It’s all there in black and white runs from August 3 to August 31. The gallery will be open by appointment from August 18 to September 3.
Julia Schmitt Healy
During the time when he called the White House home, his strong leadership would begin to falter, which Mr. Richard M. Nixon would attribute to the presence of oval rooms in the executive residence. Too many ovals omitted an excessive, unseemly amount of expressive feminine energy. Mr. Richard M. Nixon ordered the oval rooms to be turned into rectilinear rooms, to no avail. Reflecting upon his life, post-presidency, Mr. Nixon was convinced that the ovals were mainly responsible for the road towards his impeachment.
Excerpt from Mr. Richard M. Nixon’s Difficulties with Ovals, Version 2
For her 4th solo show at Western Exhibitions, Deb Sokolow will present two bodies of work: Profiles in Leadership — new narrative drawings that blend fact with fiction and speculate both comically and critically on the foibles of famous men in leadership roles and Drawings without words — Sokolow’s first ever foray into abstraction. The show will open with a public reception on Friday, November 8 from 5 to 8pm and will run through December 21. Gallery hours are 11am to 6pm, Tuesday to Saturday.
In Gallery 1, Sokolow’s drawings incorporate the voice of an unnamed narrator of questionable authority who recounts seemingly humorous, harmless anecdotes on a number of famous men such as Richard M. Nixon, Fidel Castro and Frank Lloyd Wright while also suggesting a more sinister mix of machismo, narcissism and insecurity at play. Lines between fact and fiction blur, while the tone shifts from objectivity to admiration and sarcasm. The viewer is left to decipher how much is true and to determine when, if ever, a narrator can be trusted. Sokolow’s interests in storytelling and unreliable narration take inspiration from contemporary politics and its competing narratives on events and individuals as well as the playfulness with form and humor found in postmodern literature and authors such as Jorge Borges, Thomas Pynchon, Helen Oyeyemi and Ali Smith.
Hand-drawn texts in graphite and erasure marks on the surface of each drawing function as a visual record of the narrator’s indecisive thought process in working to present each anecdote. The texts are paired with abstract shapes and diagrammatic visuals which reference the historically male-dominated movements of modern architecture, color field painting and minimalism. Many of these visuals 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 the texts in that they also contain uncertainties with regard to the fabrication of content.
Gallery 2 features a new, parallel track in Sokolow’s work— drawings which do not include the presence of handwritten text. Sokolow has often entertained this idea by covering her studio walls with an immersive, salon-style display of scraps of color and diagrammatic fragments. These fragments would eventually be paired with texts in the last stage of a drawing’s completion. In the last year, Sokolow has developed some of these visuals into finished, text-less drawings which take inspiration from Sokolow’s 2005 encounter with a ghost-like entity in the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California. The drawings combine architectural schematics with references to hidden rooms, shifting walls, smells, floating shapes, labyrinths, hypnosis, Madame Blavatsky (co-founder of the Theosophical Society in 1875) and the architectural fictions of writers Jorge Luis Borges and Mark Danielewski.
Deb Sokolow is an artist and writer. She currently has drawings on view in Manifesto: Art X Agency at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. and has been included in the 4th Athens Biennale in Greece and in other group exhibitions at The Drawing Center in New York; Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen in Germany; Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands; and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. Solo exhibitions include the Abrons Art Center in New York; Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City; Institute of Visual Arts in Milwaukee; and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, in which Sokolow’s 2013 MATRIX exhibition, Some Concerns About the Candidate, was reviewed in the New York Times. Her work has been reproduced for Creative Time’s Comics project; for Swedish art magazine, Paletten; in Vitamin D2, a survey on contemporary drawing; and in a several-page spread in the fall 2018 issue of BOMB Magazine. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, CT; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art; Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction in Indiana; and the Thomas J Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Sokolow is a recipient of an Artadia award and residencies at Art Omi and Nordic Artists’ Centre in Norway. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004. She is represented by Western Exhibitions and lives and works in Chicago.
The high-femme drama of a sad unfurling scroll penetrating a gorgeous rug, gushing together into crisscrossed waves. A dripping jug of melting roses. An underwater flood.
Ruby T is a drawer who is fueled by anger, desire, and magic. Her drawings and marbled silk paintings in Underwater Flood are translations of political and sexual desire. Within oppressive social conditions, language circumscribes both forms of yearning, collapsing them into each other as they flow toward the limits of fantasy. This show, her first at Western Exhibitions, juxtaposes ecstatic drawings of water with dozens of satirical cartoons depicting U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham.
Ruby’s drawing practice is equal parts performative and devotional. 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.
She writes, “All of my work is rooted in drawing and has been for years. I am on a quest to realize the conceptual potential of cartooning and protest art. Drawing water imagery on marbled patterns forces a power struggle between the fiction of my lines and the physical trace of water. Sometimes I dominate and sometimes I submit; multiple planes emerge, and I become trapped in the trifecta of reality, representation, and caricature.”
Her cartoons of Lindsey Graham are part of an ongoing experiment in which she draws the opportunistic misogynist over and over again from the same grimacing photo while listening to him speak. She asks, “If caricature is drawing at its most violent, can the ritualistic repetition of drawing this asshole accelerate his destruction?” Her fascination with Graham is just one in a string of obsessions with the political and corporate elite and their bullshit.
Ruby T was named a 2018 Breakout Artist by Newcity and has had solo and two-person exhibitions in Chicago at Randy Alexander Gallery, Roots & Culture, The Back Room at Kim’s Corner Food, and Woman Made Gallery. Group exhibitions include Hyde Park Art Center, EXPO Chicago, ACRE Projects, Ballroom Projects, Roman Susan, all in in Chicago and at Monaco in St. Louis. She has performed and screened video works at Chicago spaces including Iceberg Projects, Weinberg/ Newton Gallery, Gallery 400, Chicago Filmmakers, and Comfort Station. Ruby T received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016 and lives and works in Chicago.
Ruby’s illustrations and comics have been published by Temporary Services and the short-lived Land Line. Her work has been written about and reviewed in the Chicago Tribune, Newcity, The Chicago Reader, and Chicago Artist Writers. She has received grants from the Chicago Department of Public Affairs and residency and fellowship awards from Ox-Bow, Wassaic Project, and ACRE. Her band Lezurrexion has performed in over 50 crusty basements, clubs, and secret outdoor spaces between 2011 and 2015, and she is a current member of the organizing collective Make Yourself Useful.
Western Exhibitions will open its second solo show with Orkideh Torabi on Friday, September 13 with a public reception from 5 to 8pm. Torabi’s paintings depict caricatures of men — particularly men who enjoy and benefit from social freedoms that women, in many cultures, are forbidden or discouraged from engaging in.
Taking art historical cues from portrayals of the figure in landscape in the Western Canon, Torabi’s men are seemingly oblivious to their coveted social freedom. Rendered with simple button-eyes, gnarled noses, and alien skin, her intentionally humorous figures are stuck in an emasculated state of being. She banishes women from her paintings altogether, crafting scenes that offer an eerie parallel to daily life in patriarchal cultures. Without women, the men are left to coddle their baby boys, care for each other at public baths, and engage in intimate conversations amongst themselves.
In an interview with Chester Alamo-Costello for Comp Magazine, Torabi reflects on this expulsive decision: “Growing up, I gradually recognized how women do not benefit from the same opportunities as men in their everyday lives. Having consistently observed how many facets of society are established to favor men over women, I questioned how my life might differ if none of these boundaries existed.” Torabi’s new paintings follow this same thematic trajectory but reveal men in more actively ill-intentioned roles, exposing their predatory behavior as they crudely seek the attention of women, gawking and cat-calling from alleys and park benches. While most seem to be enjoying chatting and gossiping about their recent adventures, others are shamefully being caught in the act.
Torabi uses fabric dye on stretched cotton, a batik-like technique that has become her signature, to depict cartoonish contemporary men against vivid patterns, designs that are influenced by Persian manuscripts and miniatures, both integral parts of Iranian culture since the 13th century. These small yet highly detailed illustrations usually depict warrior men completing tasks as gazing women watch the active heroes in wonder from the sidelines. In the new series of paintings, Torabi moves these backgrounds into the foreground shapes of her men’s shirts, pants and blankets. Custom-designed, patterned wallpaper will be installed behind the paintings to further envelop the viewer in color and pattern. By juxtaposing her contemporary observations with such traditional imagery, Torabi makes explicit that the past and present become interwoven in the fabric(ated) world of her making.
Orkideh Torabi received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016, after receiving her BA and MA from the University of Art in Tehran. Torabi’s solo and two-person shows include Western Exhibitions in Chicago; Horton Gallery in New York; Yes, Please and Thank You in Los Angeles; and Interface Gallery in Oakland. Her recent solo show at Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica was reviewed in the Los Angeles Times. Her solo booth at the 2018 NADA New York was highlighted by Hyperallergic and Roberta Smith of The New York Times, who posted on Instagram that Torabi’s “work blends Persian painting with Hairy Who-like Nutt and Nilsson, fomenting optimism for the continuation of the reciprocal revitalizations of cultures.” Torabi lives and works in Chicago.
Press: Galerie Magazine
Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present its third solo show with Marshall Brown, Je est un autre, in Galleries 1 and 2. Featuring two new projects, Brown uses the historically disruptive properties of collage and montage to create new spaces, forms, and narratives that embody new relationships between the one and the many. Je est un autre translates roughly to “I is another,” a phrase borrowed from French poet Arthur Rimbaud, and speaks to Brown’s rejection of purist or reductionist worldviews through his hybrid works. The exhibition opens on June 7th with a free and public reception from 5 to 8pm and runs through July 27th.
In Gallery 1, Brown expands upon his abstraction of architectural photography with a new series of collages that create even more dynamic perceptions of space, scale, and orientation than his Chimera collage series from 2014. In this new series Brown samples imagery from photographs taken during the golden age of post-war architectural photography. His curated fragments, culled from monographs on significant figures from the history of architectural photography, are hand-cut and fused together onto Arches hot press watercolour paper. Looming facades, stark shadows, and structural details support one another to form unique architectural spaces and narratives — offering no site or function, Brown’s assemblages look toward new, boundless spaces. From Zach Mortice, Architect Magazine, in 2017: “Brown isn’t trying to make buildings more like collages. He’s trying to get us to acknowledge that buildings are collages, and that the future of ‘making new history’ comes from reassembling the pieces of the old.”
In Gallery 2, Brown presents a multimedia installation that details the future history of Daniel Freeman, an architect turned citizen-settler after a great flood destroys Chicago in 2033. Freeman’s story is anchored by a 4-minute digital video, “The New Country,” and augmented with architectural drawings on drafting vellum, sketches on tracing paper and wooden scale models. In Brown’s vision, ongoing shocks of climate mutation lead to an environmental apocalypse. Freeman pioneers a new way of living, eventually codified as “Smooth Growth,” in which a truly independent society is formed through collective stewardship and spatial solidarity. Brown uses this speculative architectural fiction to offer a progressive vision of a boundless and radically American civilization. Looking beyond our present moment of environmental crisis and social isolation, Brown proposes a future aimed at social ownership and collective independence.
Crossing disciplinary boundaries and extending from the intertwined histories of modern art and architecture, Marshall Brown is an architect, urbanist, and futurist whose work creates new connections, associations, and meanings among disconnected architectural and urban remnants. His work is in the collections of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Photography and the University Club, both in Chicago. Brown’s work has been exhibited at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, The Arts Club of Chicago, the Architecture and Design Museum Los Angeles, and recently in a 10-year survey, Recurrent Visions: The Architecture of Marshall Brown Projects, at the Princeton University School of Architecture. His projects and essays have appeared in several books and journals, including The New York Times Magazine, Metropolis, Crain’s, Architectural Record, Art Papers, The Believer, the Journal of Architectural Education and Log. Marshall Brown received his masters’ degrees at Harvard University. Brown is based in New Jersey and is an associate professor at Princeton University.
Western Exhibitions is pleased to present an exhibition by husband-and-husband artist team Miller & Shellabarger.
This second showing at Western Exhibitions of Miller & Shellabarger’s collaborative pursuits will focus on works from several inter-related projects including Volume 6 of their large-scale silhouette artist books, documents from a recent performance involving funeral pyres and intimate, discrete objects that utilize embroidery and carved shells.
The silhouette is a key component in several of these new works. Miller & Shellabarger first employed silhouettes in large-scale artist books that contained their individual profiles, each one cut by the other. We will show the most recent book in this series as well as other silhouette-based works that use the silhouette as a starting point, including conjoined beard silhouette collages traced by friends and two embossed lead pieces that feature similar imagery. We will also show larger-than-life, phantasmagorical images, created during their “Summer Studio” artist residency at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Sullivan Galleries in 2010 which take advantage of the distortions of the silhouetted figure in light and shadow. Life-size body tracings of each other are realized in large drawings on paper made with gunpowder, and in a small book of photographs of body tracings made with seeds.
Additional work will include a twin set of pillowcases, each monogrammed with their initials using hair from their beards as thread, a delicate cameo depicting the two with their beards intertwined carved out of sardonic shell by an Italian master carver, and photographs from a recent performance “Untitled (Pyre)” where they found two naturally fallen trees in the forest, chopped them, and stacked the fireplace-sized pieces into roughly human-size forms, and burned these pyres at dusk.
Miller & Shellabarger are a 2009 recipient of the Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant, 2008 recipient of an Artadia Award, and a 2007 recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award. Their work is in the collections of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art and the National Gallery of Canada in Ontario. In 2010 they showed a major selection of work at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, Maine, participated in the Time-Based Arts (TBA) festival in Portland, Oregon and will have a solo exhibition in 2011 at the Illinois State University Galleries in Normal, Illinois. Their work has been written about in Artforum.com, Art & Auction, Frieze, Artnet, The Art Newspaper, Flash Art, TimeOut Chicago, and the Chicago Sun-Times. Dutes Miller and Stan Shellabarger also maintain separate artistic practices. They live and work in Chicago.
A recent article by Erin Rook, published in Just Out, a GLBT publication in Portland, so perfectly captures the meaning, process and spirit in their work that we concluded Ms. Rook says it so much better than we could. (Slightly edited for length. See full text here)
Dutes Miller and Stan Shellabarger explore the dynamics of love and loss through performance pieces that emphasize the artistic process as a metaphor for the cycles of life and death, of connection and separation. The Chicago-based couple has been creating collaborative works since they starting dating 17 years ago, bringing together their respective fascinations with the body to produce performance art that speaks to universal themes in relationships in a distinctly physical way.
Their collective work focuses on the ways bodies relate. Past performances have included braiding their beards together, intentionally acquiring sunburn while embracing and a project (ongoing since 2003) in which the men crochet opposite ends of a pink tube that both separate and connect them.
Miller and Shellabarger’s art often challenges stereotypes about gender and sexuality, sometimes intentionally and other times inevitably. Many of the couple’s performances incorporate a domestic element—crocheting, sewing, origami—and their masculine appearance alone contradicts perceptions about queer men. “Whether we want it to or not, because of our relationship to one another, the personal becomes political,” says 41-year-old Shellabarger. Miller adds that while his own individual work has a clearly intentional queer focus, their collective work does not. It’s simply “a matter of fact.” More from Miller: “Just because we’re two men and we’re in this relationship, it’s queer. One of the things we hope is that it’s something other people can look at and see themselves in, both straight people and queer people.”
Still, as obvious as the nature of their relationship seems to the artists, it doesn’t always translate. In Europe, the couple has found their sexuality to be both understood and a non-issue. “It seemed incredibly obvious to them that we were [queer],” Shellabarger says. “So their interpretation of the pieces often didn’t have to do with that. It had to do with this relationship between the two of us, they didn’t fixate on the fact that we were queer.”
In the United States, however, audiences are resistant to even acknowledge that they are queer, puzzling over what the nature of their relationship could possibly be. “People will ask us if we’re brothers, other people will think we’re friends and some people will be in complete denial even after we tell them,” Miller says. “There’s this denial that masculine men are gay because gay men are always effeminate, so it’s this constantly confronting stereotypes.”
However perplexed some audiences may be by the exact nature of their relationship, the threads running through the couple’s recent work could not be more universal. Miller says they have been inspired in part by “The Work of Mourning” by Jacques Derrida.
In the piece the couple will be performing at the Time-Based Arts Festival in Portland, Oregon, “Untitled (Graves),” they explore connection through and beyond death. Miller and Shellabarger will each dig a size-proportional grave (“Stan’s will be taller and narrower, mine will be wider and shorter,” Miller explains) on the grounds of Washington High. After lying in the graves, they will dig a tunnel between the two through which to hold hands. Whether the graves are a full 6-feet deep will depend on the terrain and weather. But regardless of the depth, Miller says lying in them is a moving experience.
“You’re really thinking about death in a very purposeful way that doesn’t necessarily occur in life all the time and what it means to anticipate the loss of your lover,” Miller says.“Untitled (Graves)” is not the couple’s first piece exploring death. Over the summer, the couple performed “Untitled (Pyre)” in which they each cut up fallen trees and piled them into stacks resembling funeral pyres and burned them. “The two trees ended up serving as doppelgangers, one for Dutes, one for myself,” Shellabarger explains. “We … stacked them into a funeral pyre so it was very column-like, making reference to the body and then at sunset set them on fire. It was this idea of self-emulation, or the destruction of, the disappearance of the body.”
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Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present its first solo show with the renowned painter RICHARD HULL on March 26. Western Exhibitions’ Galley 1 will be devoted to paintings and in Gallery 2, Hull will show one large charcoal drawing of a concentrically repetitive amoeba-like form, two crayon drawings and two watercolors featuring imagery related to his Klein bottle inside/outside concerns. Richard Hull’s new works explore spatial relationships, both metaphorically and formally, between the geometric dualities of empty and full spaces. The prevalent imagery, a biomorphic shape that resembles a horse’s tail, or when doubled and combined, a Möbius strip, or a Klein bottle*, gives viewers the visual sensation of being simultaneously located both inside and out. Reverberating concentric lines inside the primary shapes allude to movement and connectivity, and can be thought of as pathways, highways or circulatory systems. Inside these pulsating pathways are several series of dots, ellipses, concentric squares, and other diagrammatic marks that the artist thinks of as architectural, almost like apartment complexes. Eyeball-like images crop up in several works, perhaps alluding to the artist’s partial vision in one eye. Another painting references Sisyphus and his repetitive action of pushing a boulder up a mountain, Hull’s concentric and reverberating rings make an apt visual metaphor for the energy Sisyphus expended. The architectural details are reminiscent of Hull’s most well-known works that often depict abstracted interiors or house shapes. In this new body of work, Hull inverts his interest in interiority, sublimating it inside these coursing concentric highways embedded within biomorphic forms. Given his interest in the dialogue between empty and full spaces, Hull has now turned his painting practice almost inside out, whereas the shapes in each painting maintain this reciprocal dialogue and the body of work as whole starts a conversation with preceding works. Past works nurtured a dark and introspective mood; current paintings look out as much as they look in. Past works kept to a earth-toned palette and heavily worked surfaces; bright, directly applied high-keyed color now plays the prominent role. In Hull words, “color has become its own entity.” * The Klein bottle is a non-orientable surface (a two-dimensional manifold) with no identifiable “inner” and “outer” sides. Richard Hull is now represented by Western Exhibitions. His work is in the collections of several museums including The Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Smithsonian Museum, Washington D.C.; Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and The Smart Museum, Chicago. He has exhibited his work at The Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City; The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT; Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, OH; Portland Art Museum, OR; The Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland, OH; Herron Gallery of Art, Indianapolis, IN; Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI; Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Evanston IL; and The Painting Center, New York, NY. He joined the legendary Phyllis Kind Gallery upon graduating from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago in 1979 and had numerous shows in both her New York City and Chicago locations. Hull lives and works in Chicago and teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. |
In Gallery 1
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Daniel Albrigo
Putting Your Money Where Your Mouth Is… A LOVE STORY
Western Exhibitions is pleased to present “Putting Your Money Where Your Mouth Is… A LOVE STORY,” a split exhibition of new works by Daniel Albrigo and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. This will be the second version of the exhibition, which was originally on view at Renwick Gallery in New York in February 2010.
“Putting Your Money Where Your Mouth Is… A LOVE STORY” documents the latest iteration of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge’s investigation into the malleability of self and reality and Daniel Albrigo’s response to the elder artist’s project. As part of that ongoing endeavor, P-Orridge’s has had all of h/er teeth removed and replaced with gold casts of the originals. The gesture is emblematic of Breyer P-Orridge’s efforts because it demonstrates the severity of h/er commitment to erasing the boundaries between art and life. Infatuated with Breyer P-Orridge’s gold teeth, Daniel Albrigo created a body of paintings documenting aspects of the process, and instigating the exhibition. Albrigo contributes stunningly realistic portraits of Breyer P-Orridge’s cast teeth. Closely cropped and lushly painted, the paintings engage the viewer in contemplating the gaudily ornamented orifice and dental prosthetics much as they would a conventional still life. In “Positive 4,” for instance, a rich, warm light shines down upon a cast of Breyer P-Orridge’s mouth perched on a metallic ledge. The paintings act as both ode and exposé.
Underpinning this exhibition is the collaborative effort begun in 1993 by Genesis P-Orridge and performance artist Lady Jaye Breyer that focused on a single, central concern: deconstructing the fiction of self. Frustrated by what they felt to be culturally enforced limits on identity but emboldened by the radical power of love, P-Orridge and Lady Jaye applied collage and cut-up techniques to their own bodies in an effort to merge their respective selves. Through plastic surgery, hormone therapy, cross-dressing and altered behavior, they fashioned a single, pandrogynous being, Breyer P-Orridge. The work is an experiment in identity, a test of how fully two people can integrate their lives, and, ultimately, a symbolic gesture of evolution and the alchemical union of the male and female halves of the human. Although Lady Jaye passed away in 2007, Genesis has continued Breyer P-Orridge, putting into question not only the limits between self and other but also life and death.
Breyer P-Orridge will present new assemblages, as well as photo-works, jewelry, and a neon psychick cross, the latter in collaboration with Albrigo. The sculptural assemblages combine sensuality, horror, and religion in curiosity cabinets that recall Joseph Cornell’s boxes, albeit far more grotesque that that allusion implies. Like the mixture of flesh and gold in Breyer P-Orridge’s mouth, these talismanic objects combine disparate materials: photographic references to the body, tampons, feathers, bone, fish, lapis lazuli, raw rubies, glitter and sequins. The exhibition also includes a recent artwork created by Breyer P-Orridge with Alice Genese, a respected jeweler: a substantial silver ring with a cast of the artist’s lower left molars in the place of a traditional stone. The ring is in an edition of 23, a number the mystical value of which was taught to Breyer P-Orridge by Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs.
Daniel Albrigo was born in Pomona, California in 1982 and currently lives and works in New York City. He is a respected tattoo artist and has exhibited his paintings and drawings in a two person exhibition at Redletter 1 Gallery, Tampa Fl and in group exhibitions at Riverside Museum of Art, Riverside, CA; Ghost Print Gallery, Richmond VA; Last Rites Gallery, New York; Art Basel 2008, Miami FL; La Luz De Jesus Gallery, Hollywood CA; Copro Naso Gallery, Santa Monica CA; Gallery DBA 256, Pomona CA. Albrigo also curated the exhibition “Be Here Now” at Canvas LA Gallery in Los Angeles. A catalogue of his work, Life Death Letters and Numbers, was recently published with an introductory text by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. An interview with the artist conducted by Banks Violette will appear in the next issue of the Swiss periodical Sang Bleu.
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge was born in Manchester, England in 1950. S/he was a member of the Kinetic action group Exploding Galaxy/Transmedia Exploration from 1969-1970. S/he conceived of and founded the seminal British performance art group Coum Transmissions in 1969 and was the co-founder of Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, and the spoken word/ambient music performance group Thee Majesty. Throughout Genesis’ long career, s/he has worked and collaborated with William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Derek Jarman and Dr. Timothy Leary, among others. H/er art has been exhibited internationally, including recent exhibitions at Deitch Projects, Mass MOCA, Centre Pompidou, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Barbican Museum, the Swiss Institute and White Columns, amongst others. Upcoming exhibitions will include a solo exhibition at Rupert Goldsworthy in Berlin, a keynote address at the Erotic Screens Conference, Centre for Public Culture and Ideas at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia and a lecture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in March. H/er archive was recently acquired for the permanent collection of the Tate Britain Museum. S/he is represented by Invisible-Exports in New York City.
Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present the third and final iteration of “The Power of Selection”, a densely-packed group show organized by gallery artist Ryan Travis Christian, in our Gallery 2. The show runs through the month of December. After December 23, the gallery is open by appointment. Regular gallery hours are Wednesday through Saturday, 11am to 6pm.
Are you taking Ryan Travis Christian for granted? Do you know what he does for you, yes, you? In addition to making highly charged and acutely rendered drawings, Mr. Christian voraciously sees shows in galleries high and low and scours the internet in search of hot new art. He often presents his findings on his Facebook page as an “artist of the day”, publishes interviews with up-and-coming artists on Beautiful/Decay and Fecal Face websites and for you lucky Chicagoans, brings all this hot new art to Western Exhibitions in his three part show “The Power of Selection”.
In part one (Jan-Feb 2010), Ryan presented four west coast artists and one Chicago artist in Western Exhibitions main gallery space. Part two this summer, he showed 3 New York artists and one from Oregon in our gallery 2, and for this show, November 19 to December 31, he is cramming Gallery 2 with a salon-style extravaganza featuring artists from across the nation.
Artists included:
Derek Albeck
Mark Arctander
Timothy Bergstrom
Marissa Bero Gerlofs
Samantha Bittman
Michelle Blade
Jaq Chartier
Ryan Travis Christian
Richard Colman
Allison Cortson
Chris Duncan
Julian Duron
Ted Gahl
Andres Guerrero
Joseph Hart
Valerie Hegarty
Maya Hayuk
Matt Irie
Jason Jagel
Kelly Lynn Jones
Michael Krueger
Denise Kupferschmidt
Jose Lerma
Matt Lock
Alex Lukas
Bill McRight
Frankie Martin
Eddie Martinez
Jeremy Mora
Kristine Moran
Erin Morrison
Sarah Mosk
Jeanette Mundt
Aaron Noble
Marcie Oakes
Maggie Otero
Matthew Palladino
Hilary Pecis
Cleon Peterson
Richard Colman
Joe Roberts
Brion Nuda Rosch
Kate Ruggeri
Ryan Schaffer
Jovi Schnell
Andrew Schoultz
Allison Schulnik
Eric Shaw
Sumi Ink Club
Ann Toebbe
Kristen VanDeventer
Ned Vena
Ben Venom
Eric Yahnker
Chuck Webster
Ryan Wallace
Exhibition organizer Ryan Travis Christian is a Chicago based artist who has had solo shows at Guerrero Gallery in San Francisco Ebersmoore in Chicago, and his solo show debut at Western Exhibitions is forthcoming for Fall 2011. He’s been included in group show at Baer Ridgway in San Francisco, Space 1026 in Philadelphia and Synchronicty in Los Angeles and has curated exhibitions at many of these same venues. This spring New City named Christian as one of Chicago’s “Breakout Artists” for 2010.
| CHAPTER 3 THE PLAN. You’ll fly into Denver International Airport in the early morning hours, If the theory about Denver International Airport is true, they will be employing numerous strategies to hide everything from the general public, so staying under the radar is going to be important. Of course, under no circumstance should you alert them to the fact that you, for them, are a problematic individual. |
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| In a departure from a studio practice that up until now has focused on large-scale, installation-oriented drawings, Sokolow is switching gears to embark on a new, long-term project of writing dozens of chapters, in no particular order, for a book that will never fully exist. Each chapter is drafted by hand on a single 30 x 22 page of paper, edited, erased, rewritten a number of times, and finally mounted onto a tablet-like panel. Each page, when finished, represents an entire visual record of the process that takes place when writing each chapter. |
| The contents of these chapters include both serious and ridiculous investigations into politics and conspiracy theories as well as thoughts on architecture, wig-wearing, and salami sandwiches. These topics will seem somewhat unrelated, but there are two common existing threads: the implication of an overarching narrative (which will begin to take a clearer shape as additional chapters are written over the next few years) and Sokolow’s voice, an unreliable alter-ego protagonist, who authors each chapter and provides (in true meta-fiction fashion) a running commentary, often of a self-critical and premonition-like nature, located between the lines of text and margins of each page. Long-term, Sokolow will continue to write chapters and present them, always out of order, in different combinations, so that when mixed and matched, a different “mood” will form from the juxtaposition of the exhibited chapters. Sokolow’s stories are inspired from watching of epic-like television dramas such as Battlestar Galactica and Deadwood, and from a recent immersion into books such as Muriel Spark’s The Comforters, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Iain Banks The Wasp Factory and Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, all of which incorporate elements of meta-fiction, the unreliable narrator and paranoia into the story-telling process. |
| The first few chapters from Sokolow’s book as well as their visuals and sources (such as footnotes, images, architectural renderings, charts and book-like objects) will be presented in this solo show at Western Exhibitions. |
| This is Deb Sokolow’s first show with the gallery and her first solo exhibition at a commercial gallery in Chicago since her show, “Secrets and Lies and More Lies” at 40000 in 2006. Her recent projects include large-scale, site-specific drawings for the Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands, the Smart Museum at the University of Chicago, the Spertus Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, INOVA [Institute of Visual Arts] in Milwaukee, a solo show at the Kemper Museum in Kansas City and a comic strip commissioned for Creative Time. Sokolow’s work will be included in upcoming group shows at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and the Arlington Arts Center and in a solo exhibition at Lawrence University. Sokolow’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Spertus Museum and has been discussed in Artforum.com, Art in America (online), Artnet, Art Papers, Art on Paper, Artslant, Beautiful Decay, Dagens Nyheter, The Kansas City Star, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, The Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Magazine, New City, Timeout Chicago, Flavorpill and Jettison Quarterly. She is a 2010 resident of the Art Omi International Artists Residency and received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004. She lives and works in Chicago. |
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| Gallery 2:
THE POWER OF SELECTION, PART 3 The Power of Selection Part 3 is the third in a series of three shows curated by Ryan Travis Christian for Western Exhibitions. Christian, who writes for Fecalface.com, Beautiful Decay and selects an Artist of the Day, each and every day on his Facebook page, has organized these shows, the first in January, the second in June and the third here in November, to increase the circulation of contemporary artwork seen in Chicago by showing works from out of town and/or up-and-coming artists. Artists in this salon-style blow-out include Michelle Blade, Louisa Chase, Chris Duncan, Joseph Hart, Maya Hayuk, Matt Irie, Jason Jagel, Michael Kreuger, Matt Lock, Alex Lukas, Bill McRight, Frankie Martin, Eddie Martinez, Kristine Moran, Erin Morrison, Sarah Mosk, Jeanette Mundt, Aaron Noble, Marcie Oakes, Maggie Otero, Mathew Palladino, Hilary Pecis, Cleon Peterson, Brion Nuda Rosch, Kate Ruggeri, Jovi Schnell, Andrew Schoultz, Eric Shaw, Marissa Textor, Ann Toebbe, Sumi Ink Club, Chuck Webster, Ryan Wallace. (This is a partial list). |
Western Exhibitions kicks off the fall season with new work by Ben Stone. Stone’ six new sculptures and one small painting transform two-dimensional images culled from popular sources into compelling and uncanny three-dimensional forms. The show will open will open on Friday, September 10 with a free public reception from 5 to 8pm.
The shocking beating of Kansas City Royals first base coach Tom Gamboa at a Chicago White Sox game in 2002 forms the centerpiece of this show. In the incident, White Sox fans William Ligue and his son, highly intoxicated, ran onto the field unprovoked and attacked Gamboa, knocking him to the ground, landing several punches, then took a beating from outraged Kansas City players. The Ligues were ultimately arrested. Years later, this random act of violence still haunts Stone. His large sculpture, three life-size monochromatic figures rendered in resin-coated polystyrene, captures this abhorrent scene as Gamboa is first knocked to the ground, his cap flying, with the Ligues throwing errant haymakers. Stone sees the pure rage and beautiful futility of this act as a disruption in the system, a ghost in the machine, as if the Ligues were possessed by a strange energy from an angrier time steeped in Chicago’s darker cultural histories of the thinly veiled policy of segregation of the first Daley administration, the stockyards and Steve Dahl’s infamous disco demolition.
Other pieces in the show depict criminals or symbols of criminal behavior. Stone wrestles the superflat characters Team Rocket, the villainous threesome from the animated television series Pokémon into a low relief sculpture. His fascination with the Pokémon evildoers comes from the anime show with his daughter and admiring the team’s persistence to “denounce the evils of truth and love” despite the constant failure of their nefarious plans. Stone finds their absolute certainty and dedication to doomed outcomes analogous to his own artistic production. Despite his perceived failures, Stone finds himself heading to the studio every day with fresh abandon.
Other works in the show include two sculptures which render a representation of the criminal neighborhood watch signs, an anachronistic image of a shadowy figure wearing a fedora and overcoat with the lapels turned up, into minimalist totems; a five-foot tall elephant, sitting on its haunches, made out of thick coils of twisted rope, based on a small, almost guilty-seeming tchotcke elephant; a mini bust of a crying Abraham Lincoln wearing a hand-made Chicago Bears pom-pom topped knit cap; and a small painting on rope of William Ligue (one of the Gamboa attackers) and his chest-covering tattoo.
This is Ben Stone’s second solo show at Western Exhibitions. His last, in 2007, was reviewed in Artforum. His work has been shown at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, DiverseWorks in Houston and in Chicago at Suitable, Ten-in-One, Gallery 400 and the Hyde Park Art Center. Stone’s seven-foot tall, 250 pound robot, Nuptron 4000, performed his wedding ceremony in 2004 and is currently moonlighting as the stand-up comedian Bernie Circuits, recently seen at Club Nutz at both the Museum of Contemporary Art and the NEXT Art Fair in Chicago. Stone received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and his MFA from the University of Illinois-Chicago. He lives in Berwyn and maintains a studio in Chicago.
In Gallery 1, John Riepenhoff presents Handler, a series of collaborative figurative sculptures, papier-mâché legs outfitted in Riepenhoff’s pants and shoes holding large-scale paintings by Peter Barrickman, Nicholas Frank, Richard Galling, Michelle Grabner, Greg Klassen, Jose Lerma, Scott Reeder and Tyson Reeder.
A painting walks into a gallery and hangs out on the wall. The gallerist says “move up a little”. The painting moves up a little. The gallerist says “looks great”. The painting doesn’t say anything, it’s legs walk away to do something else.
In Art Stand Series, pairs of papier-mâché legs outfitted in Riepenhoff’s pants and shoes hold large-scale paintings by other artists. These unconventional easels simulate the perspective of the art-handler, making visible one of the unseen laborers integral to exhibition making. By ascribing equal value to handler and artist, the artwork suddenly renders the social boundaries within the art community permeable.
Slipping into the role of impresario, John Riepenhoff has developed a strategy that enables an examination of the many positions within the art community. In his praxis he is an artist, curator, installer, gallerist—even an art fair director. Each role is adopted as a means to locate and make visible the greater framework in which an individual participates. Projects are not limited to a specific format or medium; they overlap in their aim to facilitate community on one hand, and enhance a viewing experience on the other.
From the Catalog Essay from The Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists
Written by Piper Marshall, writer and assistant curator at Swiss Institute New York
In Gallery 2, John Riepenhoff presents a series of plein air paintings — large images of the night sky, painted by the light of a solitary lantern while camping in the Nicolette National Forest in northern Wisconsin
Plein air or “open air” painting situates the artist outside the controlled environment of the studio and in the field. This often limits aspects of painterly process: time, immediacy, and a certain control over the medium, become pressing elements implicit in the process. Working from one lantern amidst the dark night sky of Nicolette National Forest in northern Wisconsin, Riepenhoff reconsidered plein air painting. In a way the artist is willingly blind to his process. He is never completely aware of what is being painted until the following morning. The night sky becomes a framework in which to hang various abstract marks and gestures. Subtle shifts within the atmosphere offer an opportunity to layer various washes reminiscent of strategies utilized in abstract, impressionist painting. Clusters and individual stars allow for marks of varying impasto to situate themselves across the surface.
From the exhibition essay for Riepenhoff’s 2010 show at nAbr Gallery in Milwaukee
Written by Richard Galling, 2010
When we create we document not only what is at our attention, we also archive the resources that have been used to tell our story. Though this latter aspect of expression is often obscured, its limitations can tell us a lot about an individual’s condition and subsequently about the position of his or her culture. This series acknowledges the limits of an individual’s range in an attempt to shift the outer conditions of creating into the subject of the medium.
–John Riepenhoff on his Plein Air paintings