Exhibitions

In Gallery 2, Western Exhibitions presents three new prints by gallery artists, Adriane Herman, Miller & Shellabarger and John Neff produced at the printmaking studio Fresh Hot Press in Madison, Wisconsin. Fresh Hot Press publishes small editions and unique prints in collaboration with visiting artists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Art Department. During the fall semester of 2008, Fresh Hot Press invited these three alumni of the UW Art Department to print editions, in conjunction with Western Exhibition’s show at The Project Lodge in Madison. Adriane Herman, Miller & Shellabarger, and John Neff each brought unique conceptual approaches to printmaking, but interestingly, all three produced work with a similar concern for subtleties in the print’s surface.  Each piece encourages an intimate experience of its topography and an appreciation of the inimitable qualities of a hand-pulled print.

Adriane Herman’s print, “Necco Census No. 1:  Scratch-Off, Scratch ‘N Sniff Alignment”, a silkscreen with hand cutting and perforation, is literally a scratch ‘n sniff piece printed from a solution that matched the fragrances of Necco wafer’s eight flavors mixed in same proportion as they appeared in the pack. This print was featured in the exhibition “New Prints 2008/Autumn” at the International Print Center New York. She also made the prints “Checklist” and “Checklist Deluxe” at Fresh Hot Press, re-producing a list she found at the Maine College of Art made by a beginning art student, a list of all the things one needs to include in order  to make good art.  Herman figured if she made a print from it, it would automatically be good art since it inherently contains all the items on the list.

Miller & Shellabarger have embossed a silhouette of themselves with their beards tied together to make their striking, black-on-black untitled print. This piece is a continuation of their Conjoined Silhouette series, which typically take the form of black cut paper silhouettes mounted on white paper. This body of work was mostly recently seen in a solo presentation by Western Exhibitions at the NADA Art Fair in Miami this December.

John Neff’s screenprint, “Vexations”, representing the score of Erik Satie’s infamous 20-plus hour piano composition “Vexations”, has 840 layers of ink on the paper’s surface. “Vexations”, as conceived by Satie, is a short chordal passage and a bass line which is repeated twice in each repetition of the piece, to be repeated 840 times, thus Neff’s correlation of 840 layers of ink. Western Exhibitions will also show this print as part of its solo presentation of Neff’s work at The Armory Show in New York City in March.

Fresh Hot Press is the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s student-run print club dedicated to promoting student, faculty, and community involvement in all forms of print media. In addition to organizing exhibitions of student work, they regularly host and print editions with regional and national artists. They not only aim to maintain UW’s involvement in the national printmaking community, but to share resources and generate interest in print media at a local level.

Rachel Niffenegger will present two sculptures and four paintings on paper for her exhibition, titled As you pass by and cast an eye as you are now so once was I. Drawing inspiration from the title, an ancient epitaph, Niffenegger will covert Gallery 2 into a hall of heads.

Rachel Niffenegger’s disembodied heads, be they in sculpture or painting, come from a place of physical and psychological unrest, while also betraying an obsession with gross out humor and fantastical death scenes. Niffenegger’s visceral work walks this tightrope between the tragic and profane. Her painted heads, born out of intuitive and surrealist techniques, are as grotesque as they are intriguing, as they touch upon themes of mutilation and torture, witchcraft and philosophy. Her three-dimensional work references traditional sculptural busts. She considers them “sculptures with painting materials”, bound and pressed by hand to fully realize the texture of the constructed figures and their gnarled skin.

Niffenegger is inspired by the psychic automatism and fumage techniques of the surrealists. Her use of materials is key. The way she puddles pigments, and layers mediums is meant to evoke spirits, conjuring ghostly faces and body parts that are both decomposing and regenerating. She plies spray paint and smoke for ghostly and ghastly effect; resin, glue, candle wax and varnish to replicate melting flesh; and all sorts of random bits like sharp crackled plaster, wood, sawdust, rolls of butcher paper, glass eyes and found bones for her monuments of the defeated. Her process is intuitive, physical and violent, feverishly binding together paper and tape into portraits and death masks as if in a trance of remembrance. To cover them in alien slime is to revivify the creation.

This is Rachel Niffenegger’s first solo show at Western Exhibitions. She has been included in exhibitions at Corbett vs. Dempsey, the Sullivan Galleries at SAIC, The Post Family, and the Hyde Park Art Center, all in Chicago. Imperfect Articles has featured her work at VOLTA New York in 2010 and VOLTA 5 Basel in 2009 and she will be included in a group show at the Ceri Hand Gallery in Liverpool this summer. New City named her “the best painter under 25” in Chicago in November 2009 and her work has been discussed in TimeOut Chicago and Whitehot. Niffenegger lives and works in Chicago.

Paul Nudd will pack the gallery with new paintings and drawings inspired by and depicting what the artist calls the “peri-anal universe”. Although his muse is an abject one; the works can’t help but reveal a strange and elegant beauty. The works’ coloristic and formal contrasts, as described below, are manifestations of Nudd’s primary interest: the decaying natural world as seen against the artificiality of the made world.

The paintings on canvas refer to microscopic lifeforms, often looking like exceptionally well-designed bacterial samples squashed between two glass slides. Nudd refers to the works’ primary compositional elements as “blobs” – oval shapes, painted or collaged onto the raw canvas, that are replicated in varying sizes and colors (usually earth tones, but also shocking pinks and reds) across the canvas. Occasionally, the artist’s blobs are punctuated with low-relief “nuclei” crafted from nuggets of modeling clay in high-keyed colors. Nudd’s color flips back and forth between differing approaches to the visceral; pop-candy colors vibrate against the dingy fake vomit tones; unbleached titanium clashes with fleshy hues.

At a glance, the paintings seem busy, out of control –  randomly mixed colors and shapes. But dedicated viewing reveals the paintings to be carefully composed portraits of filth and decay: gooey puddles, fussy swaths of sludge, scumbles of strange substances, delicate stains, wisps of string, hair, felt and fake vomit settle on the plain of the blank canvas like scabs on smooth skin.

Despite the artist’s self-proclaimed efforts to make “gross-out” art, Nudd’s paintings are perversely attractive, disgustingly hilarious and infinitely engaging. As Anthony Elms notes in a recent essay on Nudd’s work, “See, it is possible to giggle, panic, and squirm at the same time, and that is what Paul’s artwork consistently aims to induce.” Nudd maps a world – or as he says, a fishtank – of bacterial delights. As he states in a recent interview with Evan Lennox (available at the gallery), “I don’t aim to offend anyone; on the contrary, I want people to engage with my work for as long as possible.  I just think there is an entire abyss of color combinations, forms, textures, and approaches to making things that people need to see.  Crust, slop, and meditations on fake vomit and its uses are all interesting points of departure.”

This is Paul Nudd’s second solo show at Western Exhibitions. Recent solo and two-person shows include Jack the Pelican Presents in Brooklyn, telephonebooth in Kansas City and the Hyde Park Art Center, Bodybuilder & Sportsmen, and Dogmatic, all in Chicago, and group shows at Andreas Bruning Gallery in Dusseldorf, the Evanston Art Center, the Soap Factory in Minneapolis, and Mixture Contemporary in Houston. He recently completed a collaborative printmaking residency with Onsmith at the Spudnik Press in Chicago and his zines and artist books are in several institutional artist book collections across the country. He is a recent recipient of an Illinois Art Council grant. Paul Nudd received his MFA from the University of Illinois-Chicago in 2001 and he lives and works in Berwyn, Illinois.