette tapes and influences. When he asks Taylor Swift if she is classic rock, she replies “My first three albums are Classic Rock. In 2008, I was opening for Styx, Genesis and Boston.” In the drawing, Thrash Metal Legend Interviews, Pellew sits down with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, who is peppered with “What bands are you avoiding right now?”

Comical vignettes interrupt the interviews with Pellew’s pop culture heroes: Diana Ross makes repeated appearances throughout, furious about her dead cat while Paris Hilton and Gwyneth Paltrow attempt to console her. Cameron Diaz, from her mansion in Canarsie, shares that she hates hair metal. Kim Kardashian plays Slayer on a boombox. Pellew’s friends stop by to do their laundry. Parental advisory stickers pop up everywhere as do drawings of demo tapes by dozens of artists, even Stephan Jenkins from Third Eye Blind.

Michael Pellew Jr, (b. 1979, Brooklyn) is a founding member of LAND Gallery and Studio, a nonprofit program in Brooklyn that works with adult artists with developmental disabilities. As a young child, Pellew began making drawings of buses and trains, and continued to hone his artistic skills by copying cartoon characters from the 1980s. Self-proclaimed the “Godfather of Art,” he is a prolific illustrator and humorist, constantly working on his line of greeting cards, album covers, narrative art books, wooden sculptures and large drawings. Since 2005 Michael Pellew has been included in exhibitions at Western Exhibitions in Chicago, MADmusée in Belgium, and in New York at MOMA’s Cullman Education Building, The Gallery at Ace Hotel, Christian Berst Art Brut Gallery, and the Outsider Art Fair. His works have been acquired by collectors, actors, musicians and fellow artists, including Spike Lee and Mos Def. Pellew has been featured in the Huffington Post, VICE Magazine, Disparate Minds, Art News, W Magazine and PAPER magazine, who dubbed him their “favorite artist.”

See all 200 cassette tape album cover drawings here: http://westernexhibitions.com/in-depth/michael-pellew/

Watch a narrated video walkthrough of the show below:

For Maiden Voyage II: Heliocentric Forms of Blackness, Azikiwe Mohammed, in his first show with Western Exhibitions, looks at sites of respite, sections of calm and the Black languages that have been built to give voice to these often disguised spaces. Through painting, sculpture, neon and textile works, Mohammed asks: How does one plant roots when the ground is sour? What does that fruit look like when it grows and what does it say to the wind when everyone has blown out the candles? Using Chicago histories both public and personal — The Green Mill, Cabrini Green, Candy Man, Chief Keef, data sets as provided by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, Earth, Wind & Fire, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, stockyards, steel mills, The Stroll — to investigate a form that seems ever more distant, Mohammed looks not for an answer to our shapes but invites you to look with those that have been looking for longer than the moon is round. Maiden Voyage II: Heliocentric Forms of Blackness opens with a free public reception from 5 to 8pm on Friday, June 24 and runs through August 13, 2022. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11am-6pm.

Says Mohammed: “Both Herbie Hancock and Ramsey Lewis have albums called Maiden Voyage (Hancock in ’65 and Lewis in ’68), both of which I own, but never put two and two together until just now. Where were they trying to go for the first time when the departure point (Chicago) was the same? What is the promise of something elsewhere that isn’t being provided here?”

Azikiwe Mohammed’s work — painting, photography, sculpture, performance and found ephemera — is rooted in themes of Black place-making. Interested in constructing spaces of safety and welcome for people of color and for immigrants whose space is often threatened, Mohammed—who self-identifies not as an artist, but as a “dude who makes stuff”—often makes temporary homes and physical spaces for Black people. Sometimes he designs places to relax, environments where a shared language is spoken, or sometimes places where new languages can be created. His exhibitions turn galleries into homey spaces intended to put all visitors at ease. Using art to invoke community uplift is also key to his practice, exemplified by his recently launched Black Painters Academy, offering free classes and mutual aid in lower Manhattan and the New Davonhaime Food Bank, a non-location-based food bank serving as wide a variety of communities and spaces as possible thru re-directing monies for the arts into monies for food.

Azikiwe Mohammed is a 2005 graduate of Bard College, where he studied photography and fine arts. Mohammed received a Rauschenberg Artists Fund Grant in 2021, a Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant in 2016 and an Art Matters Grant in 2015. Mohammed’s solo exhibitions include the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA; Transformer, Washington, DC; Yeh Art Gallery, St. John’s University, Queens, NY; Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami, FL; Elijah Wheat Showroom, Newburgh, NY and Anna Zorina Gallery, New York, NY; as well as multiple solo offerings at SPRING/BREAK Art Show, New York. He has participated in group exhibitions at MoMA PS1, Queens, New York; Antenna Gallery, New Orleans, Louisiana; Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, California and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, among others. He is an alumnus of Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, New York, and Mana Contemporary in Jersey City, New Jersey. His work has been featured extensively in magazines, including VICE, I-D, Artforum, Forbes, BOMB and Hyperallergic. Mohammed lives and works in New York City.

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Watch a video walkthrough of the exhibition below:

For her fourth solo show at Western Exhibitions, Arrangement in the Steps of a Horse, Lilli Carré presents a new body of work that revolves around the pivot movement of the knight’s piece in chess. The exhibition title is derived from a 9th-century description of the Knight’s Tour, a classic chess problem in which the knight visits each square exactly once. The show will open with a public reception on Friday, March 11, from 5 to 7 pm, and will run through April 23, 2022. The gallery will be open late on Friday, April 8 as part of EXPO Chicago’s Art After Hours program, until 8 pm.

The work in Arrangement in the Steps of a Horse pivots among mediums; Ceramic sculpture, stone mosaic, ink drawing, hand-drawn animation, and weaving are all created simultaneously, a consistent dynamic within Carré’s practice. In formal and autobiographical ways, this body of work explores constant change and repositioning; being grounded and ungrounded; a heavy step versus a light step; strategy versus improvisation. It also furthers Carré’s ongoing exploration of a contorted body in virtual and physical spaces, considering how a body is positioned and watched in relation to others.

A stone mosaic depicting three people engaging aggressively in a game rests on the ground, a long-labored image that revealed itself slowly as it was made. The mosaic squats in the room surrounded by a series of fast, impulsive ink gestures on paper, improvisational meditations on change. Embedded within the drawings, ceramics, and stone works are autobiographical pivots that occurred during the pandemic as the work was being made.

Three reimagined chess pieces stand as human-sized sculptures in the room, holding the triadic tension of a concealed power dynamic. In a hand-drawn animation titled Glazing, an animated body pivots in smear frames through the history of painting, parroting famous depictions of women. She tests the postures by inhabiting them and promptly discarding them, rejecting the fantasy that each represents. The cartoon body is confined by the frame but thrives in constant transition. The origins of cinema and animation can be traced back to the Muybridge movement study of a horse’s feet, capturing them all in midair.

Lilli Carré’s solo shows include the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio, Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica di Bologna in Italy, and Western Exhibitions. She was recently included in Private Eye: The Imagist Impulse in Chicago Art at Indianapolis Museum of Art and Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Her animated films have been shown in festivals throughout the US and abroad. She co-founded the Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation in 2010, which is held annually in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. She has several published graphic novels and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Best American Comics, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and the New York Times, where she currently does weekly illustrations. She received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and MFA from Northwestern University. Carré is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and she lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Read a review in the Chicago Reader here.

Watch a narrated video walkthrough of the exhibition below:

The Other Side of a Mirror by Mary Elizabeth Coleridge aka “Anodos”

For her fourth solo exhibition with Western Exhibitions, Opia, Rachel Niffenegger braves familiar faces in curious and experimental new media. Specters the artist previously conjured through paint pours, are now generated through an obsessive digital breeding process, which combines artificial intelligence and sublimated aluminum. These wraiths are suspended amongst haunted furniture, pulled from the folds of psychedelic clay, and spiraled through mirrored metal work. A precarious steel and brass tête-à-tête chair and uncanny rug divides the gallery. The psychological seating presents a space to ponder our unbecoming, and observe the haunted underscores of ourselves and homes in the process. The show opens on Saturday, January 8 and will run through March 5, 2022. Appointments are not necessary; masks are mandatory; gallery hours are Tuesday-Saturday, 11am to 6pm.

Rachel Niffenegger’s work has been included in museum shows at the Museum for Modern Art in Arnhem, the Netherlands;  the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, MI; and the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago and in gallery show in New York, Berlin, Chicago, Liverpool, Denver, and Milwaukee, among others. In 2012 she completed a 9-month residency at DE ATELIERS in Amsterdam. Chicago Magazine named her “Chicago’s best emerging artist” in 2010 and New City named her one of “Chicago’s Next Generation of Image Makers” in 2010, this after naming her the “Best Painter Under 25” in 2009. Niffenegger, born in Evanston in 1985, received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. She is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and lives and works in Chicago.

Visit the In Depth with Rachel Niffenegger page for a studio playlist, process images and insight, a narrated video walkthrough, and more about Niffenegger’s thoughts around Opia here.

Freed from the constraints of the picture plane, large, brazenly-coloured anthropomorphic figures constructed from collaged carpet scraps of prior projects strut across the walls of the gallery in Jessica Campbell’s second solo show at Western Exhibitions, Gigantomachinations. This show, her first in Chicago since her acclaimed 2019 Chicago Works show at the MCA Chicago, opens on November 6 and will run through December 18. Appointments are no longer necessary; gallery hours are Tuesday-Saturday, 11am to 6pm.

Prior to this exhibition, Campbell’s work was woven from elaborate, humorous, and politically pointed narratives, fitting for an artist who is a well-regarded cartoonist with 2 published graphic novels and another forthcoming.  Her process has since changed. This exhibition is a response to the stress of a move from Chicago to Green Bay to help care for her ailing in-laws, stress from her own family, stress from making a living in upper Wisconsin, stress from the ongoing pandemic and a myriad of political and social crises. The work combines both the tradition of crazy quilts and pareidolia, the experience of ascribing meaning to visual phenomena (like seeing figures in the clouds). For Campbell, this method of working intuitively and formally, as opposed to starting with a clear idea and executing it, is “the only sustainable way for me to work in this current moment through a constant brain fog.”

As she works in the studio, juggling the above stresses with her own internal dialogue, Campbell’s mind plays both the role of defender of her beliefs and its antagonist. This leads Campbell to consider Gigantomachy, the struggle between the gods and the giants in Greek mythology. The Gigantomachy is one of the favoured topics for representation in Greek art and can be seen in the Parthenon friezes. These representations were also meant metaphorically, as a depiction of the shift from barbarism to civilized society and victory in specific battles. In a parallel manner, Campbell’s figures, pieced together from scraps embodying immense tension, come to be metaphorical representations of the demons in her mind. Working as a bit of an exorcism, Campbell’s non-linear process and newfound figures allow her to fight back against the struggles plaguing her mind during these past few years: “What a time to be alive!”

Jessica Campbell is a Canadian artist and humourist based in Green Bay, Wis., working in comics, fibres, painting, drawing and performance. Her Chicago Works  show at the MCA Chicago in 2018-2019 was reviewed in Art in America, Hyperallergic and Juxtapoz. Her graphic novel XTC69 was reviewed in Publishers Weekly, The Comics Beat, and The Comics Journal; her 2016 graphic novel Hot or Not: 20th Century Male Artists was reviewed by Hyperallergic and Comic Alliance: both are published by Koyama Press and are available at the gallery. Her solo and two-person exhibitions include Field Projects in NYC, Roots & Culture and Sub-Mission in Chicago and La Galerie Laroche/Joncas in Montreal. Her work was recently on view in Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and has been included in group shows at the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton; Art Gallery of Hamilton in Ontario; Richard Heller in LA; moniquemeloche in Chicago, among others. Her new graphic novel, RAVE, published by Drawn & Quarterly, will be released in April 2022.

Visit the In Depth with… Jessica Campbell page here.

Nicholas Frank presents “Reality, whatever that is,” a show about narrative, and his larger interest in biography. Frank will modify Western Exhibitions primary gallery with a wall that bifurcates the space, as he will use half of Gallery 1 and all of Gallery 2 to present two sets of narratives, one in the form of paintings and the other in pages of his lifelong “Nicholas Frank Biography” project.

The “Nicholas Frank Biography” has been expressed as a museum-style exhibition (Milwaukee, 1998) and individual book pages (ongoing) detailing the history and historical significance of the output of the artist “Nicholas Frank.” In all cases, the “author” goes unnamed, presumed by its third-person perspective to be other than Nicholas Frank. Book pages are presented singularly, in frames or hand-bound, generally without benefit of before-page and after-page or before-chapter and after-chapter context.

The paintings in this show focus on narrative formation, depicting a sentence that can be read forwards or backwards, or recombined into different meanings, much like any other group of paintings one might encounter. Formally, the paintings draw upon Frank’s fascination with monochromes, Lucio Fontana and a general interest in the failure of pure states. Taken together, these five paintings explore subject/audience agreement, meaning-flow, anticipation and expectations, and reproduction of intent and experience, along with color, plasticity and objectness.

Nicholas Frank’s primary activities are art making, including visual art, stage-, recording-, radio- and television-based performance and writing; and multi-disciplinary art exhibition coordination, including curation, and facilitation of dialogue through symposia, lectures and publications. Secondary activities are commentating, essaying, critiquing and lecturing about art and Midwestern culture. Frank is currently the chief curator at the Institute of Visual Arts (Inova), in the Peck School of Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a founding member of the Milwaukee International, which organizes miniature art fairs around the world. Frank has organized, jointly and solo, exhibitions at the Swiss Institute in New York City, the Green Gallery, Walker’s Point Center for the Arts and the Jody Monroe Gallery (all in Milwaukee) and The Pond in Chicago. He owned and directed the Hermetic Gallery in Milwaukee from 1994 to 2001. Frank has written for Sculpture, Art Papers, InterReview, Bridge, New Art Examiner and Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. His work has been included in group shows at Small A Projects and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise-Passerby in New York City, Locust Projects in Miami, the Milwaukee Art Museum, Diverseworks in Houston, and the Soap Factory in Minneapolis. Solo shows include the Green Gallery (2008), Suitable (2004), Chicago Project Room (1996) and a forthcoming exhibition at The Poor Farm in northern Wisconsin (2010). This is Frank’s second solo show with Western Exhibitions. He lives and works in Milwaukee.This is Frank’s second solo show with Western Exhibitions. He will concurrently have a piece in “Picturing the Studio” in the Sullivan Galleries at the School of the Art Institute, curated by Michelle Grabner and Annika Marie, opening December 12. He lives and works in Milwaukee.