Western Exhibitions is thrilled to announce the inaugural “Western Exhibitions Drawing Biennial,” a salon-style celebration of works on paper by gallery and affiliated artists celebrating our commitment to drawing and works on paper. The approaches on view will capture the current state of contemporary drawing practices while placing a focus on the gallery artists’ core concerns of personal narratives and cosmologies, identity and gender, sexuality, pattern and exuberance, all with a keen attention to materiality.
Go in-depth with the Biennial here to get insight into each participating artist’s work through several multimedia offerings including images, audio recordings, short videos, written interviews, studio tours, and contributions to a Spotify playlist.
Review in New City: https://art.newcity.com/2021/01/25/a-respite-from-the-waking-nightmare-a-review-of-western-exhibitions-drawing-biennial/
The show will open the 2021 season, beginning on January 8, and will run through February 20. There will not be an opening reception but the show will be supplemented by robust multimedia offerings on our website and Vimeo page. Private viewings for groups of 1 to 4 persons are available by appointment; make your reservation at exploretock.com/westernexhibitions/.
The idea for this show has been percolating since overhearing a conversation at the inaugural EXPO Chicago in 2012 between curators Shannon Stratton and Mark Pascale, with Stratton urging her colleague to consider “Western Exhibitions especially rich program devoted to drawing” (Shannon’s words, we think. She’s contributed an essay to the show!). This led us to the realization that Western Exhibitions does prioritize drawings and works on paper, an organic development for the gallery. It took an outsider to notice this, as at that point, we didn’t perceive that the gallery had a particular focus other than work we thought was good and important.
From Shannon Stratton’s essay:
Western Exhibitions’ inaugural – and therefore, hopefully first of many – drawing biennial(s), celebrates an artform that the gallery has represented steadily throughout its history. As the gallery itself notes, the core concerns of its artists tend towards “identity and gender, personal narrative, sexuality, pattern and exuberance and an attention to materiality.” If we take drawing to be an extrusion of self, many of these themes – particularly those around identity, gender and sexuality are particularly well rendered in this form. Drawing is space to make visible the contents that make us, to make material, and then examine, those qualities that are much more complex than the linguistic code applied to them. Similarly, exuberance – a dynamic affect perhaps more readily associated with action painting – finds a place in drawing as a more solid manifestation of the energy that courses through us. That exuberance might exceed description – a vibration that can’t be summarized as ‘happy or ecstatic because…’; rather, I like to comparatively imagine certain sound visualizations that capture the physics of resonance.
Her full essay will be available as a take-away at the gallery and is downloadable as a PDF here.
Request a preview here.
Participating artists and bios:
Dan Attoe’s paintings depict natural wonders populated by tiny figures spouting even tinier diaristic missives culled from the artist’s stream of consciousness. Attoe makes a small drawing every day that he keeps for himself—slightly larger drawings and paintings expand upon this practice. His drawings share the same concerns but inverted—the phrases and disconnected images are larger and often cartoonish, creating small-scaled narrative vignettes.
Marshall Brown is an architect, urbanist, and futurist whose work creates new connections, associations, and meanings among disconnected architectural urban remnants. Moving between various scales of architecture and diverse conceptual frameworks, Brown’s collages embody new relationships between the one and the many as he expands the boundaries of reality.
Elijah Burgher creates structured, hieratic compositions in his coloured pencil drawings, matching figuration to abstraction in a provocative tension. A simplified approach to pencil technique and colour along with an attention to paper as a light source allows for heightened luminosity.
Amanda Joy Calobrisi tells strange and sensuous tales of womanhood. Rendered affectionately rather than objectively, the women fold, bend, lean, and stretch in spaces that hover between boudoir and landscape. Individualism and agency work in tandem, creating a space where self-love and self-admiration are no longer private revelations.
Jessica Campbell’s satirical drawings, comics, and textiles expose the everyday experiences that reveal the sexism women have faced throughout history, and especially presently. She infuses a vulnerably humorous tone into her work, but underlying this humour is often a darker subject matter that directly or indirectly references themes of class oppression, sexual violence, gender discrimination, trauma, or other personal narratives.
Lilli Carré’s interdisciplinary creative practice employs a wide range of media including drawing, animation, comics, printmaking, and ceramic sculpture. Representations of the malleable animated female body throughout history are a constant source of fascination for Carré.
Ryan Travis Christian carefully and densely layers graphite to reveal high contrast graphics and dizzying patterns in his small-scale drawings. Impacted by Chicago-style figuration, Christian focuses on the paradoxical relationship between childish cartoons and ominous messages, musing on the technological and material obsolescence of his inspiration.
Courttney Cooper is a vernacular artist from Cincinnati, Ohio who is known for drawing large-scale cityscapes of his hometown that respond to changes in the city’s architecture and environment. Cooper’s practice is a perpetual celebration of Oktoberfest Zinzinnati, USA, a commemorative and nostalgic place that exists parallel to or as a transparent layer upon Cincinnati, Ohio.
Edie Fake’s precise paintings and drawings start as self-portraits. From there, they make a break for it as Fake references elements of the trans and non-binary body through pattern, colour, and architectural metaphor. His intimately scaled gouache and ink paintings on panel are structured around the physical aspects of transition and adaption as well as mental and sexual health.
Joey Fauerso addresses issues of gender, humour, and family across a variety of media including painting, video, installation, and performance. Her work exists in between these themes and mediums as she dedicates herself to the blending of life with art.
Julia Schmitt Healy’s early work embodies the Chicago Imagist scene in the early 1970s. Her drawings on handkerchiefs and sewn flour bags present connections to real people, places and things through a lens of symbolic surrealism. Her work focuses on themes ranging from ecological disaster, human relationships, symbols, feminism, consumerism, and the natural world.
Andrew Hostick is self-taught, taking as his subject the advertisements and reproductions found in various art magazines including Art in America and Artforum. In each drawing Hostick inscribes and scores the mat board with heavy-handed marks, slowly building up a velvety sheen of coloured pencil. The resulting works constitute a beautiful collapse of both primitive and contemporary sensibilities, commenting directly on a sort of voyeuristic access to an Art World largely inaccessible to the artist as an outsider practitioner.
Richard Hull’s crayon drawings curate conversations between colour and form. Hull’s portraits and hairdos express distinct visual personalities rather than a legible representations of a specific individuals. He calls his over-capacitated, robust, mysterious heads stolen portraits.
Leah Mackin’s meditative black abstractions are born of drawing, photocopying, and printmaking techniques as she combines the objectivity of the machine with the subjectivity of artistic decision-making. Mackin uses old carbon transfer paper in her drawings, a material that she has been collecting for several years. She approaches her drawings with the mindset of wanting to work the whole sheet, in her straightforward methodology, describing them as something she can pick up and put down with ease.
Dutes Miller examines the spaces where the artist’s inner life, queer subcultures, and mass media intersect in his collages and artist books. Appropriating images from pornographic websites, magazines, and his own imaginings, Miller investigates alternative standards of beauty, visualizations of lust and desire found on the internet, and power dynamics in sexual relationships. His work critically engages with the mythologies surrounding human sexuality, especially an exploration of the male body as it manifests itself in gay desire—in its evident state of arousal, its protuberances, and its emissions.
Paul Nudd is committed to central themes of primal sludge, growth and disease, systems of classification, mutation and life, patterning, and mark-making. His mixed-media works offer cartoonishly terrifying mutants. These radioactive icons find redemption in disease, being self-aware bodies in a paranoid age reveling in genetic mutations, bad pharmaceuticals, and environmental degradation. Nudd’s prolific output is not just a symptom of an artist and how he uses his time, but a central motif in the work itself.
Robyn O’Neil’s precisely drawn graphite landscapes investigate evolution, apocalypse, natural disaster, and extinction with imagined imagery that is surreal, and separate from the flow of time. Ominous clouds and landmasses, monks, ears, mysterious female figures, faceless busts, and other enigmatic characters float over craggy and rolling landscapes illuminated by strange—almost heraldic—light, cast through mystical clouds, calling to mind Pre-Renaissance painting.
The collaborative work of Onsmith & Nudd tightens the cleavage between the seemingly disparate worlds of underground comics and contemporary painting. Onsmith & Nudd reject the notion that these approaches to making things differ in any meaningful way, instead opting for a strategy that focuses on an end product that resembles an artificially-thickened quasi-cultural purée. Onsmith is the cartoonist, a documentation of modern isolation and purveyor of grim humour, and Nudd is the painter of gunk, pox, and plasmic filth.
Michael Pellew is a Brooklyn-based artist who is known for his humorous rumination on pop culture and celebrity mash-ups. His inspiration comes from speed-metal, Taylor Swift, Chicago Deep House and reality TV stars. Michael’s seemingly simple and succinct drawings use playful line quality and imaginative cultural observations to develop an alternate universe where pop culture is thrown into a blender, giving the viewer random moments that are exuberant, painfully honest, witty and at times, grim.
Stan Shellabarger‘s drawings in the Western Exhibitions Drawing Biennial are made by walking on paper laid over an aggressive surface while wearing shoes with graphite-impregnated soles, a tangible extension of his endurance-performance actions, often enacted from sunrise to sundown on solstices and equinoxes. Shellabarger’s performances, works on paper, prints and artist books employ alternative drawing methods to address how the body relates to the Earth. He takes everyday activities—walking, writing, breathing—to extreme measures in endurance-based performance work that amplify the traces humans leave on the Earth. Repetition of an activity leads to a massive accumulations of marks, thus creating drawings that record discrete units of time and space. This repetition is necessary so that otherwise extremely subtle marks emerge as visible artistic interventions.
Geoffrey Todd Smith creates complex, rule-based abstractions that place him firmly within the orbit of modern American art, but with a wandering eye to the future. His vision is guided by self-imposed limitations that instill order to an otherwise meandering dream-like process. The result is a stylish eruption of concentrated color and form, enveloped in a hand-drawn web of doodled spikes and ruffles and embedded with a rhythmic plague of polka-dotted interference. The playfully constructed titles for each work provide an additional climate of atmosphere and mood without completely revealing a narrative.
Deb Sokolow’s semi-abstract diagrammatic drawings reference aerial views and floor plans. Their titles propose humor and criticality with regard to the built environment, institutions and the foibles of world leaders. Sokolow’s schematics often appear to be reproduced with a printmaking process. Instead, they are hand-rendered with colored pencils and crayons and function as a conceptual compliment to their speculative titles in that they contain a level of uncertainty with regard to the fabrication of content.
Ruby T is a drawer who is fuelled by anger, desire, and magic. Her practice is equal parts performative and devotional, and her drawings and marbled silk paintings are translations of political and sexual desire. For the past few years, she has been preoccupied with drawing moving water —particularly the impossible act of representing it— landing recently on the process of marbling, which essentially is a print of the surface of water.
Frances Waite renders horny apocalyptic meltdowns in her photorealistic graphite drawings. In these tableaus, she asks questions about ultimate desire: When the end of the world hits, what will you do? Will you go underground and hide? Will you grab your lover and hold them tight? Will you dance like nothing is out of the ordinary? Will you spread love? If the outside is crumbling, are you, too? In Waite’s world, humans have no other choice than to ‘do it.’
Erin Washington’s paintings and drawings combine imagery, text, and fugitive materials to evoke a long history of human inquiry into the form and meaning of the universe we live in. In these works, perception, and permanence are called into question, while elements of theoretical physics mingle with images of tangible objects from antiquity. These multilayered works consist of a medley of ambiguous scientific diagrams, art historical references, Post-it notes, studio debris, mythological figures, and self-deprecating jokes.
Cathrine Whited writes lists as the first step in her art-making process. She then draws each item on the list, rendered in her unique way of framing and labeling the item before cataloging the list’s drawings together as a unit. For instance, with a list entitled, “What’s in my fridge?” every possible item that is in the fridge is labeled. She starts a drawing with a ruler, making guidelines in pencil, to then render the imagery and text. Colored pencil is then applied for the right amount of color before moving to the next item on the list. Her renderings are a vehicle for viewers to isolate, experience, and analyze our collective everyday interaction with the objects and culture that surrounds us.
Lauren Wy is a drawer and painter whose work investigates the desiring body and fractal narrative as residue of process and color. Her current work is a multi-volume graphic novel saga: AUTODESIRE. AUTODESIRE drawings are process-based erotic rhizomes made from channeled partial narratives both owned and stolen; using layered markings to constantly destroy and re-form, embracing melancholic capaciousness as a healing modality. AUTODESIRE attempts a form of world-making where the materiality of the drawings exploits the erotic density of wax color to inset Thanatos/Eros into a geological temporality, leaning on optical blending and the weight of deep marks.