{"organization":{"id":"782","name":"Western Exhibitions","organization_type_id":"1","district_id":"2","telephone":"+13124808390","website":"http://westernexhibitions.com","email":"info@westernexhibitions.com","hours":"Tu–Sa 11–6 ","body":"

Western Exhibitions is a contemporary art gallery that shows thought-provoking, and visually innovative artists who work across most media, with an emphasis on personal narratives and cosmologies; LGBTQ and feminist artists and issues; pattern, decoration and surface concerns; works on paper; and artist books. Western Exhibitions presents unique artist projects, curated group shows and maintains a specific inventory of artist books and multiples, gathered together as a sister entity and store, WesternXeditions.


Artists represented: 

Dan Attoe, Marshall Brown, Elijah Burgher, Jessica Campbell, Lilli Carré, Courttney Cooper, Edie Fake, Nicholas Frank, Julia Schmitt Healy, Richard Hull, Jessica Labatte, Dutes Miller, Miller & Shellabarger, Aya Nakamura, Rachel Niffenegger, Paul Nudd, Robyn O’Neil, Stan Shellabarger, Geoffrey Todd Smith, Deb Sokolow, and Ben Stone.

 

Upcoming 2026 exhibitions: 

Jan 9-Mar 21: Spaces for People, Systems for Spaces (group show about the built environment) 

Mar 27-May 30: Marshall Brown

Jun 5-Aug 15: Richard Hull



Image: Marshall Brown, installation view of Remastériser, Western Exhibitions, 2023. Photo by James Prinz.

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September 17 to October 31, 2026


Affairs to Remember

Lilli Carré

Journie Cirdain

Nanako Kono

Paul Nudd

Geoffrey Todd Smith

Cathrine Whited

Olivia Zubko


Opening reception

THURSDAY, September 17, 5-8pm


Request preview


See images here 


Affairs to Remember features recent work by gallery artists: framed hand-drawn animation cels by Lilli Carré, large graphite drawings by Journie Cirdain, miniature paintings on plastic by Nanako Kono, ceramic sculptures by Paul Nudd, miniature paintings on paper by Geoffrey Todd Smith, drawings of household objects by Cathrine Whited. and wall-mounted ceramic sculptures by Olivia Zubko.


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Please join for an opening reception for Olivia Zubko’s first show at Western Exhibitions, on Thursday, September 17, 5 to 8pm.


Western Exhibitions is pleased to announce our first solo show, Nymphaeum, with Olivia Zubko, a Chicago-based artist new to our roster. Zubko’s recent work employs cast replicas of fixtures and found materials from private, semi-private, and domestic environments to create ceramic sculptures evoking viewers’ personal memories and associations with intimate spaces. Her works investigate the nuanced relationship between these objects and the human form, as well as the broader dynamic between the individual and the domestic sphere of private space, personal intimacy, having a body, and the burdens and privileges of maintaining it. The show opens with a free public reception on THURSDAY, September 17, 5 to 8pm (during Chicago Exhibition Week) and runs through October 31. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm.


For Zubko, no object is too modest to use for appropriating into a material dialogue about metamorphosis. Cast porcelain dumbbells tessellate as repetitive units of laborious bodily upkeep. Single-use sheet masks swirl around a basin as reflections of a desire for a more perfect image. An orthopedic pillow assumes the role of a fleshy, corporeal fragment, both playful and possibly a touch foreboding. Her sculptural works recast these modest, mortal artifacts as mythological bathing nymphs, drawing reference from the long and expansive history of depicting “bathers” in both art and mythology. Celebrated, objectified and/or fetishized, bathers have been a trope throughout art history since antiquity, whether in a tub, basin, or outdoor body of water. Zubko’s work conflates historical depictions with modern sentiments towards private space and personal intimacy and focuses on the negative compositional space surrounding the bather while still invoking the sense of a body or its absence.


A nymphaeum is an ancient Greek and Roman sanctuary built as tribute to water nymphs that functioned as a public fountain, water reservoir, and gathering place. Nymphs, while associated with healing, prophecy, love, and the natural world, are also often characterized as unconventional outcasts who reject conformity to societal standards. In Zubko’s exhibition the Nymphaeum is translated into an intimate space like a bathroom or locker room, spaces often imbued with visceral associations. They may evoke vivid recollections, such as childhood experiences of bubble baths, illnesses, and quiet reflections as well as discordances with body image, identity, and development. Associations deeply rooted in personal experience render the bathroom a significant site for daily rituals, personal intimacy, and “self-care,” occupying a paradoxical space that can be both familiar and distant, public and private, safe and unsafe, sterile and emotional.


Olivia Zubko (born in 1995, Chicago, IL) has had solo and 2-person shows at Left Field Gallery in Los Osos, California and in Chicagoland at The Arts Club of Chicago, DeGroot Fine Art, Cleaner Gallery + Projects, and McHenry County College. Her work has been included in group shows at Patient Info and The Plan, both in Chicago, and at Rockford University, Illinois. Zubko recently curated Deep Cuts! at The Plan, a group show of over 75 Chicago artists with works that were made when the artists were 12 years old or younger. She is a current fellow at The Arts Club of Chicago. Zubko received her BFA in 2020 from Northern Illinois University, and lives and works in Chicago.



Image: Cairn III , 2025, Stained porcelain. 16h x 6 1/2w x 6 1/2d in

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Gallery Two, Chicago

Please join for an opening reception for Paul Nudd‘s sixth solo show at Western Exhibitions, the first focusing on his burgeoning ceramics practice, on Friday, November 6, 2026, 5 to 8pm. More information to come.

Image: Paul Nudd ceramics

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Gallery One, Chicago

Please join for an opening reception for Miller & Shellabarger’s sixth show at Western Exhibitions on Friday, November 6, 2026, 5 to 8pm. More information to come.

Image: Tug, 2025, construction paper, string, 6h x 13 1/2w in

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Ryan Travis Christian's surreal personal narratives are fueled by the absurdity of life in his small, suburban-Chicago hometown. The untidy lifestyles of contemporary humanity are all hanging out, including heavy petting, drugs and alcohol, beaten-up cars, fireworks and death. Inspired by Ub Iwerks, George Condo, the Hairy Who and- new to this body of work- vintage political cartoons and hand-drawn animation, Christian comes to terms with his sources sordid past while embracing their richness and flavor.
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\r\nIn his third solo show at Western Exhibitions, This Shit Is For The Birdies, Christian's idiosyncratic vision has expanded to include commentary on current crises in the nation and world at large. Tackling hot political issues such as immigration, depression and the American dream, Christian's historical precedents become a mirror reflecting many common concerns of the present, warts and all. 
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\r\nMusing on the technological and material obsolescence of his inspiration, Christian's recent work doubles down on the paradoxical relationship between childish cartoons and ominous messages. Using dense layers of graphite pencil to create graphic images of condoms, brick houses, and Mickey Mouse, his high contrast figures are rendered in slow motion and set against hazy sfumato-esque landscapes and inside of melting, skewed spaces. A series of small daily drawings touch upon a vast array of topics, such as the economy, violence, the environment, gender, class, hope, doubt, and the afterlife; a large floor sculpture takes the form of a drinking bird toy, that perpetual motion gag gift that mimics a bird bobbing for a drink; and for the first time, monochromatic patterned paintings feature vibrating optics, quivering silhouettes and cream cheese smears of titanium white oil paint.
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\r\nRyan Travis Christian's solo shows include the Contemporary Art Museum in Raleigh, NC; Guerrero Gallery in San Francisco, Halsey McKay in East Hampton, NY and Cooper Cole in Toronto, and has been included in group shows in London, Rotterdam, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Baltimore, Dallas and Los Angeles. His work has been written about in frieze, art ltd, Art Papers, New American Paintings, Daily Serving, Indy Week and the Associated Press. New City named Christian as one of Chicago's "Breakout Artists" for 2010 and named by the same publication as one of Chicago's "Top 50 Artists' Artists" in 2012. DAZED recently named Christian as one of the "top ten artists working with monochrome." He is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and lives and works in the Chicagoland area.

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Top image: Ryan Travis Christian, DEPRESSION, 2017, Graphite on paper, 7 x 10 inches

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SaveSave

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In Gallery 2: Steve Reinke, Portfolio A / Atheists Need Theology, Too / Semen is the Piss of Dreams / Drawings 

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My subconscious has melted away and seems to have been replaced by the muted, jangled chorus of my microbiome. I'm not sure if this condition is rare or widespread. I expect it is widespread and that our microbiomes are battling with our subconsciouses for supremacy. There is no battle in me, though. My subconscious is gone. Human Events is a series of works reflecting on this condition. It proceeds through a chain of associations. "Atheists Need Theology, Too," the first of seven videos, begins with a poem by Emily Dickinson, "To fill a Gap / Insert the Thing that caused it — ." All of Human Events, then, could be read as a gloss on the poem. Or, one could choose — or be compelled by their dwindling subconsciouses and roiling microbiomes to choose — any other link in this chain of associations and use that as the starting point. -- Steve Reinke

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For his first show at Western Exhibitions, Chicago-based artist Steven Reinke will present Portfolio A, ten prints he made with Stan Shellabarger at Spudnik Press; two high-definition videos from his ongoing series Human Events, and a suite of drawings related to the first video, Atheists Need Theology, Too.
\r\n
\r\nMemories, fantasy and the desiring body have been central themes in the work of Steve Reinke since the 1980s. His videos typically take a diaristic or collage format, melding archival sources with a seemingly autobiographical narrative. Reinke is perhaps best known for The Hundred Videos, completed between 1989 and 1996; its underlying theme confronts the authority of filmmaking and the construction of the documentary genre. The Toronto International Film Festival named it one of the 150 essential works in Canadian cinematic history. Reinke’s work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (NY), the Centre Pompidou (Paris), MACBA (Barcelona) and the National Gallery of Canada. His films have screened festivals including Sundance, Oberhausen and the New York Video Festival and his work has been exhibited at the 2015 Istanbul Bienali, Art Gallery of Ontario, ICA London, Wexner Center in Columbus, OH, DePaul Art Museum and a solo show at Isabella Bortollozzi in Berlin, among several others. In 2006, he received the Bell Canada Award in Video Art. In 2014, he was included in the Whitney Biennial in collaboration with Jessie Mott. Steve Reinke (born 1963) lives and works in Chicago and is a professor of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University.

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\"\"

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In Gallery 2

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Combining found materials, magazine cutouts, sculptures, and ink-on-paper drawings, Sofia Moreno's new series, She-King: the Origin of Perversion, Idolatry, and Neo-Pharmaco Mythology, samples from sources as far-flung as stone-carved Mesoamerican deities, Catholic traditions, environmental terrorism, and the fashion industry to cast dark eroticism over the body as a scientifically, self-mutilated site of discomfort. This body of work probes the contemporary technologization of the flesh through its vain self-imagination. Provocations depicting exquisite and grotesque figures-cyborgs, deities, and animalistic figures-are born in her private, demi-mythological landscapes, inviting the viewer into this vulgar, alluring paradise full of violence, protected by an ancient magic. Voyeurs in this world will encounter tender creatures as part of a living, ancient culture reclaiming time, space, and justice for the perverse body.

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Sofia Moreno is a multimedia artist whose subjects include expressions of the sacred and profane, the body, sexuality, religion and socio-political issues within contemporary culture. She is currently working on the follow-up to her six-year project, P o r n A g a i n, which has been shown at s+s project in San Francisco, LaGrotta Art Gallery in Queens and at Defibrillator in Chicago. She has participated in multiple group exhibitions across the world, including in Berlin, Copenhagen, Amsterdam and across the US. Moreno, born and raised in Coahuila, Mexico, immigrated to the United States in 1994. She was educated at El Centro College and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and she lives and works in Chicago.

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Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present The Dead Know Everything, a solo show by gallery artist Elijah Burgher, his first solo show since moving to Berlin from Chicago one year ago and his third show at Western Exhibitions. Burgher will show new colored pencil drawings that ruminate on friendship, death, flags, gods, demons and paradise in Gallery 1 and he's invited the multimedia artist Sofia Moreno to show in Gallery 2. Both shows open with a reception, free and open to the public, on Saturday, April 15 from 5 to 8pm and run through May 27, 2017. 

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Exhibition on view: June 3 to July 8
\r\nOpening Reception: Saturday, June 3, 5-8pm

\r\n","type":"Event","state":"published","slug":"katie-halton","created_at":"2018-10-22 20:40:41.896794","updated_at":"2018-10-22 20:40:41.896794","excerpt":null,"is_timeless":false,"organization_id":782,"highlighted":false,"opening_starts_at":null,"opening_ends_at":null,"searchable":"'-8':17B '3':7B,15B '5':16B '8':10B 'exhibit':3B 'halton':2A 'juli':9B 'june':6B,14B 'kati':1A 'open':11B 'pm':18B 'recept':12B 'saturday':13B 'view':5B","thumbnail":null,"calendar":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/raw/upload/v1721669445/event_ics_1721669444860.ics","carousel":null,"category_name":null},{"id":4359,"title":"Dutes Miller","starts_at":"2017-06-03 17:00:00","ends_at":"2017-07-08 20:00:00","body":"

Exhibition on view: June 3 to July 8
\r\nOpening Reception: Saturday, June 3, 5-8pm

\r\n","type":"Event","state":"published","slug":"dutes-miller","created_at":"2018-10-22 20:40:41.15457","updated_at":"2018-10-22 20:40:41.15457","excerpt":null,"is_timeless":false,"organization_id":782,"highlighted":false,"opening_starts_at":null,"opening_ends_at":null,"searchable":"'-8':17B '3':7B,15B '5':16B '8':10B 'dute':1A 'exhibit':3B 'juli':9B 'june':6B,14B 'miller':2A 'open':11B 'pm':18B 'recept':12B 'saturday':13B 'view':5B","thumbnail":null,"calendar":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/raw/upload/v1721669441/event_ics_1721669441048.ics","carousel":null,"category_name":"Exhibitions"},{"id":4763,"title":"A Sag, Harbored","starts_at":"2017-07-14 17:00:00","ends_at":"2017-08-19 20:00:00","body":"

Tanya Aguiñiga, Elizabeth M. Claffey, Amber Cobb, Nicholas Frank, Michelle Grabner, Kate McQuillen, Rachel Niffenegger, Holt Quentel, Preetika Rajgariah, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Gyan Shrosbree, Jordan Tate + Rick Silva, Loring Taoka

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The work in this show utilizes, for lack of a better description, the image of fabric/textile sagging in the middle between two upraised points. The artists included use this specific formal gesture to reach different conceptual goals. This premise arose from seeing images of Michelle Grabner’s recent sculptures, bronze casts of hand-crocheted and knitted blankets, many of which were used as templates for her abstract paintings. Her draping forms of reconstituted textile are reminiscent of gallery artist Rachel Niffenegger‘s fabric shrouds, painting/sculpture hybrids that function as clothing, skins and spirits, all referencing the residual imprint of the body.

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A Sag, Harbored is a celebration of this form as well as a subtle subversion of the art world “who wore it better” and “who’s____who” memes, websites and social media feeds that try to highlight artists whom have seemingly almost-identical works. “I think the idea of highlighting/celebrating these similarities is fairly fresh since the instinct, especially from a gallery and sometimes artist’s point of view is to pretend like they don’t exist,” said Niffenegger about the possibility for this exhibition. Along this vein, the show will include a Nicholas Frank biography piece that references the snarky website “Who wore it better,” comparing a possibly-fictional performance staged by Frank to Beyoncé’s video for her song “Ghost.” Also featured is a wall hanging by the fiber artist and designer Tanya Aguiñiga; Elizabeth M. Claffey‘s ethereal photograph of an under garment augmented by hand stitching; Amber Cobb’s bathmat encased in silicon; a distressed canvas by Holt Quentel; a monoprint by Kate McQuillen made by running her clothing through a printing press; a layered painted fabric installation that riffs on traditional Indian textiles by Preetika Rajgariah; Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s fragmented photographs of male bodies hidden and revealed by heavy draping; a kimono by Rick Silva and Jordan Tate that features a satellite image of the Bering Strait appropriated from the Russian SRC Planeta webserver; paintings by Gyan Shrosbree, and maybe more.

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A Sag, Harbored opens at Western Exhibitions’ new gallery space in Chicago’s Ukrainian Village on Friday, July 14 with a reception, free and open to the public, from 5 to 8pm. The show will run through August 19. 

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Head wraps around form. Eyes stretch out, curl around building corner. Ears feel heat, condensation on inner hairs, hear hoarse whistle. Paws splay, hover above asphalt. Rose color fills body, slowly, starting with feet. Rises, as liquid, to brim. Eyes look dead ahead. Eyelids stretch selves down, hard. Eyelids snap up, curl rapidly into selves as windowblinds. Eyes shoot out of sockets, as penises, multiply into a set of six, hover. Sockets gape, breathe. Lines indicate stink. Gravity pulls jaw. Chin hits floor. Tongue rolls out, as carpeting. Eyes retreat into sockets. Hole is pulled across ground with finger, rest falls through. Fingers grip top edge, body descends, as tar. Eyes rise up, wrap around ground plane to rest on earth, then pull above, as periscope.

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Western Exhibitions presents their third solo show with Lilli Carré with a two part solo show that opens on September 9 and runs through October 28. Please join us for a free public reception on Saturday, September 9 from 5 to 8pm.

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In Gallery 1, Carré will show Salves, a grouping of new ceramic sculptures, animation, and prints. Physical and virtual containers cope with ever-bloating dysphoria by stomach coating, wound licking, and crack soothing. Topical and internal ointments offer temporary relief.

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Jill will be projected in Gallery 2, a looping CG animation that builds on the history of the rebellious cartoon body. Set in a plain white room reminiscent of a gallery space or testing laboratory, an acousmatic voice interacts with Jill through a series of commands. Jill shows the wear and tear of slapstick, maintaining dents on a body that seems to feel no pain. The piece speaks to power dynamics between creator and creation, recalling one of the earliest animations, Gertie the Dinosaur, and the asymmetrical interaction of Frankenstein and his monster.

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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. Her animated films have been shown in festivals throughout the US and abroad, including the Sundance Film Festival, the Edinburgh International Film Festival, Animator Festival in Poznań, Poland, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, and the International Film Festival in Rotterdam. 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 York Times, The New Yorker, Best American Comics and Best American Nonrequired Reading. She received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and MFA from Northwestern University. Carré lives and works in Los Angeles.

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Top image: Lilli Carré, Kidding Me

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\r\n","type":"Event","state":"published","slug":"lilli-carre","created_at":"2018-10-22 20:41:32.997085","updated_at":"2018-10-22 21:19:40.257729","excerpt":null,"is_timeless":false,"organization_id":782,"highlighted":false,"opening_starts_at":null,"opening_ends_at":null,"searchable":"'1':173B '2':218B '2010':388B '28':154B '5':168B '8pm':170B '9':149B,166B 'abroad':349B 'acousmat':248B 'across':98B 'ahead':45B 'american':420B,424B 'angel':396B,451B 'anim':184B,222B,292B,338B,360B,386B 'ann':366B 'annual':392B 'appear':410B 'arbor':367B 'around':5B,11B,117B 'art':315B,321B,436B 'asphalt':28B 'asymmetr':298B 'best':419B,423B 'bfa':430B 'biblioteca':327B 'bloat':195B 'bodi':32B,109B,232B,270B 'bologna':331B 'breath':76B 'brim':41B 'build':12B,224B 'carpet':90B 'carr':138B,174B,306B,445B,455B 'carré':2A 'cartoon':231B 'ceram':182B 'cg':221B 'chicago':316B,394B,439B 'chin':83B 'co':379B 'co-found':378B 'coat':199B 'color':30B 'columbus':318B 'comic':421B 'command':257B 'condens':17B 'contain':190B 'contemporari':314B 'cope':191B 'corner':13B 'crack':203B 'creation':286B 'creator':284B 'curl':10B,54B 'dead':44B 'della':328B 'dent':267B 'descend':110B 'di':330B 'dinosaur':295B 'dynam':282B 'dysphoria':196B 'e':326B 'ear':14B 'earliest':291B 'earth':123B 'edg':108B 'edinburgh':356B 'ever':194B 'ever-blo':193B 'exhibit':130B,336B 'experiment':385B 'eye':7B,42B,60B,91B,113B 'eyelid':46B,51B 'eyework':382B 'fall':103B 'feel':15B,274B 'feet':36B 'festiv':344B,354B,359B,361B,369B,374B,383B 'fill':31B 'film':339B,353B,358B,368B,373B 'finger':101B,105B 'floor':85B 'form':6B 'found':380B 'frankenstein':301B 'free':160B 'galleri':172B,217B,242B 'gape':75B 'gerti':293B 'graphic':404B 'graviti':80B 'grip':106B 'ground':99B,118B 'group':179B 'hair':20B 'hard':50B 'head':3B 'hear':21B 'heat':16B 'held':391B 'histori':227B 'hit':84B 'hoars':22B 'hole':95B 'hover':26B,73B 'imag':453B 'includ':310B,350B 'indic':78B 'inner':19B 'institut':437B 'interact':250B,299B 'intern':207B,357B,372B 'internazional':325B 'itali':333B 'jaw':82B 'jill':212B,252B,258B 'join':156B 'kid':456B 'laboratori':246B 'lick':201B 'lilli':1A,137B,305B,454B 'line':77B 'liquid':39B 'live':446B 'look':43B 'loop':220B 'los':395B,450B 'maintain':266B 'mfa':441B 'monster':304B 'multipli':67B 'museo':324B 'museum':312B,319B 'musica':329B 'new':181B,398B,413B,417B 'nonrequir':425B 'northwestern':443B 'novel':405B 'octob':153B 'offer':209B 'ohio':323B 'ointment':208B 'one':288B 'open':146B 'pain':276B 'part':142B 'paw':24B 'penis':66B 'periscop':128B 'physic':187B 'piec':278B 'plain':236B 'plane':119B 'pleas':155B 'poland':364B 'power':281B 'poznań':363B 'present':131B 'print':186B 'project':215B 'public':161B 'publish':403B 'pull':81B,97B,125B 'rapid':55B 'read':426B 'rebelli':230B 'recal':287B 'receiv':428B 'recept':162B 'relief':211B 'reminisc':239B 'rest':102B,121B 'retreat':92B 'rise':37B,114B 'roll':87B 'room':238B 'rose':29B 'rotterdam':376B 'run':151B 'salv':177B 'saturday':164B 'save':458B,459B 'school':433B 'sculptur':183B 'seem':272B 'selv':48B,57B 'septemb':148B,165B 'seri':255B 'set':70B,233B 'sever':402B 'shoot':61B 'show':135B,144B,176B,259B,309B 'shown':342B 'six':72B 'slapstick':265B 'slowli':33B 'snap':52B 'socket':64B,74B,94B 'solo':134B,143B,308B 'sooth':204B 'space':243B 'speak':279B 'splay':25B 'start':34B 'stink':79B 'stomach':198B 'stretch':8B,47B 'sundanc':352B 'tar':112B 'tear':263B 'temporari':210B 'test':245B 'third':133B 'throughout':345B 'time':415B 'tongu':86B 'top':107B,452B 'topic':205B 'two':141B 'univers':444B 'us':157B,347B 'virtual':189B 'voic':249B 'wear':261B 'western':129B,335B 'whistl':23B 'white':237B 'windowblind':59B 'work':408B,448B 'wound':200B 'wrap':4B,116B 'york':399B,414B 'yorker':418B","thumbnail":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1721668388/dztohtl90ut6weeoazcx.jpg","calendar":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/raw/upload/v1721669454/event_ics_1721669453841.ics","carousel":null,"category_name":"Exhibitions"},{"id":5092,"title":"Art After Hours: Salves & Jill","starts_at":"2017-09-15 17:00:00","ends_at":"2017-09-15 21:00:00","body":"

In Gallery 1, Carré will show Salves, a grouping of new ceramic sculptures, animation, and prints. Physical and virtual containers cope with ever-bloating dysphoria by stomach coating, wound licking, and crack soothing. Topical and internal ointments offer temporary relief. Jill will be projected in Gallery 2, a looping CG animation that builds on the history of the rebellious cartoon body. Set in a plain white room reminiscent of a gallery space or testing laboratory, an acousmatic voice interacts with Jill through a series of commands. Jill shows the wear and tear of slapstick, maintaining dents on a body that seems to feel no pain. The piece speaks to power dynamics between creator and creation, recalling one of the earliest animations, Gertie the Dinosaur, and the asymmetrical interaction of Frankenstein and his monster.

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Part of EXPO's Art After Hours. 

\r\n","type":"Event","state":"published","slug":"art-after-hours-salves-jill","created_at":"2018-10-22 20:41:39.754927","updated_at":"2018-12-20 22:47:01.163721","excerpt":null,"is_timeless":false,"organization_id":782,"highlighted":false,"opening_starts_at":null,"opening_ends_at":null,"searchable":"'1':8B '2':53B 'acousmat':83B 'anim':19B,57B,127B 'art':1A,144B 'asymmetr':133B 'bloat':30B 'bodi':67B,105B 'build':59B 'carr':9B 'cartoon':66B 'ceram':17B 'cg':56B 'coat':34B 'command':92B 'contain':25B 'cope':26B 'crack':38B 'creation':121B 'creator':119B 'dent':102B 'dinosaur':130B 'dynam':117B 'dysphoria':31B 'earliest':126B 'ever':29B 'ever-blo':28B 'expo':142B 'feel':109B 'frankenstein':136B 'galleri':7B,52B,77B 'gerti':128B 'group':14B 'histori':62B 'hour':3A,146B 'interact':85B,134B 'intern':42B 'jill':5A,47B,87B,93B 'laboratori':81B 'lick':36B 'loop':55B 'maintain':101B 'monster':139B 'new':16B 'offer':44B 'ointment':43B 'one':123B 'pain':111B 'part':140B 'physic':22B 'piec':113B 'plain':71B 'power':116B 'print':21B 'project':50B 'rebelli':65B 'recal':122B 'relief':46B 'reminisc':74B 'room':73B 'salv':4A,12B 'sculptur':18B 'seem':107B 'seri':90B 'set':68B 'show':11B,94B 'slapstick':100B 'sooth':39B 'space':78B 'speak':114B 'stomach':33B 'tear':98B 'temporari':45B 'test':80B 'topic':40B 'virtual':24B 'voic':84B 'wear':96B 'white':72B 'wound':35B","thumbnail":null,"calendar":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/raw/upload/v1721669466/event_ics_1721669466029.ics","carousel":null,"category_name":"Art Fairs"},{"id":5099,"title":"Faith Wilding: un-natural Parables ","starts_at":"2017-11-03 17:00:00","ends_at":"2017-12-22 20:00:00","body":"

Exhibition on view: November 3-December 22, 2017

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Opening reception: Friday, November 3, 5-8pm

\r\n","type":"Event","state":"published","slug":"faith-wilding-un-natural-parables","created_at":"2018-10-22 20:42:00.468788","updated_at":"2018-10-22 20:42:00.468788","excerpt":null,"is_timeless":false,"organization_id":782,"highlighted":false,"opening_starts_at":null,"opening_ends_at":null,"searchable":"'-8':21B '2017':14B '22':13B '3':11B,19B '5':20B 'decemb':12B 'exhibit':7B 'faith':1A 'friday':17B 'natur':5A 'novemb':10B,18B 'open':15B 'parabl':6A 'pm':22B 'recept':16B 'un':4A 'un-natur':3A 'view':9B 'wild':2A","thumbnail":null,"calendar":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/raw/upload/v1721669466/event_ics_1721669466119.ics","carousel":null,"category_name":"Exhibitions"},{"id":5341,"title":"Hand-Eye Coordination: Sports and Art","starts_at":"2018-01-06 18:00:00","ends_at":"2018-02-17 19:00:00","body":"

Opening reception: Saturday, January 6, 5-8pm

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The artist and the athlete. Often portrayed in movies and television as opposites, the reality is that arts and athletics overlap (of course they have done so for centuries) and each has an important perspective on our society. Hand-Eye Coordination: Sports and Art is a survey of Midwest-connected artists from the Hairy Who to today, who incorporate sports, its themes, implications, and content into their artwork.

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Sparked by a 2010 essay published on ArtSlant titled “Who Will Curate a Major Sports Exhibition?,” which suggested that an area of major public interest and significant artistic production–sports–was overdue for new exploration, Western Exhibitions owner Scott Speh reached out to the author Abraham Ritchie to carry out his own suggestion. With artists whose approaches range from celebratory to critical, Hand-Eye Coordination is suggested as the start of a wider conversation about these two celebrated areas of human society: the arts and athletics.

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Hand-Eye Coordination: Sports and Art opens with a public reception on Saturday, January 6 from 5 to 8pm and will run through February 17. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm.

\r\n","type":"Event","state":"published","slug":"hand-eye-coordination-sports-and-art","created_at":"2018-10-22 20:42:15.334713","updated_at":"2018-10-22 21:15:26.064146","excerpt":null,"is_timeless":false,"organization_id":782,"highlighted":false,"opening_starts_at":null,"opening_ends_at":null,"searchable":"'-8':14B '11am':205B '17':198B '2010':89B '5':13B,190B '6':12B,188B '6pm':207B '8pm':192B 'abraham':131B 'approach':142B 'area':106B,165B 'art':7A,33B,60B,170B,179B 'artist':17B,68B,113B,140B 'artslant':93B 'artwork':85B 'athlet':20B,35B,172B 'author':130B 'carri':134B 'celebr':164B 'celebratori':145B 'centuri':44B 'connect':67B 'content':82B 'convers':160B 'coordin':4A,57B,151B,176B 'cours':38B 'critic':147B 'curat':97B 'done':41B 'essay':90B 'exhibit':101B,122B 'explor':120B 'eye':3A,56B,150B,175B 'februari':197B 'galleri':199B 'hairi':71B 'hand':2A,55B,149B,174B 'hand-ey':1A,54B,148B,173B 'hour':200B 'human':167B 'implic':80B 'import':49B 'incorpor':76B 'interest':110B 'januari':11B,187B 'major':99B,108B 'midwest':66B 'midwest-connect':65B 'movi':24B 'new':119B 'often':21B 'open':8B,180B 'opposit':28B 'overdu':117B 'overlap':36B 'owner':123B 'perspect':50B 'pm':15B 'portray':22B 'product':114B 'public':109B,183B 'publish':91B 'rang':143B 'reach':126B 'realiti':30B 'recept':9B,184B 'ritchi':132B 'run':195B 'saturday':10B,186B,204B 'scott':124B 'signific':112B 'societi':53B,168B 'spark':86B 'speh':125B 'sport':5A,58B,77B,100B,115B,177B 'start':156B 'suggest':103B,138B,153B 'survey':63B 'televis':26B 'theme':79B 'titl':94B 'today':74B 'tuesday':202B 'two':163B 'western':121B 'whose':141B 'wider':159B","thumbnail":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1721668409/zkwv4fllog6hoa8v7nuf.jpg","calendar":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/raw/upload/v1721669475/event_ics_1721669474451.ics","carousel":null,"category_name":"Exhibitions"},{"id":5342,"title":"Geoffrey Todd Smith ","starts_at":"2018-02-24 18:00:00","ends_at":"2018-04-07 19:00:00","body":"

February 24, 2018 - April 7, 2018
\r\nIn Galleries One & Two

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More Information HERE.

\r\n\r\n","type":"Event","state":"published","slug":"geoffrey-todd-smith","created_at":"2018-10-22 20:42:29.713896","updated_at":"2018-10-22 21:15:25.526257","excerpt":null,"is_timeless":false,"organization_id":782,"highlighted":false,"opening_starts_at":null,"opening_ends_at":null,"searchable":"'2018':6B,9B '24':5B '7':8B 'april':7B 'februari':4B 'galleri':11B 'geoffrey':1A 'inform':15B 'one':12B 'smith':3A 'todd':2A 'two':13B","thumbnail":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1721668409/gue6k1yu2aridj7lqfcb.jpg","calendar":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/raw/upload/v1721669475/event_ics_1721669474631.ics","carousel":null,"category_name":"Exhibitions"},{"id":5343,"title":"Richard Hull: New Work ","starts_at":"2018-04-13 17:00:00","ends_at":"2018-05-26 20:00:00","body":"

For his fourth show at Western Exhibitions, Richard Hull presents a new series of abstracted portraits as both paintings and for the first time, sculpture. Repetitive shapes reverberate concentrically around Hull's "heads", shapes that he sees as inner mirrors where repetitive thinking and behaviors are events of self-discovery and learning.

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More Information can be found HERE.

\r\n","type":"Event","state":"published","slug":"richard-hull-new-work","created_at":"2018-10-22 20:42:45.70117","updated_at":"2018-10-22 21:15:24.915999","excerpt":null,"is_timeless":false,"organization_id":782,"highlighted":false,"opening_starts_at":null,"opening_ends_at":null,"searchable":"'abstract':19B 'around':34B 'behavior':49B 'concentr':33B 'discoveri':55B 'event':51B 'exhibit':11B 'first':27B 'found':62B 'fourth':7B 'head':37B 'hull':2A,13B,35B 'inform':59B 'inner':43B 'learn':57B 'mirror':44B 'new':3A,16B 'paint':23B 'portrait':20B 'present':14B 'repetit':30B,46B 'reverber':32B 'richard':1A,12B 'sculptur':29B 'see':41B 'self':54B 'self-discoveri':53B 'seri':17B 'shape':31B,38B 'show':8B 'think':47B 'time':28B 'western':10B 'work':4A","thumbnail":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1721668409/yygktlidteyeo1ikakfm.jpg","calendar":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/raw/upload/v1721669475/event_ics_1721669474618.ics","carousel":null,"category_name":"Exhibitions"},{"id":5344,"title":"Jessica Campbell: Who dis","starts_at":"2018-04-13 17:00:00","ends_at":"2018-05-26 20:00:00","body":"

For her first show, who dis, at Western Exhibitions, Jessica Campbell presents a new series of carpet paintings tackling her (and our) obsession with smart phones. Campbell did not acquire a cell phone until 2013. Since then she's grappled with how this now ubiquitous device has changed her life and how it has altered the way our society functions. The paintings (collaged-together carpet remnants) depict specific narratives: a cabbie watching porn while he drives; a bikini selfie on a broken phone screen; Campbell watching a movie on a phone while on a StairMaster at the gym. Often using comedic tropes as her subject matter, Campbell sees humour as a tool to help her process what is happening in the world.

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More Information can be found HERE.

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In Gallery 1

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Rachel Niffenegger's fifth show at Western Exhibitions opens, along with Michael Pellew's show in Gallery 2, with a reception for the artists, free and open to the public, on Friday, June 1, 5 to 8pm and will run through July 7. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11am to 6pm. The gallery will be closed on July 4. 

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Rachel Niffenegger's work has been included in group show at the Museum for Modern Art in Arnhem, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Tracy Williams LTD, Bourouina Gallery in Berlin, Ceri Hand Gallery in Liverpool, and The Suburban in Milwaukee. In 2012 she completed a 9-month residency at DE ATELIERS in Amsterdam. Niffenegger, born in Evanston in 1985, received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from Northwestern University. She lives and works in Chicago. 

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In Gallery 2

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Michael Pellew is a Brooklyn based artist who is known for his humorous ruminations 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. His subject matter is NYC trains and buses, fashion design, "punk funk freaks from the East Village and around the Tri-State area" and pop portraits of favorite singers and performers. Hip fashion retailer Opening Ceremony carries Michael's greeting cards in Manhattan and Los Angeles and his work is in the corporate collections of Citibank, J. Crew, and PAPER Magazine, who has dubbed him their "favorite artist."
\r\n
\r\nAn interview (excerpts below) by Matthew Bede Murphy was commissioned by the gallery on the occasion of this show. Murphy is an artist, curator, and founder of LAND Gallery and Studio, a unique nonprofit day habilitation program that teaches life skills through the modality of art. Murphy first met Michael Pellew while recruiting artists for Brooklyn's first art-based day habilitation program. LAND opened its doors in 2005 and continues to be Pellew's primary creative home.

\r\n\r\n","type":"Event","state":"published","slug":"michael-pellew-1-under-control-world-tour","created_at":"2018-10-22 20:43:05.817933","updated_at":"2018-10-22 21:15:22.861709","excerpt":null,"is_timeless":false,"organization_id":782,"highlighted":false,"opening_starts_at":null,"opening_ends_at":null,"searchable":"'1':3A '2':10B '2005':230B 'altern':67B 'angel':138B 'area':115B 'around':110B 'art':206B,220B 'art-bas':219B 'artist':17B,160B,183B,214B 'base':16B,221B 'bede':167B 'blender':76B 'brooklyn':15B,216B 'buse':99B 'card':133B 'carri':129B 'celebr':29B 'ceremoni':128B 'chicago':42B 'citibank':148B 'collect':146B 'come':35B 'commiss':170B 'continu':232B 'control':5A 'corpor':145B 'creativ':238B 'crew':150B 'cultur':27B,62B,71B 'curat':184B 'day':195B,222B 'deep':43B 'design':101B 'develop':65B 'door':228B 'draw':55B 'dub':156B 'east':107B 'excerpt':163B 'exuber':84B 'fashion':100B,125B 'favorit':120B,159B 'first':208B,218B 'founder':186B 'freak':104B 'funk':103B 'galleri':9B,173B,189B 'give':77B 'greet':132B 'grim':91B 'habilit':196B,223B 'hip':124B 'home':239B 'honest':86B 'hous':44B 'humor':23B 'imagin':61B 'inspir':34B 'interview':162B 'j':149B 'known':20B 'land':188B,225B 'life':200B 'line':58B 'los':137B 'magazin':153B 'manhattan':135B 'mash':31B 'mash-up':30B 'matter':94B 'matthew':166B 'met':209B 'metal':39B 'michael':1A,11B,49B,130B,210B 'modal':204B 'moment':81B 'murphi':168B,180B,207B 'nonprofit':194B 'nyc':96B 'observ':63B 'occas':176B 'open':127B,226B 'pain':85B 'paper':152B 'pellew':2A,12B,211B,235B 'perform':123B 'play':57B 'pop':26B,70B,117B 'portrait':118B 'primari':237B 'program':197B,224B 'punk':102B 'qualiti':59B 'random':80B 'realiti':46B 'recruit':213B 'retail':126B 'rumin':24B 'seem':51B 'show':179B 'simpl':52B 'singer':121B 'skill':201B 'speed':38B 'speed-met':37B 'star':48B 'state':114B 'studio':191B 'subject':93B 'succinct':54B 'swift':41B 'taylor':40B 'teach':199B 'thrown':73B 'time':90B 'tour':7A 'train':97B 'tri':113B 'tri-stat':112B 'tv':47B 'uniqu':193B 'univers':68B 'up':32B 'use':56B 'viewer':79B 'villag':108B 'witti':87B 'work':141B 'world':6A","thumbnail":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1721668409/ibok5uh8zuqntvmyorez.jpg","calendar":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/raw/upload/v1721669474/event_ics_1721669474545.ics","carousel":null,"category_name":"Exhibitions"},{"id":6002,"title":"COMPRESSION","starts_at":"2018-07-13 17:00:00","ends_at":"2018-08-18 20:00:00","body":"

Summer show. Opening reception Friday, July 13.

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COMPRESSION brings the work of Elana Herzog and Luanne Martineau into dialog; both artists whose methodology is that of compression – blending and merging material into surfaces and forms that encode matter and image into enmeshed objects. Compression reduces volume: entangling and constraining material into condensed amalgams of form.

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Curated by Shannon Stratton, the the Mildred and William Lasdon Chief Curator at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City, COMPRESSION opens on Friday, July 13 with a free public reception from 5 to 8pm and will run through August 18. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm. Please contact info@westernexhibitions.com for images and more information.\r\n\r\n

\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n","type":"Event","state":"published","slug":"compression","created_at":"2018-10-22 20:43:26.651075","updated_at":"2018-10-22 21:07:44.045676","excerpt":null,"is_timeless":false,"organization_id":782,"highlighted":false,"opening_starts_at":null,"opening_ends_at":null,"searchable":"'11am':107B '13':8B,85B '18':100B '5':92B '6pm':109B '8pm':94B 'amalgam':54B 'art':73B 'artist':22B 'august':99B 'blend':29B 'bring':10B 'chief':67B 'citi':79B 'compress':1A,9B,28B,45B,80B 'condens':53B 'constrain':50B 'contact':111B 'curat':57B,68B 'design':75B 'dialog':20B 'elana':14B 'encod':38B 'enmesh':43B 'entangl':48B 'form':36B,56B 'free':88B 'friday':6B,83B 'galleri':101B 'herzog':15B 'hour':102B 'imag':41B,114B 'info@westernexhibitions.com':112B 'inform':117B 'juli':7B,84B 'lasdon':66B 'luann':17B 'martineau':18B 'materi':32B,51B 'matter':39B 'merg':31B 'methodolog':24B 'mildr':63B 'museum':71B 'new':77B 'object':44B 'open':4B,81B 'pleas':110B 'public':89B 'recept':5B,90B 'reduc':46B 'run':97B 'saturday':106B 'shannon':59B 'show':3B 'stratton':60B 'summer':2B 'surfac':34B 'tuesday':104B 'volum':47B 'whose':23B 'william':65B 'work':12B 'york':78B","thumbnail":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1721668434/qeyhlldawl7b6xsadmdx.jpg","calendar":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/raw/upload/v1721669500/event_ics_1721669500345.ics","carousel":null,"category_name":"Exhibitions"},{"id":6374,"title":"Got It For Cheap Chicago","starts_at":"2018-07-28 16:00:00","ends_at":"2018-07-28 20:00:00","body":"

Got It For Cheap is a traveling series of group shows including 500+ artists. All pieces are original works on paper, which are sold for the low price of $30 USD or the local equivalent.

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The goal of GIFC is to make buying original art accessible to all people and to give young artists a platform to sell their work and be exposed to a worldwide audience.

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Since January of 2016, this traveling series curated by artists Charlie Roberts and Chris Rexroad has stopped all over Europe and the U.S., delivering an alternative to the typical art viewing experience. This offers attendees a chance to engage in the art buying experience like never before, while giving artists of all levels vast exposure.

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A selection of artists for GIFC Chicago include Ryan Travis Christian, Kristy Luck, Cody Tumblin, Morgan Mandalay, Mie Kongo, Cindy Parra, Baldur Helgason, Chelsea Kirkey, Dont Fret, Paul Kenneth, Cristina Marquez, Ethan Stuart, Simone Blain, Janie Korn, Mac Blackout, Tara Booth, Loren Law, Erica Podwoiski, Taylor Carpenter, Steve Morrison, Chris Williford, Zachary Buchner, Micah Dunlap, Chris Parmelee, Lexie Cicale, Laura Denzer, David Heo, Maya Mackrandilal and many more!

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For examples of works to be shown, please visit our Instagram account @gifcworldwide.

\r\n","type":"Event","state":"published","slug":"got-it-for-cheap-chicago","created_at":"2018-10-22 20:43:37.544593","updated_at":"2018-12-20 22:47:01.163721","excerpt":null,"is_timeless":false,"organization_id":782,"highlighted":false,"opening_starts_at":null,"opening_ends_at":null,"searchable":"'2016':76B '30':35B '500':18B 'access':51B 'account':207B 'altern':98B 'art':50B,102B,114B 'artist':19B,59B,82B,122B,131B 'attende':107B 'audienc':72B 'baldur':149B 'blackout':166B 'blain':162B 'booth':168B 'buchner':180B 'buy':48B,115B 'carpent':174B 'chanc':109B 'charli':83B 'cheap':4A,9B 'chelsea':151B 'chicago':5A,134B 'chris':86B,177B,183B 'christian':138B 'cical':186B 'cindi':147B 'codi':141B 'cristina':157B 'curat':80B 'david':189B 'deliv':96B 'denzer':188B 'dont':153B 'dunlap':182B 'engag':111B 'equival':40B 'erica':171B 'ethan':159B 'europ':92B 'exampl':197B 'experi':104B,116B 'expos':68B 'exposur':127B 'fret':154B 'gifc':44B,133B 'gifcworldwid':208B 'give':57B,121B 'goal':42B 'got':1A,6B 'group':15B 'helgason':150B 'heo':190B 'includ':17B,135B 'instagram':206B 'jani':163B 'januari':74B 'kenneth':156B 'kirkey':152B 'kongo':146B 'korn':164B 'kristi':139B 'laura':187B 'law':170B 'level':125B 'lexi':185B 'like':117B 'local':39B 'loren':169B 'low':32B 'luck':140B 'mac':165B 'mackrandil':192B 'make':47B 'mandalay':144B 'mani':194B 'marquez':158B 'maya':191B 'micah':181B 'mie':145B 'morgan':143B 'morrison':176B 'never':118B 'offer':106B 'origin':23B,49B 'paper':26B 'parmele':184B 'parra':148B 'paul':155B 'peopl':54B 'piec':21B 'platform':61B 'pleas':203B 'podwoiski':172B 'price':33B 'rexroad':87B 'robert':84B 'ryan':136B 'select':129B 'sell':63B 'seri':13B,79B 'show':16B 'shown':202B 'simon':161B 'sinc':73B 'sold':29B 'steve':175B 'stop':89B 'stuart':160B 'tara':167B 'taylor':173B 'travel':12B,78B 'travi':137B 'tumblin':142B 'typic':101B 'u.s':95B 'usd':36B 'vast':126B 'view':103B 'visit':204B 'williford':178B 'work':24B,65B,199B 'worldwid':71B 'young':58B 'zachari':179B","thumbnail":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1721668450/ijdahygnyrta4hgf4xby.jpg","calendar":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/raw/upload/v1721669514/event_ics_1721669513905.ics","carousel":null,"category_name":"Art Fairs"},{"id":6280,"title":"Paolo Arao","starts_at":"2018-09-14 17:00:00","ends_at":"2018-10-27 20:00:00","body":"

Paolo Arao’s sewn paintings, fabric collage, and textile constructions explore the elastic and open-ended concept of queerness, combining geometric abstraction and bold color with textile media as an alternative to depicting bodies. Made with second hand clothing, commercial fabrics and used canvas drop cloths, the works resemble flags or quilts alluding to people and places as a coded visual language is woven into them.

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His ongoing series of fabric collages (Flagettes) appear to be mirror images of each other. Upon closer inspection subtle differences emerge between the pair as they question one’s perception while also addressing ideas of sameness and difference. Arao lovingly refers to them as his “same-sex” diptychs.

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They’re stitched facing backwards and forwards, occasionally exposing seams and rough edges. Fabric becomes paint. Seams act as a line drawing. Paint drips and dusty footprints from drop cloths add a narrative element of lived-experience. Sometimes the pieced and sewn textiles are stretched onto wooden supports – the tension adding a level of imprecision that creates subtle distortions, and softening the geometry. Other times they hang freely, allowing the material and patchwork to dictate their form. The results are intentionally imperfect as Arao is curious about perception, intention and imprecision – perhaps seeing and doing things the “wrong way” to discover something unexpected yet deeply personal.

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Paolo Arao (b. 1977, Manila, NCR, Philippines) is Brooklyn-based artist. This is his first show at Western Exhibitions. His solo shows include Jeff Bailey Gallery and Barney Savage Gallery, both in New York City and Franklin Art Works in Minneapolis. Arao has participated in residencies at the Fire Island Artist Residency, The Wassaic Artist Residency, Lower East Side Printshop, the Bronx Museum of Arts, and MASS MoCA. He received his BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2000.

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Top image: Othered Sides, 2018, Acrylic and colored pencil on sewn canvas and cotton, 25 x 35 inches overall

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Western Exhibition is thrilled to present twelve elaborately patterned and intensely personal paintings in Edie Fake’s second solo show at the gallery, Gut Rehab. The show opens Friday, September 14, 2018 with a free public reception from 5 to 8pm. 

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Edie Fake’s paintings start as self-portraits, and from there, they make a break for it, referencing elements of the trans and non-binary body through pattern, color and architectural metaphor. His precise, intimately scaled, gouache-and-ink paintings on panel are structured around the physical aspects of transition and adaptation as well as mental and sexual health.

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Since moving from first Chicago, then to Los Angeles while briefly attending grad school at USC, to now the high desert of Joshua Tree in California, Fake’s work has evolved from his acclaimed Memory Palaces series — reimagined facades of urban lesbian bars and gay nightclubs — to a new feeling of vulnerability due to shifts in the U.S. social and political climate. The work blurs lines between architecture and body with structures adorned by elements that seem to be both decorative and protective. Architectural components are used as visual metaphors for the ways in which definition and validation elude trans identities. Says Fake, “More and more I’m trying to bring an anarchy into that architecture, or a fantasy and ecstasy of what queer space is and can be.”

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Edie Fake’s drawings, paintings, comics, books and publications have been written about it in artforum, ArtNews, The Comics Journal, Art 21, The Guardian, Hyperallergic, The Los Angeles Review of Books and were recently featured on the cover of the Paris Review. He was one of the first recipients of Printed Matter’s Awards for Artists. His collection of comics, Gaylord Phoenix, won the 2011 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel. Fake’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including solo shows at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, NY and Marlborough Contemporary, NYC, and in group shows at the Museum of Arts and Design, NYC and the Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU in Richmond, VA. Edie Fake was born in Chicagoland in 1980 and received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2002. Fake is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and currently lives and works in Twentynine Palms, California.

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Top image: Open Source 2018, Gouache on panel, 18h x 24w inches

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12:00–4:00pm | Open House 

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1709 W Chicago Galleries 

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Come and sample Marz Community Brewing Company's new fall releases and spend an afternoon of art viewing at David Salkin Creative, DOCUMENT, Paris London Hong Kong, Volume, and Western Exhibitions, all while enjoying creative beers and snacks. 

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Part of EXPO Chicago's EXPO Art Week

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Shade Garden, Jessica Labatte’s second solo exhibition at Western Exhibitions, continues the artist’s explorations of paradoxes and illusions within photographic images.  The works in Shade Garden champion beauty in the everyday as a radical political gesture in our contemporary moment. The images explore photographic notions of the visible and invisible, the present and withdrawn. Shade Garden will include two interrelated series of color photographs.

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The first series is a group of floral still lives. Small and medium sized prints will be installed in a salon fashion in the gallery alongside three monumentally scaled prints. Marking temporality in the everyday domestic space of the artist’s home and garden, Labatte has photographed every flower that bloomed over the course of one growing season. The pictures incorporate indexes of nurturing and domestic spaces–the clutter of objects and materials that accompany parenthood and artistic practice. Challenging myths of artistic practice and motherhood espoused by early feminist artists, these works look to depict new definitions of feminist art practice.

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The second series of photographs capture the experience of being in the garden, as color and dappled light are constantly in flux. In these seemingly abstract works, color, light, and shadow explore an imagined virtual space beyond traditional notions of photographic representation. Drawing inspiration from Hilma af Klint, and early photographic abstractionists such as Lazlo Moholy Nagy, these works meditate on color, time, and sensation as an alternative present within the everyday. To create these brightly colored images, the artist uses film and a large format camera to capture multiple exposures of collaged color paper. This process allows one image to fuse with another, obscuring and revealing forms, textures, and the fleeting effects of light and shadow. These depictions create a virtual space that becomes a metaphor for the visible and invisible within society, photographic image making, and art.

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Top image: Shadow Plants 1, 2018, archival inkjet print, 30 x 40 in.

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In Galleries One & Two



 

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In Gallery 2

Western Exhibitions presents a companion show, My informal printmaking residency with Stan Shellabarger, that features work by Leslie Baum, Elijah Burgher, kg, Kelly Kaczynski, Rachel Niffenegger, Paul Nudd, Steve Reinke, and Jeremy Tinder. The work in this show highlights Shellabarger’s curiosity and generosity of spirit in inviting Chicago artists he admires, most with no printmaking experience, to make prints with him at Spudnik Press Cooperative.

 

Image: Shellabarger working on a Leslie Baum print at Spudnik Press

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Gallery 1

Stan Shellabarger presents new artist books and collages made from cyanotypes produced during full moons, summer and winter solstices, autumnal and vernal equinoxes and a solar eclipse.

 

Image: Untitled (Winter Solstice 2017), artist book: cyanotypes on paper, archival tape, arches covers. 7 x 5 inches closed, 7 x 50 inches open. Unique edition of 2.

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Saturday, April 6 at WESTERN EXHIBITIONS, 5-9pm

Western Exhibitions is hosting the second Chicago iteration of Got It For Cheap, a traveling series of one-night-only group shows including 500+ artists. All works are original works on paper and sold for the low price of $30 USD. 

Per organizers Charlie Roberts and Chris Rexroad, the goal of GIFC is to make buying original art accessible to all people and to give young artists a platform to sell their work and be exposed to a worldwide audience. Since January of 2016, GIFC has stopped all over Europe and the U.S. delivering an alternative to the typical art viewing experience which offers attendees a chance to engage in the art buying experience like never before, while giving artists of all levels vast exposure. 

For examples of works to be shown please visit their Instagram account GIFC

First come, first serve, one-night only, in-real-life, no internet sales. All art works just $30 a piece

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In Gallery 2:

For Julia Schmitt Healy’s first show at Western Exhibitions, the gallery is thrilled to present a selection of textile works from the early 1970s — a series of ballpoint on handkerchief drawings and a grouping of tufted watercolor on muslin pieces that exist somewhere between painting, pillows and soft sculpture. Coming out of the Chicago Imagist tradition, Schmitt Healy explores images and iconography from the news, religions, mass media and her travels. Her work focuses on themes ranging from ecological disaster, human relationships, symbols, feminism, consumerism and the natural world. The show opens with a free public reception from 5 to 8pm on Friday, April 19 and runs through June 1, 2019.

Schmitt Healy’s early work embodies the Chicago Imagist scene in the early 70s and there is symbolic surrealism throughout the work — tactile, stuffed, quilted and finished off with with zits, bandages, hair, and buttons. There’s a connection to real people, places and things depicted though a three dimensional psychedelic cartoon of sorts where faces have tufts for eyes and threads of worm-like fibers for facial hair. Similarities to more well-known Chicago Imagists abound: Barbara Rossi’s fabric works come to mind (a medium which Schmitt Healy used before Rossi); some hair-dos inspired from a trip to Africa are reminiscent of Christina Ramberg; and her puffy cars might make one think of Roger Brown. Per Chicago artist and collector John Maloof, who introduced the gallery to Schmitt Healy’s work: “Julia’s playful, yet often grotesque work strikes a perfect nerve where art and absurdity intersect. Who thinks up Teenage Car with Pimples?”

Julia Schmitt Healy was born in Elmhurst, Illinois and received a BFA and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied with Ray Yoshida and Whitney Halsted. After graduation, Healy moved to Africa, where she traveled and lived, then later toured Europe and moved in Nova Scotia, Canada with her first husband. Her work was represented for many years by Phyllis Kind Gallery in New York and Chicago, as well as Susan Whitney Gallery in Canada. While in school, she co-curated a Mail Art Show with artist Ray Johnson, called “Intercourse,” at the Wabash Transit Gallery. Presently she divides her time between a Manhattan apartment in the East Village and a house/studio in Port Jervis, New York.

 

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For his fourth solo show, Plastic Blastula, at Western Exhibitions, Paul Nudd presents a selection of large-scale paintings depicting an ambiguous and chaotic prenatal cosmic universe, densely populated by a series of many rapidly transforming and colliding embryonic cleavages. Collectively they can be seen as a forceful and monumental continuation of many of Nudd’s aesthetic and formal obsessions: bodies in distress, molecular anxiety, blobs and biomorphic abstraction, disease, malformation, mutation and uncontrollable biological forces. The show opens with a free public reception from 5 to 8pm on Friday, April 19 and runs through June 1, 2019.

A blastula is a pre-embryonic cellular blob of matter that eventually morphs into a fetus. Plasticity similarly induces a development or transmutation of nature as plastic is created through a seemingly science-fiction derived embryonic mass production. Both blastulas and plastics can be deformed in any direction, but plastic differs from these pre-embryonic forms in that it is materially permanent and impenetrable. Plastic is unnatural and can be molded and stretched to fit in or around anything.  If birth is rupture, plastic birth is rupture without rupture.

In Nudd’s worldview, Plastic Blastula walks the line between cautionary apocalyptic tale and orgiastic revelry. His canvases are littered with malformed phosphorescent fetal forms and prenatal neo-punk youngsters of varying size, mass and scale that expressionistically exhume the unnatural falsehoods that exist at our most plasmic level.  Nudd’s new primal sludge runs slow and deep as artificially colored, viscous high-fructose globs of amniotic fluid pumped up on bovine growth chemicals and quasi-natural anti-caking agents. Through an enlarged scope that allows viewers to experience the imperceptible dilemma of our collective degrading existences, Nudd proclaims that the very essence of the human condition is fake.  To boot, Plastic Blastula shows us the potential younger and earlier stages in the lives of the radioactive, self-aware mutants that Nudd is known for.

Paul Nudd has had solo shows in Berlin, Detroit, Portland, OR, Brooklyn, Kansas City, Raleigh, NC and in Chicago at the Hyde Park Art Center, Bodybuilder & Sportsmen, and Dogmatic. His work has been included in group shows in Dusseldorf, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Houston, Denver and was included in Seeing Is a Kind of Thinking: A Jim Nutt Companion at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. His prodigious zine work can be found in several national artist book collections including the Museum of Modern Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Thomas J. Watson Library; Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Newark Public Library; National Academy of Design, New York; Indiana University and School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Paul Nudd received his MFA from the University of Illinois-Chicago in 2001. He is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and he lives in Berwyn, Illinois.

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In Gallery 1 & 2

Believing that the architect’s role is to test and expand the boundaries of reality, Marshall Brown’s projects are concerned with the interactions between architecture, power, and acts of world making. Invested in the material history of architecture, he constructs visions of urban worlds yet to come using collage, drawing, video, objects, and built projects. Brown moves between various scales of architecture and diverse conceptual frameworks, embodying new relationships between the one and the many. Crossing disciplinary boundaries and extending from the intertwined histories of modern art and architecture, Brown’s collages create new connections, associations, and meanings among disconnected architectural and urban remnants.

Brown’s recent projects sample from the history of modern and contemporary architecture to create new forms of monumentality. The Dequindre Civic Academy, a 3 million square foot citadel for the children of Detroit, was featured in “The Architectural Imagination” at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale. That same year, his Ziggurat garden folly was commissioned by the Arts Club of Chicago, drawing from the architecture of Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenman, and Zaha Hadid.

Marshall Brown is an architect based in New Jersey and a professor at Princeton University. 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, and the Architecture and Design Museum Los Angeles. His projects and essays have appeared in several books and journals, including Metropolis, Crain’s, Architectural Record, The New York Daily News, Art Papers, The Believer, Journal of Architectural Education, and New Directions in Sustainable Design. Marshall Brown received his masters’ degrees at Harvard University and he lives and works in Chicago. He is represented by Western Exhibitions, Chicago.

 

Image: Marshall Brown, Chimera, 2014.

 

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In Gallery One

Artists on view:

Jessica Campbell, Lilli Carre, Jenny Crowe,Julia Schmitt Healy, Jessica Labatte, Rachel Niffenegger, Deb Sokolow, Robyn O'Neil, Orkideh Torabi

 

Image: Jessica Campbell London Student Sojourn, After Emily Carr, 2018, ink and charcoal on paper

 

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In Gallery Two

 

Image: www.daydaypaint.com colored pencil on mat board

 

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In Gallery 2

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.
 

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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, a gender which in many cultures will enjoy and benefit from social freedoms that women are forbidden or discouraged from engaging in.

Taking art historical cues from the Western Canon’s portrayal of the figure in landscape, Torabi’s men are seemingly oblivious to their coveted social freedom. Rendered with simple button-eyes, gnarled noses, and alien skin, her unabashedly humorous figures are stuck in an emasculated state of being. She banishes women from her paintings altogether, crafting scenes which offer an eerie parallel to daily life in Iran. 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 may differ if none of these boundaries existed.”

Torabi uses fabric dye on stretched cotton, a batik-like technique that has become her signature, to depict cartoonish contemporary men against vivid patterns. These patterns are influenced by Persian manuscripts and miniatures—small yet highly detailed illustrations that have been an integral part of Iranian culture since the 13th century. 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 these 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.

Roberta Smith of The New York Times 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.”

 

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, Interface Gallery in Oakland and Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica. She currently lives and works in Chicago.

 

Recent press notices:

“At Horton Gallery/Western Exhibitions chez @newartdealers the Iranian artist Orkideh Torabi works in fabric dye on cotton fabric and likes to hang her work on patterned walls. She got her MFA at the SAIC and lives and works in Chicago. Her work blends Persian painting with Hairy Who’s like Nutt and Nilsson, fomenting optimism for the continuation of the reciprocal revitalizations of cultures. They simply won’t be kept apart.” – Roberta Smith, New York Times

“The most eye-catching painting display is in the shared booth of Horton Gallery and Western Exhibitions, with its ornate orange wallpaper pattern, which serves as a popping backdrop for Orkideh Torabi’s playful and attractive portraits.” – Benjamin Sutton, Hyperallergic

Orkideh Torabi received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016, and she received her MA and BA from The University of Art in Tehran. Torabi’s solo and two-person shows include Yes, Please & Thank You in Los Angeles, Western Exhibitions and Horton Gallery in New York City. Group shows include Andrew Rafacz Gallery and the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago. She was selected for the 2017 Midwest issue of New American Paintings and has work in the Microsoft Art Collection in Redmond, WA. Torabi lives and works in Chicago. She is represented by Western Exhibitions, Chicago and Horton Gallery in Dallas.

 

Image: NADA New York 2018 Solo booth with artist-designed custom wallpaper, co-presented with Horton Gallery

 

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Western Exhibitions will be exhibiting a booth of artworks by Richard Hull throughout EXPO Chicago at Navy Pier

 

Image: Interior photo of Western Exhibitions gallery

 

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Open for Art After Hours, a citywide open gallery night inviting EXPO CHICAGO visitors and the Chicago community to experience the city's vibrant art scene during extended hours. 

For details and participating galleries and art spaces, click here.

6:00–9:00pm | Citywide Locations 

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Note: Deb Sokolow: Profiles in Leadership is on view in Gallery One 

In Gallery Two:

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 in Gallery 1 and “Drawings without words” — Sokolow’s first ever foray into abstraction in Gallery 2. 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.

Deb Sokolow is an artist and writer. She currently has work on view in “Manifesto X” at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC 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 and Western Exhibitions 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 current issue of BOMB Magazine. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC; 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.

 

Image: Deb Sokolow, Studio view, summer 2019

 

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In Gallery One

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 in Gallery 1 and “Drawings without words” — Sokolow’s first ever foray into abstraction in Gallery 2. 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.

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, while also suggesting a more sinister mix of machismo, narcissism and insecurity at play. Lines between fact and fiction blur, and 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.

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.

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.

Deb Sokolow is an artist and writer. She currently has work on view in “Manifesto X” at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC 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 and Western Exhibitions 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 current issue of BOMB Magazine. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC; 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.

 

Image: Deb Sokolow, Mr. Kim Jong-un Attempts to Kidnap Mr. Michael Jordan 2019. Graphite, coloured pencil, pastel, crayon, ink, and collage on paper

 

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Robyn O’Neil, known for her epic magisterial drawings that are currently the subject of a 20-year survey at The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, will not be showing any drawings for her third show at Western Exhibitions. For the first time in a gallery, O’Neil will be presenting her tapestries, which she sometimes refers to as “yarn drawings.” The woven narratives are just as enigmatic as O’Neil’s drawings, if maybe just a little warmer. The Tapestries opens in Gallery 2 at Western Exhibitions alongside the group show Female Trouble in Gallery 1 on January 10, 2020 with a public reception from 5 to 8pm and will run through February 22, 2020. Gallery hours are 11am to 6pm, Tuesday to Saturday.

O’Neil has been crocheting and weaving since she was a kid. Some of her early work from college and grad school was crocheted and she has continued, to this day, making crocheted floor lamps, jewelry and bags. Says the artist: “I’ve been doing this kind of stuff all along, but since making art professionally I have kept it hidden for some reason.” About a year ago O’Neil decided to approach her textiles like her drawings and started to make large blanket-drawings. Though she initially considered the textile-making as a break-like activity from drawing, O’Neil now takes them just as seriously as her drawings and, believe it or not, in her own words: “THEY TAKE EVEN LONGER TO MAKE THAN MY DAMN DRAWINGS.”

Like all of O’Neil’s work, the tapestries are enigmatic. They’re landscape based. They have characters acting out scenarios that seem as familiar as strange. They’re sky focused. They’re oddly organized. They reference Catholic imagery at times. And similar to her drawings that are made with mechanical pencils from office supply stores, O’Neil uses non-precious materials —acrylic yarn from the most basic of craft supply stores —as she says: “I’m into elevating the everyday materials like these into huge, powerful, thoughtful beautiful things.”

Matthew Bourbon captures the heart of O’Neil’s work in his review in Dallas Morning News, of her current survey at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth:

O’Neil tackles the big subjects of violence, tenderness and death. Hers is an introvert’s art, at home and sympathetic with animals and the natural world, yet deeply skeptical and critical about human nature. In her reckoning, humans negatively affect their environment, but the land, the sky and the roiling ocean always have the proverbial last word, destroying the hubris of human ambition.

Robyn O’Neil currently has a 20-year survey of her work on view at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Robyn O’Neil: WE THE MASSES. Her solo museum exhibitions include The Des Moines Art Center; The Kohler Art Center in Wisconsin; The Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University; and the Frey Art Museum in Seattle. She has been included in numerous group exhibitions throughout the US and internationally including the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art; The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; American University Museum in Washington, DC; and The Museum of Contemporary Art in Tampa, FL. Her work was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. O’Neil has participated in gallery shows in Amsterdam, Berlin, London, Paris, Copenhagen, Shanghai, NYC, Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, and Seattle. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including an Irish Film Board Award for a film written and art directed by her entitled “WE, THE MASSES” which was conceived at Werner Herzog’s Rogue Film School. She is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago, Susan Inglett Gallery in New York and Talley Dunn Gallery in Dallas, and she lives and works in the Pacific Northwest.

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For Female Trouble, co-organizers Elijah Wheat Showroom and Western Exhibitions bring together five female artists who take modes and patterns of female representation into their own hands, uncovering and expounding the delights of their corporeal forms and fearlessly expressing body positive broadcasts of nudes in image, form, and craft. The she-power of this show is about risk, exploration and eminent bodily domains. The show will open at Western Exhibitions in Chicago with a public reception on Friday, January 10 from 5 to 8pm and will run through February 22, 2020.

Victorian-age physicians were tasked with the revival of repressed vaginas, performing remedial pelvic massages until their patient’s female hysteria was tamed, devoting considerable time and energy to whacking women off. Thanks to their caregiver’s elbow grease, women were returned to their designated mates subdued, and under control. Doctors eventually grew tired of the immense effort required to cure hysteria and struggled to find less arduous remedies, leading one exhausted professional to invent the vibrator. This prescribed tool relieved physicians of their palliative duties. Female hysteria was reclaimed, its intended cure eventually transformed and recognized as a source of pleasure, fulfillment and self-celebration. Following in these women’s footsteps, Female Trouble brings attention to feminine figurative work that indulges and divulges into this reclaimed feminine sexuality with pride.

Amanda Joy Calobrisi tells strange and sensuous tales of womanhood. The figures that inhabit her canvases ponder the theatrics of sex—and death—in worlds less dangerous and more revealing than our own. Rendered affectionately rather than objectively, the women fold, bend, lean, and stretch in painted spaces that hover between boudoir and landscape. Individualism and agency mold their realm where self-love and self-admiration are no longer private revolutions. ­­­

Lilli Carré’s work exudes sensuality in earthenware sculptures, formed with poise but tantalizing and forbidden to handle. Inspired by ancient erotic pottery and representations of the malleable animated female body, Carré is interested in narrative vessel forms and how they reflect the desires and behaviours of the cultures that used them. Clay is molded to a presence that at first seems innocuous, but suddenly turns to the bystander and assembles protruding—almost familiar—parts, potentially pornographic in mission.

Qinza Najm’s tapestries are over-woven with titillating and discrete imagery of female bodies stretching to their limits as they distort themselves to wrestle with their confinement. The tightly woven textiles that restrain these women become the sheets to the comfort for a horizontal body. Najm distorts her figures’ encased bodies, perspectivally extending them past the ornamented extremities of her rugs, as “an extended body claims space beyond its expected role.”

Standing stoic, Kathryn Refi’s protean portraits push the malleability of perceived truth to its limits. By wickedly weaving her full-frontal nudes into disjointed photographic semi-representations, Refi summons grid-adhering versions of herself. Unmoving and commanding attention with a wild natural muff of mojo, Refi’s photo montages are wrapped in a balance of symmetry and affixed to space, rebellious in presence.

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.’ In her drawings Waite reaches a climax: Spread big love.

* * *

Elijah Wheat Showroom is a Brooklyn-based artist-run space and nomadic curatorial experience founded by Carolina Wheat & Liz Nielsen. The gallery is named after their late son, Elijah, whose creative insight, righteous vision, perceptive being and stylistic voice for trendsetting guides the spirit that the Showroom honors. EWS artists are socially conscientious, politically engaged and reflective of a creative community striving to cultivate interactions and instigate critical conversations to promote visual art’s discursive messages while promoting its accessibility.

Western Exhibitions is a Chicago-based contemporary art gallery that shows thought-provoking, and visually innovative artists who work across most media, with an emphasis on personal narratives and cosmologies; LGBTQ artists and issues; pattern, decoration and surface concerns; works on paper; and artist books. Western Exhibitions presents unique artist projects, curated group shows and maintains a specific inventory of artist books and multiples, gathered together as a sister entity, WesternXeditions.

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Publication Retrospective is a one-day event that will take place at Western Exhibitions on Sunday, February 23, from 3 to 6pm.

In 2007 the Chicago-based artist Marc Fischer began working under the project name Public Collectors to elevate sub-cultural, underground, marginal and collective perspectives that many museum and institutional collections neglect. Public Collectors has gradually shifted toward an emphasis on artist book publishing and research, exploring a range of topics from underground music to obscure public library holdings and the criminal justice system.

To date Public Collectors has produced 44 booklets and this one-day event will serve as an opportunity to view all of those publications in one place. They range from offset booklets with print runs of 1,000 copies or more, to Risograph-printed materials and small editions produced and assembled at home with a black and white laser printer. Copies of many Public Collectors booklets will be available for purchase during this brief retrospective. Other materials are out of print and will be presented for in-gallery reading only.

Some highlights of Public Collectors’ publishing-related projects:

Hardcore Architecture explores the relationship between the architecture of living spaces and the history of American hardcore punk bands in the 1980s. Fischer researches band addresses using contact listings published from 1982-89 in the fanzine MAXIMUM ROCKNROLL and use Google Street View to capture photos of the homes. The project exists as a series of publications, prints, exhibitions, events, and a Tumblr blog, that present a visual survey of underground music based on where people lived.

Library Excavations highlights and activates public library materials through a series of publications. The project is particularly focused on materials that may be overlooked and under-utilized, that Fischer encourages visitors to request and view. Public Collectors has authored, designed and printed ten Library Excavations publications to date that observe collection materials ranging from illustrations in US Government safety manuals to advertisements geared toward people working in the prison industry.

An untitled series of five recent chap book-style artist booklets considers the poetry of ephemeral social media posts and sales listings on eBay and Craigslist. GRAVE PLOTS surveys Craigslist ads where people attempt to either sell family cemetery plots, or trade them for items like cars and tractors. SOLD AS BLANK / POSSIBLE LOST MEDIA reveals how people get around an eBay restriction on selling home-recorded VHS tapes by offering them as blank, despite detailed descriptions of each tape’s contents.

Public Collectors started The Courtroom Artist Residency in 2018. For this project artists are invited to attend approximately three hours of court proceedings with Marc Fischer at Cook County Criminal Court on 2650 S. California Ave. Following court, Fischer treats the resident to a meal nearby at Taqueria El Milagro and we discuss what they observed. A publication series, The Courtroom Artist Residency Report, that Public Collectors designs, edits and prints focuses on transcripts of these conversations. To date the project has hosted sixteen residents and created four booklets.

For more information on the work of Public Collectors, visit www.publiccollectors.org.

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View Exhibition Here

Homo-entanglement has been virtually extended until May 30, 2020. Installation views and individual artwork images can be viewed virtually on several platforms:

On our website: here

On Artsy: here

On Artnet: here

Download PDF: here

 

Loving repeating then in some is their natural way of complete being. This is now some description of one.

-Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans

Married artist collaborators Miller & Shellabarger explore physicality, duality, time and romantic ideals in their multidisciplinary work. Performance, photography, artists’ books, sculpture and cut paper silhouettes document the rhythms of human relationships, speaking both to common experiences of intimacy as well as the specifics of queer identities. For their third show at Western Exhibitions, Miller & Shellabarger present artists’ books, prints, photographs, and a cut-paper installation that address their ongoing concerns with an emphasis on entanglement, compression of time, mortality, and bodily and temporal limitations. Homo-entanglementwill open with a public reception on Friday, February 28 from 5 to 8pm and will run through April 11. Gallery hours are 11am to 6pm, Tuesday to Saturday.

For Homo-entanglement, Miller & Shellabarger utilize images and methods from prior bodies of work, temporally and physically entwining their past into a single space in the present. Entanglement is a key consideration in their work, allowing for capture and elevation of moments of togetherness and separation, public and private, protection and pain, visibility and veiled. Embodiment and physicality are fictitious in the scenes that Miller & Shellabarger orchestrate; mortality is an overarching theme in this show. What happens or remains when the physical presence is no longer present?

In Gallery 1, Miller & Shellabarger present an array of new artist books and prints which are informed by fragmented ephemera of older work. Their heads, entangled bodies and handprints from gunpowder drawings are layered and re-layered atop one another, traveling backwards and forwards through time, in richly textured pressure prints and on the pages of cinematic and narratively confusing artists’ books. A series of notebooks stained with rings from their respective coffee cups, captured daily, document the quiet and/or messy moments of a life spent together. Butter Books from the past couple of years will also be included, an ongoing series where they collect, clean and bind every wax paper butter wrapper from each stick of butter they have consumed in a year.

Curtains of cut-paper silhouettes form a temporal and fragile room within a room in Gallery 2, evoking an overwhelming sense of absence and presence, or absence of presence. The curtains consist of vertical rows of silhouettes of the artists in interactive, often sexual, poses that are folded multiple times so that the image flips backward and forward, repeated so many times that it becomes a mass of corporal outlines. Inside the room made with cut paper veils will be two rectangular piles of white origami cranes. A bare light bulb is dangled in the middle of this mortuary, casting shadows through the veils, illuminating their physical figures while also calling attention to their absence. This powerful yet low-tech installation addresses possibilities of their physicality: accepting, investigating and expressing their respective mortalities. After the show comes down the entirety of the installation will be ritualistically burnt—veils and cranes—and the ashes will be preserved in a wooden urn.

Miller & Shellabarger have had solo shows and performances at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis, DePaul Art Museum, Chicago Cultural Center, INOVA in Milwaukee, Time-Based Arts Festival in Portland, Sindikit Projects in Baltimore, and Gallery Diet in Miami and they have performed and/or been exhibited in group shows across the North America. Miller & Shellabarger are a 2008 recipient of an Artadia Chicago award and a 2007 recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award. Their work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, the Newark Public Library, Indiana University Art Museum and the National Gallery of Canada. Their work has been written about in Artforum, Art in America, Art & Auction, Frieze, Artnet, The Art Newspaper,Flash Art, Chicago Tribune, and the Chicago Sun-Times. Dutes Miller and Stan Shellabarger also maintain separate artistic practices. They live and work in Chicago.

 

Image: Untitled, 2018, pressure print, 23h x 19w in.

 

 

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Virtual Showroom Available Here

 

Western Exhibitions is privileged to present a curated selection of paintings, drawings, ceramics, artist books and sculptures from artists who make work at Visionaries + Voices (V+V), a progressive art studio in Cincinnati, Ohio. The show begins on Saturday, June 6 and will run through the summer. The gallery will be open BY APPOINTMENT ONLY until further notice, Tuesday-Saturday, 11am to 5pm. 

Please email scott@westernexhibitions.com or call (312) 480-8390 to schedule a viewing.

 

Featured Artists: Courttney Cooper, Jenny Crowe, Curtis Davis, Elmer, Andrew Hostick, Trip Huggins, Dale Jackson, Linda Kunick, Kenneth Moore, Melissa Preston, Mark Smith, Kevin White, Cathrine Whited

 

Matt Distel, V+V’s director at the time, introduced Western Exhibitions’ founder Scott Speh to Courttney Cooper in 2011. Shortly after this visit to his hometown, Speh included Cooper in the three-person show Indirect Observation at the gallery. Cooper joined the gallery roster and his most recent solo show in 2016 was lauded as a must-see by Disparate Minds. Western Exhibitions has mounted a solo show with V+V artist Andrew Hostick, reviewed in Disparate Minds and New City and the gallery has presented V+V artists at art fairs: Hostick at EXPO Chicago in 2015 and Cooper with fellow V+V artist Jenny Crowe at the 2017 Outsider Art Fair in New York City.

Established in 2003, Visionaries + Voices is a non-profit organization that provides exhibition opportunities, studio space, supplies and support to more than 125 visual artists with disabilities. V+V artists actively contribute to the greater Cincinnati arts community through creative, educational, and strategic partnerships with local and regional artists, schools and business leaders. To learn more about Visionaries and Voices, visit: www.visionariesandvoices.com

 

 

 

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Please make an appointment via Tock to see the show.

 

“When I made the first group of altered photos, I was working on a show in my friend Richard's studio in LA. He'd printed me out a bunch of pictures from several shoots we'd conducted. I knew that I wanted to manipulate them somehow with paint — photoshop by other means, I was thinking, since I'm not very tech savvy. He told me there was a tub of pig's blood in the refrigerator and I was free to make use of that. I wanted to but didn't.”

—Elijah Burgher, July 2020.

For his fourth show at Western Exhibitions, Elijah Burgher will present a series of photographs from rituals, daily life and other sources that are hand manipulated with bleach, ink and other liquids in Gallery 1 and a small group of drawings depicting friends and sigils in Gallery 2. 

Image credit: Siriso Sitta Sinoda, 2020, Ink and bleach on inkjet print, 13h x 19w in

 

 

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Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present Jessica Labatte: Almanac for Shade Gardeners in EXHIBITION Weekend (September 25–27, 2020), a digital initiative organized by EXPO Chicago that convenes Chicago-based contemporary art galleries and leading institutions, featuring current exhibitions, curatorial projects, and artist programs.

Visit our EXHIBITION Weekend page here

(This link goes live on Friday, September 25th at 10 AM)

And as a companion to our EXHIBITION Weekend presentation, please visit our new online exclusive \"In Depth with...\" page on our website featuring the entire Almanac for Shade Gardeners series, alongside thoughts by the artist, essays by Elizabeth Chodos and Jeff M. Ward, a playlist from Eric May, a video interview from Silver Eye and more. Visit In Depth with Jessica Labatte here.

Image: Jessica Labatte, Kate's Bush, 2018, Archival pigment print. 40 x 30 in

 

• LIVE EVENT: Saturday, September 26, 4 PM CST

In the Garden with Jessica Labatte and Eric May

Join Jessica Labatte and Eric May via a live YouTube feed from their home garden as they discuss their botanical and shade-gardening practices.

Almanac for Shade Gardeners is a series of photographic floral still lifes that mark impermanence in the everyday domestic space of Jessica Labatte’s home and garden. The series, which began in 2018 when Labatte photographed every flower that bloomed over the course of one growing season, has continued over the past two summers marking time as flowers bloom and fade from one season to the next, year after year. The pictures incorporate evolving indexes of nurturing and the endless clutter of objects that accompany parenthood and artistic practice within domestic spaces. Challenging myths of artistic practice and motherhood espoused by early feminist artists, Labatte’s photographs look to depict a more expansive definition of feminist art practice for our contemporary moment. These images advocate for the appreciation of beauty and mindfulness in everyday domestic objects and caretaking rituals. The most recent photographs display the expansive creativity that can be found in the home and capture the joys and challenges of parenting through a pandemic. 

 

 

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Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present Jessica Labatte: Almanac for Shade Gardeners in EXHIBITION Weekend (September 25–27, 2020), a digital initiative organized by EXPO Chicago that convenes Chicago-based contemporary art galleries and leading institutions, featuring current exhibitions, curatorial projects, and artist programs.

Visit our EXHIBITION Weekend page here

(This link goes live on Friday, September 25th at 10 AM)

And as a companion to our EXHIBITION Weekend presentation, please visit our new online exclusive \"In Depth with...\" page on our website featuring the entire Almanac for Shade Gardeners series, alongside thoughts by the artist, essays by Elizabeth Chodos and Jeff M. Ward, a playlist from Eric May, a video interview from Silver Eye and more. Visit In Depth with Jessica Labatte here.

 

• LIVE EVENT: Saturday, September 26, 4 PM CST

In the Garden with Jessica Labatte and Eric May

Join Jessica Labatte and Eric May via a live YouTube feed from their home garden as they discuss their botanical and shade-gardening practices.

Almanac for Shade Gardeners is a series of photographic floral still lifes that mark impermanence in the everyday domestic space of Jessica Labatte’s home and garden. The series, which began in 2018 when Labatte photographed every flower that bloomed over the course of one growing season, has continued over the past two summers marking time as flowers bloom and fade from one season to the next, year after year. The pictures incorporate evolving indexes of nurturing and the endless clutter of objects that accompany parenthood and artistic practice within domestic spaces. Challenging myths of artistic practice and motherhood espoused by early feminist artists, Labatte’s photographs look to depict a more expansive definition of feminist art practice for our contemporary moment. These images advocate for the appreciation of beauty and mindfulness in everyday domestic objects and caretaking rituals. The most recent photographs display the expansive creativity that can be found in the home and capture the joys and challenges of parenting through a pandemic. 

 

 

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Western Exhibitions is thrilled to participate in NADA’s Chicago Gallery Open. Taking place September 30 through October 4, 2020, the event showcases online and in-person exhibitions hosted by Chicago galleries, non-profits, and artist-run spaces.

Exclusive to the Chicago Gallery Open, Western Exhibitions is presenting further explorations from the series of hand-manipulated photographs currently on view in ELIJAH BURGHER's show at the gallery, Until the beasts and all the mountain are wild with divinity.

Chicago Gallery Open goes live on Wednesday, September 30, 2020 at 11am EST / 10am CST. Start here: https://chicagogalleryopen.org/

Schedule your visit to see Elijah's show in person via Tock, email, or by calling us during business hours at (312) 480-8390.

 

 

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Western Exhibitions invites you to take a deep dive into our current show with Erin Washington in a new series on our website, In Depth with ...

For the third iteration of our In Depth with ... series, join Erin Washington in a multimedia exploration of her show at Western Exhibitions Bodies feel dangerous right now.

Washington discusses the state of our bodies during a pandemic, defaced statues, elliptical cosmologies and mythologies, her fascination with/repulsion to Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist black square, automatic drawing, anatomy studies, her drawing series After Zeus documenting an injury to her drawing hand 7 years ago and more, using text, audio and a video walk-through, plus a playlist sharing what she listens to when working in her studio in Chicago.

The show runs through December 19. To schedule your appointment to see the show, please visit Tock, email us, or call (312) 480-8390 during business hours.

Image: Erin Washington, tempest, 2018, Acrylic, colored pencil, graphite, high-polymer film lead on panel, 24h x 20w in.

 

 

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In Gallery 2 Western Exhibitions will present an unconventional multiple by one of our favorite artists Cary Leibowitz, rubber semi-truck mud flaps that are printed with axioms like “Vote for a Teenager,” “World’s Best Queen Esther Rodeo: No More Round Ups,” “Faggy Faggy Boom Boom,” and “Ughhh He’s Crying Again.” This show is presented in collaboration with New Discretions. At the time of this release (July 2020), the show will not have an opening reception and will be open by appointment, Tuesday through Saturday, 11am to 5pm. Please email or call (312) 480-8390 or visit Tock to schedule a visit.

For decades, Leibowitz has been the New York art world’s master painter of abjection and neurosis, self-loathing, self-doubt, and self-interrogation—“like a human dynamo of insecurity,” Rhonda Lieberman wrote in Artforum in 1992. In those years, he was still known as Candyass, a prankster-critic of neo-expressionist grandiosity—and one whose self-mocking good humor belied a universe of anxiety below the surface, particularly as the AIDS crisis devastated New York. He hosted a talk show (Talk Show), appointed himself the director of Fake Chanel (a menorah was a collection centerpiece), became a sort of poster-boy for the Pathetic Aesthetic, and turned sleek, self-important galleries into Candyass Carnivals full of pennants blaring irony, Americana paintings that managed to have it (i.e. the whole American vernacular tradition) both ways, valentines to underappreciated movie stars, and multiples that mocked art-as-commerce even as they were offered, themselves, for sale. His uproarious text paintings of self-lacerating one-liners, typically composed against pastel-colored wood “canvases,” were a self-conscious counterpoint to neo-expressionist grandiosity and the new pop spectacle of the art world of the time (mixing elements of therapy, interrogation, social and institutional critique, and stand-up comedy routine). But his work was also and always deeply personal and idiosyncratic, driven by anxieties, neuroses, and premonitions of difference—and by the nagging of crippling conscience that lies always beneath, or behind, or just around the corner, with a mocking and knowing wink.

 

Cary Leibowitz’s work has shown in museums and institutions across the globe including The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Massachusetts; The Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, Germany; The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut; the Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York; The Jewish Museum, New York, New York; Museum of Modern Art, PS1, New York, New York; The Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, Indiana; The Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, Germany; White Columns, New York, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Jewish Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Art Metropole, Toronto, Canada; Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf; Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, Germany; Cabinet Gallery, London, United Kingdom; Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen, Denmark; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois; Galerie Claudio Botello, Turin, Italy; List Visual Arts Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge.

 Leibowitz’s first comprehensive career survey and solo museum exhibition, Museum Show, originated at The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco in 2017 and traveled to The Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, and The Contemporary Art Museum, Houston in 2018. Leibowitz’s work has been included in the landmark exhibitions Too Jewish? Challenging Traditional Identities at The Jewish Museum in New York, New York; In a Different Light at the University Art Museum, University of California at Berkeley; and Bad Girls, New Museum, New York, New York. His work has been reviewed in The New Yorker, Artforum, The New York Times, Frieze Magazine, and Art in America, among others.

 

 

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Western Exhibitions is thrilled to announce the inaugural “Western Exhibitions Drawing Biennial,” a salon-style, ceiling-to-floor 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.

We’ve been kicking this idea around ever since overhearing a conversation at the inaugural EXPO Chicago between curators Shannon Stratton and Mark Pascale. They were admiring our “especially rich program devoted to drawing” (Shannon’s words, we think. She’s contributing an essay to the show!). This led us to the realization that—by god yes—Western Exhibitions loves and prioritizes drawings and works on paper! This was a totally organic development, one not dictated by a mission statement, and something that took an outsider to notice as at that point, we didn’t think the gallery had a particular focus other than work we thought was good and important.

The show will open the 2021 season, beginning on January 8, running through February 20. We doubt, alas, that we’ll be able to have an opening reception by then so the show will be supplemented by robust multimedia offerings on our website and Vimeo page. Stay tuned!

Artists included:

Dan Attoe
Marshall Brown
Elijah Burgher
Amanda Joy Calobrisi
Jessica Campbell
Lilli Carré
Ryan Travis Christian
Courttney Cooper
Kareem Davis
Edie Fake
Joey Fauerso
Julia Schmitt Healy
Andrew Hostick
Richard Hull
Dutes Miller
Paul Nudd
Robyn O’Neil
Michael Pellew
Steve Reinke
Stan Shellabarger
Geoffrey Todd Smith
Deb Sokolow
Ruby T
Frances Waite
Cathrine Whited

 

 

 

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Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present Geoffrey Todd Smith’s sixth solo show with the gallery, Sordid Orchestra, running from February 27 to April 10, 2021. Smith will present new vibrant and nervy multi-media paintings on paper and on panel.

For Geoffrey Todd Smith, abstraction is an unreliable narrator. Like carnival music playing in a horror movie, his abstract drawings and paintings don’t accurately convey the mood of the moment. Rather than holding up the proverbial mirror to society, Smith’s images are more like funhouse mirrors, further distorting and guiding the viewer away from reality. Every decision in the development of his compositions is fraught with the worry that he’s not saying enough, quickly giving way to the alternative, that he may have revealed too much–therein lies the tension. These Rorschach-like blobs bubble up to induce a sense of familiarity, only to be met with uncertainty.

Each work in Geoffrey Todd Smith’s Sordid Orchestra began with one continuous, wavy line, meandering throughout the picture plain, until it ended back where it started. From there, Smith searched for compelling arrangements within the long tangle of the continuous line. In a complicated juggling act of materials, Smith integrated a variety of materials including, acrylic, enamel, gel pens, gouache and oil-based paint markers, on both paper and wooden surfaces. As he moved around the picture plain, flipping the images upside-down and returning them to their original orientation, mysterious figures were discovered, developed, examined, obliterated, revived and eventually, adorned with seething doodles of repetitious zig-zags and a virtual plague of dots.

There will not be an opening reception, but the show will be supplemented by robust media offerings on our website and Vimeo page. Private viewings for groups of 1 to 4 persons are available by appointment: reserve a time at exploretock.com/westernexhibitions.

Geoffrey Todd Smith’s work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Hallmark Inc., Fidelity Investments Corporate Art Collection, the Jager Collection in Amsterdam, Soho House Chicago, the South Bend Art Museum in Indiana, and Harper College in Illinois and has been shown at Luis de Jesus Gallery and Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles; Hyde Park Art Center, the Union League, DePaul Art Museum and Shane Campbell Gallery in Chicago; The Hughes Gallery in Australia; The Green Gallery in Milwaukee; The Front in New Orleans; Illinois State Museum, and the Elmhurst Art Museum in Illinois. He has been written about in New City, The Seen, New American Paintings, Bad at Sports, art ltd, Juxtapoz, Chicago Tribune, and Chicago Magazine. Smith is represented by Western Exhibitions and he lives and works in Chicago.

 

View the show on our website here

 

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Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present Kareem Davis’ first show with the gallery, running from February 27 to April 10, 2021. Davis will present meticulous architectural renderings of buildings both real and imagined.

Kareem Davis’ elegant graphite drawings focus on the simple and straightforward beauty of buildings that may or may not exist. Many depict Chicago Housing Projects, the majority of which have been torn down. Some are delightful wishful thinking, like his renderings of The New Obama International Hotel and Suites and The Chicago Sky Tower, possibly homage to the Chicago’s WNBA team. Most of the drawings contain a small rendering of the sun or the moon to show scale.

Davis is a life-long Chicago resident and is extremely knowledgeable about the Chicago Transit Authority. When he is not drawing skyscrapers, he is rendering images of CTA L-trains and buses while enthusiastically informing his viewer of the design and function. The largest drawing in the show depicts the CTA’s 2200 cars that were, as Davis notes on the work, built by Budd in 1969-1970.

This show is presented in conjunction with Project Onward, a Chicago-based studio and gallery dedicated to the creative growth of adult artists whose lives are impacted by mental illness and developmental disabilities, where Kareem Davis has been member artist for five years. He works full time at both Antique Taco locations, family-run restaurants in the Wicker Park and Bridgeport neighborhoods of Chicago. He proudly lives in a high-rise apartment on the twentieth floor in Noble Square. He has also recently taken up light weight-lifting and dancing.

View the show on our website here

 

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Ryan Travis Christian’s 1990s suburban Chicago upbringing offered up absurd experiences, which he uses as fuel for the surreal personal narratives in his pop-culture-influenced graphite 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. Vintage political cartoons and hand-drawn animation influence Christian’s detailed vignettes—namely from Ub Iwerks, George Condo, and the Hairy Who—Christian comes to terms with his sources’ sordid pasts while embracing their richness and flavor. Christian carefully and densely layers graphite to reveal high contrast graphics and dizzying patterns; wiggly figures are rendered in slow motion, living among hazy landscapes and melting fences. He exposes the untidy lifestyle of contemporary humanity through a vast array of topics and imagery; the economy, the environment, gender, class, hope, and doubt are contemplated with drugs, heavy petting, alcohol, violence, depression, death, and the afterlife. Christian’s recent work has expanded to comment on current nationwide and worldwide crises: his historical precedents become mirrors reflecting the common concerns of the present. Text is prevalent in Christian’s work, coming mostly from personal notes-to-self about conversations or encounters that have stuck around long enough to remain relevant to him and keep up to the caliber of his source.

Ryan Travis Christian’s solo and two-person shows include Ross+Kramer Gallery in New York, NY; Arsham/Feig Gallery in New York, NY; Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica, CA; the Contemporary Art Museum in Raleigh, NC; The Hole in New York, NY; Guerrero Gallery in San Francisco, CA; Halsey McKay in East Hampton, NY; and Cooper Cole in Toronto, ON. Christian has been included in group shows in London, Rotterdam, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Baltimore, Dallas and Los Angeles. His work has been written about in frieze, art ltd, ArtNews, Art Papers, Juxtapoz, New American Paintings, Daily Serving,Indy Week and the Associated Press. DAZED recently named Christian as one of the “top ten artists working with monochrome.” He is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and lives and works in the Chicagoland area.

 

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In conjunction with his solo show in gallery one, CRYIN RYAN, Ryan Travis Christian presents a group show in Gallery 2, Figure 9, highlighting some of his favorite artists working today. Included artists:

Bill Adams, Raven Halfmoon, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Jess Johnson, Hein Koh, Eddie Martinez, Christian Rex Van Minnen, Lamar Peterson, Emily Mae Smith

link to show page here

 

Image Credit: Hein Koh, Lighter, 2020. Charcoal, oil, and oil stick on canvas, 30h x 23w in.

 

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Edie Fake’s paintings start as self-portraits, and from there, they make a break for it, referencing elements of the trans and non-binary body through pattern, color and architectural metaphor. His precise, intimately scaled, gouache-and-ink paintings on panel are structured around the physical aspects of transition and adaptation as well as mental and sexual health.

Since moving from first Chicago, then to Los Angeles while briefly attending grad school at USC, to now the high desert of Joshua Tree in California, Fake’s work has evolved from his acclaimed Memory Palaces series — reimagined facades of urban lesbian bars and gay nightclubs — to a new feeling of vulnerability due to shifts in the U.S. social and political climate. The work blurs lines between architecture and body with structures adorned by elements that seem to be both decorative and protective.  Architectural components are used as visual metaphors for the ways in which definition and validation elude trans identities. Says Fake, “More and more I’m trying to bring an anarchy into that architecture, or a fantasy and ecstasy of what queer space is and can be.”

Edie Fake currently has painted installations on view at The Drawing Center in New York and the Berkeley Art Museum and Film Archive in California. Fake’s drawings, paintings, comics, books and publications have been written about it in artforum, ArtNews, The Comics Journal, Art 21, The Guardian, Hyperallergic, The Los Angeles Review of Books and were recently featured on the cover of the Paris Review. Fake’s 2018 show at Western Exhibitions was reviewed in Art in America  He was one of the first recipients of Printed Matter’s Awards for Artists and his collection of comics, Gaylord Phoenix, won the 2011 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including a solo shows at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, NY and Marlborough Contemporary, NYC, and in group shows at the Museum of Art and Design, NYC and the Institute of Art at VCU in Richmond, VA. Fake’s work is held in the collections of the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park,KS and the RISD Art Museum in Providence, RI. Edie Fake was born in Chicagoland in 1980 and received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2002. Fake is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and he currently lives and works in Twentynine Palms, California.

 

 

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In Gallery One: Paul Nudd’s Black Mayonnaisery

In Gallery Two: Paul Nudd: Collected Prints & Multiples

In art ltd in 2011, James Yood wrote of Paul Nudd, “If the body is a temple, Nudd offers it as crumbling and collapsing, as an amazing remnant soon to be food for very busy worms.” Nudd is committed to central themes of primal sludge, growth and disease, systems of classification, mutation and life, patterning and mark making.

Paul Nudd’s large vertical figure drawings depict cartoonishly terrifying mutants, alien/human mash-ups besotted with tumors, warts, lesions, growths, male and female genitalia and mis-placed pubic hair. The slightly-larger than human full-body portraits feel like amalgamated bastard spawn of Nudd’s gross-out heroes and influences: Paul McCarthy, Öyvind Fahlström, Peter Saul, Ivan Albright and of course, Jim Nutt, along with popular sources, movies like “The Fly”, “Dead Alive”, “The Toxic Avenger” and The Thing from the Fantastic Four. Nudd’s hermaphroditic figures (“Most of the action goes on between the legs”, per the artist) map bizarre physical characteristics with green being a prevalent color, representing life, growth, bacteria, mold, fungus and monsters, Frankenstein’s monster and the Hulk. These radioactive icons find redemption in disease, being self-aware bodies in a paranoid age, reveling in genetic mutations, bad pharmaceuticals and environmental degradation.

A sub-series of mutant drawings are smaller; adolescent sized, or juveniles, less developed, but in the process of mutating with exaggerated physical characteristics of puberty: armpit hair, rampant acne, overall asymmetry, misshapen breasts, pubic hair, enlarged genitalia, gender confusion, hormonal shifts, mood swings and erections.  In these works, the repetition of pea-green and small internal lumps reference the pituitary gland, an adolescent’s albatross, here forming into something unhealthy, or dirty, such as a tumor.

Nudd’s mixed-media paintings on canvas offer up images of head-like entities emerging from colorful thick swaths of paint and his videos are endless cycles of spastic rupturing of gunk and goo, reflecting Nudd’s artistic practice as a whole.

Paul Nudd’s solo and two-person shows include Bourouina Gallery in Berlin, Hap Gallery in Portland, OR, Jack the Pelican Presents in Brooklyn, telephonebooth in Kansas City and the Hyde Park Art Center, Bodybuilder & Sportsmen, and Dogmatic, all in Chicago. His work has been included in group shows in Dusseldorf, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Houston, Denver and was included in Seeing Is a Kind of Thinking: A Jim Nutt Companion at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. His prodigious zine work can be found in several national artist book collections including the Museum of Modern Art; Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; New Jersey Public Library; National Academy of Design, New York; Indiana University and School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Paul Nudd received his MFA from the University of Illinois-Chicago in 2001. He is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and he lives and works in Berwyn, Illinois.

 

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Appointments are not necessary, masks are required

Dutes Miller’s work critically engages mythologies surrounding human sexuality, especially of the male body as it manifests itself in gay desire – in its evident state of arousal, its protuberances, orifices, and its emissions. His small painted sculptures are the result of engagement into the multivalent expressions of queer desire. They are portraits, other portals, all pursuing their sexual desires.   Erotic possibilities are exaggerated, multiplied, and mutated into a myriad of forms. Miller’s forms refuse to be confined to either side of a binary, they are both the fucked and the fucker. And sometimes both. In his paintings, collages and artist books, Miller examines the spaces where the artist’s inner life, queer subcultures and mass media intersect, appropriating images from pornographic websites, magazines and his own imaginings to investigate alternative standards of beauty, visualizations of lust and desire found on the internet, and power dynamics in sexual relationships.

Dutes Miller’s fourth show at Western Exhibitions will open during regular business hours on Saturday, September 18 from 11am to 6pm, and will run through October 30, 2021. The gallery is open to the public, with no appointment necessary, Tuesday through Saturday, 11am to 6pm.

Dutes Miller’s work has been written about on artforum (1, 2,) Hyperallergic, Huffington Post, and the Chicago Reader. His collaborative work with his husband Stan Shellabarger, as Miller & Shellabarger, won a 2008 Artadia Award and a 2007 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award and has been written about in Art in America, Artforum.com, Art & Auction, Frieze, Artnet, The Art Newspaper, Flash Art, and the Chicago Tribune. Miller received a BFA from Illinois State University. He is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and lives and works in Chicago.

 

View show online here

 

Dutes Miller takes full advantage of his fourth solo exhibition at Western Exhibitions to celebrate queer-sex positivity as a form of resistance to the dominant culture. In a large body of new sculpture, collage, painting and drawing, the artist depicts his vision of a queer cultural revolution still evolving—free from taboo, stigma and repression, and bursting with sexual connection and body adoration. Miller depicts the gay male nude as a medley of arousal zones, in freeform shapes and wild paint globs of desire.

Miller figures into a movement of “image culture” artists who appropriate and reinterpret gay mass media. He pulls men from porno/physique magazines and draws all over them. He also thrusts these men into his paintings as anonymous forms, out of a past era, into an extravagant, fleshy environment. Miller borrows queer visual culture to liberate it from body-image dogma. He touches black-and-white photographic images with gold leaf, exposing men who are not typically considered sexy, exploring their bodies as desirable to themselves and to others.

Boldly, Miller’s exhibition features a series of wall sculptures, over 30 in total, hanging like specimen, each an ambiguous portrait compiled of surprising materials and bulging appendages, looking like the dangling insides and outsides of a body. A fan of Deconstructionism and the philosophy of the body, Miller follows his self-interiority into the spaces inside the body, looking for the origins of desire in the flesh itself. This essentialism is Miller’s reaction or anti-gesture to the recent re-emergence of coded gay art mostly in the form of coy abstract painting. Instead, Dutes Miller offers a steady stream of lust in its wild state.

– Jason Foumberg, Chicago, July 2021

 

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Appointments are not necessary, masks are required

View the show on our website here

Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present a solo show by Los Angeles-based artist Lauren Wy in which she will debut Volume 1 of AUTODESIRE, a graphic novel machine made of process-based drawings —a body without organs­— assembled through capacious rhythms. The show will open during regular business hours on Saturday, September 18 from 11am to 6pm,  and will run through October 30, 2021. The gallery is open to the public, with no appointment necessary, Tuesday through Saturday, 11am to 6pm.

AUTODESIRE is a saga: a collection of 232 drawings that work together as a new manifesto on the darker iteration of figural abstraction. At the start of the pandemic, Wy found herself locked out of the studio and attempted a new format of making to meet the chaotic anxiety of the moment. While working serially and automatically in a format inspired by Louise Bourgeois’ Insomnia drawings, Wy’s AUTODESIRE became a vessel or a place or a setting like a hedge garden: a place designed for one to get lost.

AUTODESIRE is the story of a heroine who is making a journey through a road trip inferno. Her story is told through an algorithm that extracts memories from her long-dead corpse. AUTODESIRE drawings are made through the layering of ultra-saturated oil crayons with rich pigment-dyed folding panels. Within these environments, forms continually refuse to settle while they embrace multiplicity, alien sexuality, and Dionysian logic. Fragmented narratives—both real and imagined, autobiographical and stolen—come in and out of resolution throughout the panels. AUTODESIRE is the multiplicity of self as voiced by the alien femme in the bacchanal at the end of the world.

Each drawing in the series is displayed on two small handmade wood panels. These panels are hinged to open flat for display on the wall or may close shut like a book to be hidden on a bookshelf. The outside of each diptych/spread is flat white and minimal as the inside opens to reveal a drawing. The inspiration for this finishing is from “devotional” images from the early modern period: small wooden hinged panels, filled with images of Christs and Madonnas, made to be carried around.

Lauren Wy’s work was most recently shown in the Western Exhibitions Drawing Biennial in Chicago IL; ANTI, the 6th Athens Biennale in Greece; Kunstraum Walcheturm in Zurich, and at Apparatus Projects and Practise Gallery, both in Chicago and this fall will be included in Espressioni at Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Turin, Italy. Concurrent with her show here at Western Exhibitions, Wy will be showing Volume 2 of AUTODESIRE in a solo show at Dio Horia in Greece. Wy received her MFA from Northwestern University in 2020 and she lives and works in Los Angeles.

 

Image: Lauren Wy, AUTODESIRE, Volume 1, May 7, 2021

 

 

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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.

View the show on our website here

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For his fourth show at Western Exhibitions, Dan Attoe presents a series of new paintings on panel that reflects the changing conditions of his life as a result of the ongoing pandemic. Known for his tight and highly detailed paintings, this body of work is looser, more impulsive, and improvisational as Attoe moves towards an unclear and incomplete method of story-sharing. The show will open on Saturday, November 6 during regular gallery hours and will run through December 18, 2021. The gallery is open to the public, with no appointment necessary, Tuesday through Saturday, 11am to 6pm.

Throughout his 20+ years of painting, Attoe has challenged himself to offer as much detail as possible: “I’ve always enjoyed finding the limits of my abilities and comprehension. For me, there’s something in hitting the end of the jar, the point where earnest representation meets awkwardness, where processing of reality meets metaphor, that is entertaining and telling about an artist’s psychological makeup.” While his paintings up until this point could be read as stills from short stories where every detail has meaning and a sequence of events can be assumed, the works in this show are fragments of constructed places and happenings that don’t reveal an entire story: outlines of trees washed out by hazy sun, ghostly figures inhabiting a blurry forest, an empty swimming pool deck on a hot afternoon, a washed-out suburban homecoming, a shy yellow and orange orb glowing alongside a thick forest canopy. Attoe captures the feelings behind the scenes.

The events of the past 18 months or so have influenced and inspired Attoe in numerous ways, especially with his methodology in the studio. Says Attoe: “the application of the paint became important and it made sense to me to apply it looser and chunkier.” Home teaching and daycare of his two young children led to consuming animated movies en masse, which led Attoe to develop a somewhat sinking feeling as he realized that he couldn’t compete with the beautifully rendered fictitious landscapes on the screen. Social upheaval inspired him to work faster, to respond, even if obliquely, to current events in realer time than prior painting practices would allow. Attoe also noticed himself spending more time on Instagram deeply inspecting other artists’ work and found a renewed interest in the texture of paint, alien colors and sense of humor.

Dan Attoe has had solo shows and been in numerous group shows in galleries and museums across the United States and Europe, most recently at The Hole in New York City and de boer gallery in Los Angeles. He worked with and was part of the inspiration for a line of clothing by fashion designer Adam Kimmel in 2011. Attoe is also one of the founders of Paintallica, an artist collective that has presented performative installations across the country, as well as Barneys New York and the Iowa State Fair. Dan Attoe’s work has been written about and featured in Frieze Magazine, Art in America, Artforum, The Los Angeles Times, Art Review, The Journal, Flash Art, Berlin Art Journal, PAPERMAG and The New York Times. He received his BFA from the University of Wisconsin in 1998 and his MFA from the University of Iowa in 2004. He is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago. Born in 1975 in Bremerton, Washington, Attoe grew up in parts of Washington, Idaho, Minnesota and Wisconsin, and now lives and works in Washougal, Washington.

View the show on our website here

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Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present 10 new abstract works on paper—colored pencil on artist-produced handmade paper—by Aya Nakamura in her first show, Wayfaring, at the gallery. The show opens on Saturday, January 15 and will run through February 26, 2022. Appointments are not necessary; masks are mandatory; gallery hours are Tuesday-Saturday, 11am to 6pm.

Aya Nakamura borrows the show’s title from Tim Ingold’s Lines, a book that proposes a taxonomy of lines across different cultures and time.  For Nakamura, abstraction is a way of relating intention in the moment. It is a kind of wayfaring, or of following the signs and guideposts that reveal themselves along a path in order to arrive at an end point. Nakamura works in pencil, as this slows down time enough for her to deliberate while drawing. She thinks of each element in the drawing as a consciousness that engages directly with its neighbors and aggregates into a larger entity, like an anthill. The result is a series of encounters, a permeability of space and form, embedded sensitivities, and touch.

The drawings are colored pencil on handmade paper of different sizes and shapes, which have a physicality and assert themselves during the drawing process. Variegated lines move across, alongside and into fields of color, and these assemble into amorphous compositions that appear to simultaneously build and dissolve. Some have visual links to existing symbols and objects, which provide a starting point and focus. Their inspirations are various but orbit around a cataclysmic event, the passing of a loved one in the spring of 2021. They are meditations on death and metaphysics, and provide a space for questioning, grief, memorial, humor, and healing.

Nakamura’s work is influenced by a philosophy of mind that does not exclusively locate consciousness in the human, derived from interacting with plants and following posthumanist research in biology and anthropology. Drawings like Dwelling, Wheel and Dharma Spin deal with Buddhist death rituals and beliefs, and with attempts to inculcate some of these values within herself. In other works like Where Is Your Head At? and Holes, materiality itself seemed to shift towards porosity, an overwhelming sense of things to come, or as Thomas Ligotti writes in his short story Alice’s Last Adventure: “I felt intimations of a thousand misshapen marvels—of things going haywire in curious ways, of the edge of the world where an endless ribbon of road continued into space by itself, of a universe handed over to new gods.”

Aya Nakamura has shown at venues in the US and abroad, including The Hangar and Dawawine in Beirut, Lebanon; Supa Salon in Istanbul, Turkey; Mana Decentralized in Jersey City, NJ; and MPSTN in Fox River Grove, IL. She is the recipient of the Denbo Fellowship from Pyramid Atlantic Art Center and the George and Ann Siegel Fellowship from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Nakamura is also a member of Chicago API (Asian, Pacific Islander) Artists United (CAAU), and a board member of Spudnik Press in Chicago, IL. Nakamura was born in Japan and educated in France and the US. She holds a BA in Fine Arts and Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania, an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and currently lives and works in Chicago.

 

 

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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 15 and will run through February 26, 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.

 

 

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visit the exhibition page here

 

Dan Attoe

Elijah Burgher

Julia Schmitt Healy

Leasho Johnson

Robyn O’Neil

Lauren Roche

Frances Waite

 

 

","type":"Event","state":"published","slug":"figures-grounds","created_at":"2022-03-04 23:04:35.327377","updated_at":"2022-03-04 23:04:35.362578","excerpt":"","is_timeless":true,"organization_id":782,"highlighted":false,"opening_starts_at":null,"opening_ends_at":null,"searchable":"'atto':9B 'burgher':11B 'dan':8B 'elijah':10B 'exhibit':5B 'figur':1A 'franc':22B 'ground':2A 'heali':14B 'johnson':16B 'julia':12B 'lauren':20B 'leasho':15B 'neil':19B 'o':18B 'page':6B 'robyn':17B 'roch':21B 'schmitt':13B 'visit':3B 'wait':23B","thumbnail":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1721668546/fnrpmn4wcq9rkjuag76o.jpg","calendar":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/raw/upload/v1721669606/event_ics_1721669605410.ics","carousel":null,"category_name":"Exhibitions"},{"id":9016,"title":"Lilli Carré","starts_at":"2022-03-12 12:00:00","ends_at":"2022-04-23 12:00:00","body":"

For her fourth solo show with Western Exhibitions, Lilli Carré presents a new body of work consisting of loose ink drawings, ceramics with custom pedestals, stone mosaics, and animations.

visit the exhibition page here

 

 

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Open for EXPO CHICAGO's Art After Hours

On view: Lilli Carré

","type":"Event","state":"published","slug":"open-for-expo-art-after-hours-c8e1a44a-0362-4cfa-906c-35f7b606f8bc","created_at":"2022-03-26 16:04:26.194306","updated_at":"2024-06-06 19:44:35.667716","excerpt":"","is_timeless":true,"organization_id":782,"highlighted":false,"opening_starts_at":"2022-04-08 17:00:00","opening_ends_at":"2022-04-08 20:00:00","searchable":"'art':4A,12B 'carré':18B 'chicago':10B 'expo':3A,9B 'hour':6A,14B 'lilli':17B 'open':1A,7B 'view':16B","thumbnail":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1721668554/uuzhkmkovrgedg32v8bs.jpg","calendar":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/raw/upload/v1721669614/event_ics_1721669614262.ics","carousel":null,"category_name":"Gala / Benefit"},{"id":9171,"title":"Michael Pellew: No Life Till Kings County","starts_at":"2022-04-29 17:00:00","ends_at":"2022-06-18 17:00:00","body":"

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.”

View the show on our website here

 

 

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Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present Bed-Stuy to Chi: Artists from LAND Studio & Gallery, a group show of artist from one of favorite progressive art studios, LAND Studio & Gallery. Founded in 2005 and located in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, LAND is a unique nonprofit day-habilitation program that teaches life skills through the modality of art, nurturing the talents of participating artists, while integrating individuals into the community of contemporary art. Bed-Stuy to Chi, a companion exhibition in Gallery 2 to fellow LAND artist Micheal Pellew’s solo show in Gallery 1, features drawings and paintings by Raquel Albarran, Carlo Daleo, Garrol Gayden, Kenya Hanley, Byron Smith and James Rosa. The show opens on Friday, April 29 with a public reception from 5 to 8 pm, and runs through June 18, 2022.

Raquel Albarran (b. 1987) is a Puerto Rican-born artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Preoccupied with toes, noses, and encapsulated forms, Albarran’s art is full of juxtapositions and playful explorations of life, illness, and objects begging to be squeezed. Albarran’s drawings and sculptures reflect her delight sense of mischief, humor, and energy. Albarran describes the fantastical and sometimes bizarre pairings in her work are as an endearing “mix of light and dark”. She warns viewers that there will be “a lot of amputations going on” in her upcoming exhibitions. 

Carlo Daleo (b. 1961) was born in Elmhurst, Queens. After a short stint living on Long Island, he moved back to New York City’s Bushwick neighborhood in Brooklyn with his family in 1964. Daleo has been attending LAND since its inception in 2005. He is a talented draftsman, painter, writer, animator and voiceover artist. Daleo started making art at the age of five following two pop culture tragedies: the unfortunate car accident injuring Jan Berry and the death of Walt Disney. Daleo decided he wanted to continue the legacy of Disney and other cartoonists like Hanna-Barbera and DePatie-Freleng. Daleo’s interests and aesthetic influences are incredibly diverse, including Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Soupy Sales, New York City cultural institutions, newscasters, and local librarians.

Garrol Gayden (b. 1960) has been an artist at LAND since 2005. Inspired by a childhood trip to New York City’s historic Coney Island, Gayden’s saturated images often start with layers of figures, landscapes, and words related to the amusement park. The famed Spookarama is a favorite. Interwoven between these landmarks, however, one will find phrases related to Gayden’s life, family, and fellow artists. “I write the things I see,” Gayden says, “It makes me feel a whole lot better.” His unique line quality is bold and sculptural, alternating from simple hatch marks to a complicated orchestra of tangled, yet descriptive lines. This fusion results in highly detailed and deeply personal compositions that have been featured in numerous exhibitions, including the Paris Outsider Art Fair, London’s Jennifer Lauren Gallery, and The Coney Island Museum. 

Kenya Hanley (b. 1975), one of LAND’s founding members, has devoted countless hours a day to assiduously drawing his two great loves: food and reggae musicians. Hanley’s meticulously organized images, often color-coded and labeled, pay homage to the food he grew up eating, the sweets he tries to stay away from, and the music he so lovingly listens to. Hanley has been featured in multiple Outsider Art Fairs in New York City, Belgium’s MADmusée, and Tokyo’s UTRECHT design store. His work has been the subject of an exhibition at the flagship J Crew store on Madison Avenue and has since become part of J Crew’s corporate collection. His art also figures prominently in The Museum of Everything in London, England. Hanley has been reviewed in VICE Magazine’s Creators Project series, Art Forum, and Disparate Minds. In 2017, Hanley’s work was featured in his first book, Tasty Reggae, published by All-You-Can-Eat Press. 

Byron Smith (b. 1963) is originally from North Carolina and now lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Smith’s drawings and paintings are often gentle, celebratory, and intriguing depictions of women. Sourcing his images from fashion magazines, Smith exaggerates his model’s features. His figures have long, bold eyelashes, polished nails, and plump and puckered lips.

James Rosa (b. 1965) is a Brooklyn-based artist and documentarian. Rosa draws inspiration from his environment. His drawings, paintings, and collages begin with simple outlines of found objects. They grow into intricate compositions of narrative and abstract worlds. These illustrations of Rosa’s colorful inner life and environment often include houses, faces, flowers, rats, circles, and teeth. Throughout his work, Rosa’s use of harmonious, saturated colors binds his pieces together across subject matter and style. Each individual story and arrangement acts in relation to the work before it.

View the show on our website here

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View the show on our website here

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.

 

Image: Azikiwe Mohammed \"Waitig at 7:22pm, Curtain Open,\" 2021. Acrylic and gouache on board, 18h x 22w in.

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Schmitt Healy: Ray Takes a (Bad) Trip","starts_at":"2022-06-24 17:00:00","ends_at":"2022-08-13 12:00:00","body":"

View the show on our website here

Coming out of the Chicago Imagist tradition, Julia Schmitt Healy explores images and iconography from the news, religion, mass media and personal travel. Her multimedia work — painting, drawing, textiles, collage — describes snippets of her dreams and concerns, hopefully with a bit of humor mixed in, touching on ecological disasters, human relationships, symbolic surrealism, feminism, consumerism and the natural world. Ray Takes a (Bad) Trip 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.

In 1973, Julia Schmitt Healy, then Julia Schmitt, moved to Nova Scotia after one year in Africa and Europe, while following the love of her life (or so she thought). She developed her Imagist-inspired style before this move, while living, creating and schooling in Chicago in the late 1960s. Her tufted portraits of friends, family, lovers and automobiles had garnered a following in Chicago. At artist Ray Yoshida’s urging, she joined the Phyllis Kind Gallery but never had a solo show there. An example of Schmitt’s work from this time is currently on view in the display of Yoshida’s collection at the Art Preserve in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. As the Imagist scene exploded in Chicago in the early 1970s, Schmitt’s career all but stalled given her move abroad. Despite this, she never stopped making work, even drawing on flour bags and chamois cloth with ballpoint pen when art supplies were limited in Ethiopia. One could call her a “lost Imagist.”

When she arrived in Nova Scotia, Schmitt veered from her tufted work to make paintings and drawings that were somewhat autobiographical in their opinions, warnings and even outrage about personal and political concerns. The body of work in this show, from 1973-74, depicts her oblivious husband, weather events, animals, improbable terrains, dreamscapes, power plants, bandages and figures in strange surroundings, such as depictions of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip as corgi-monsters. While continuing to evoke an unmistakable Chicago style, the themes and imagery in these paintings were influenced by her stint in Ethiopia and her new surroundings in Canada. Schmitt reflects on this period, saying “I often remember my dreams, which sometimes reflect my insecurities and are often full of objects or symbols of current events or things going on in my life.”

Ray Yoshida was Schmitt’s teacher/mentor while she was living in Chicago and is the subject of a few pieces in the show. These works were created a few years after Schmitt finished school and left Chicago, as she slowly came to realize the importance he had on her life. As she puts it: “We had a weird relationship that I didn’t understand at the time.” In Ray and the Dominatrix, Schmitt plays the domme, plunging him into an icy pool as thunder and lightning and pollution loom in the distance. He shows up again in Ray Takes a (Bad) Trip, an allegorical painting about the travails of road travel at the time … “things were not smooth sometimes.”

Julia Schmitt Healy was born in Elmhurst, Illinois and received a BFA and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied with Ray Yoshida and Whitney Halstead. After graduation, Healy moved to Africa, where she traveled and lived, then later toured Europe and moved to Nova Scotia, Canada with her first husband. Her work was represented for many years by Phyllis Kind Gallery in New York and Chicago, as well as Susan Whitney Gallery in Canada. While in school, she co-curated a mail art show with artist Ray Johnson, called “Intercourse” at the Wabash Transit Gallery. Her works has been shown recently at the Lubeznik Center for the Arts in Michigan City, IN and Camayuhs in Atlanta, GA. In 2019, the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, NY acquired two tufted works from 1972. This is her second show at Western Exhibitions. She lives and works in Port Jervis, New York.

 

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 For his second solo show at Western Exhibitions, Daniel Rios Rodriguez presents a new group of paintings about summer, a hot hot hot summer. Driven by the landscape and the intense heat of this summer, this body of work is about the sun in a very literal way. Making work in the Texas heat, in a studio without A/C, he’s only been painting in the mornings and mostly outside, saying that “making these paintings is kind of like taking a vacation where you are cramming in a lot in a short amount of time. They are also about portability since the paintings are living mostly on my fence outside and spending a bit of time with me on the river. Rarely am I taking them into the studio to work where it feels like an oven.”

Rodriguez’ shaped canvas paintings, unique combinations of found material and impasto paint executed on an intimate scale, take inspiration from his environment, his children, and his dreams. Rodriguez makes the supports himself from materials such as terracotta and cement and lades the paintings with flotsam he finds within the natural landscape.

Request a checklist here.

Visit the exhibition page here.

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In Gallery One

Info

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 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” that 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.

 

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Now Paint Something Temporary

Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present Joey Fauerso’s second solo show with the gallery, Now Paint Something Temporary. Her new series of figurative paintings on raw unstretched canvas created during artist residencies, including MacDowell and Yaddo in 2021 and 2022, continues her use of humor and theatricality to shift and subvert traditional gender roles and genres within Western art.

In this show themes of waiting, confinement, leisure, pleasure and escape manifest in dense and playful ways-languid nude men recline in groups, gathering for no particular purpose but to be admired, women scramble and stride to escape their fixed position within the compositions.

Visit the show page here.

Image: Joey Fauerso \"Modern Art,\" 2020. Painted steel and canvas, 10h x 21w x 10d in.

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JADE YUMANG

Open House Spatter

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.

Visit the show page here.

Image: Jade Yumang \"Riverside Sand No. 747,\" 2021. Archival ink on cotton, wallpaper, batting, cotton, fiberfill, dye, binder's board, aluminum wire, acrylic nails, pine, basswood, oak, and hardware. 39h x 30w x 5 3/4d in.

 

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Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present the second Western Exhibitions Drawing Biennial, a celebration of the medium of drawing in many expanded mutations. Contributions by gallery and affiliated artists confirm the gallery’s commitment to drawing and works on paper and the varied approaches on view — from schematic to free-form, in-your-face to speculative, abstract to figurative — will capture the current state of contemporary drawing practices while placing a focus on gallery artists’ core concerns of personal narratives and cosmologies, identity and gender, sexuality, pattern and exuberance, all with a keen attention to materiality.

The inaugural WXDB, in 2021, presented multiple works from each artist. This iteration is different: participating artists will present just one or two pieces – some created specifically for this show, others pulled deep from within the artist’s archive – to concentrate the viewer’s focus and reward careful looking. By continuing the idea of a Drawing Biennial, Western Exhibitions stakes a claim that drawings are to be lauded as much as painting, sculpture, and any other medium, as the gallery reveres the handmade, the tactility, the immediacy of drawing. From the essay by Shannon R. Stratton, commissioned by the gallery for the 2021 show: “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.”

 

Critic Erin Toale reviewed the inaugural Western Exhibitions Drawing Biennial in New City, expertly capturing the gallery’s devotion to the practice of drawing:

Drawing. A medium that is foundational, yet often relegated to the planning stages: just a sketch, rarely the main event or finished product, something unearthed after the death of an artist or architect to demonstrate their rendering accuracy. This biennial, however, is not drawing as a first draft, a prompt, or the beginning of something. This is the gallery declaring its commitment to drawing in a public ceremony. This is the evolving mission and history of the space as told through multiple panoramic storyboards, each artist with a vignette contributing to the overall narrative.

 

The 2023 Western Exhibitions Drawing Biennial will open the 2023 art season with a reception, free and open to the public, at our Chicago location on Friday, January 6, from 5 to 8 pm and will run through February 25. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11am-6pm and by appointment.

 

 

 

💻 Send us an email, here.

 

📲 Call us during business hours, Tu-Sa, 11am-6pm: (312) 480-8390.

 

💌 DM us on Instagram, here.

 

For more images and information please visit the exhibition page on our website here.

 

Also stay tuned for a new In Depth with... page for this show, featuring insight and background information from participating artists about their work in the show.

 

Participating artists:

Bios and more information here

Dan Attoe

Marshall Brown

Elijah Burgher

Jessica Campbell

Lilli Carré

Ryan Travis Christian

Journie Cirdain

Courttney Cooper

Jenny Crowe

Edie Fake

Julia Schmitt Healy

Andrew Hostick

Richard Hull

Dutes Miller

Aya Nakamura

Rachel Niffenegger

Robyn O’Neil

Michael Pellew

Stan Shellabarger

Geoffrey Todd Smith

Deb Sokolow

Ruby T

Frances Waite

Erin Washington

Cathrine Whited

Lauren Wy

 

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RICHARD HULL – Mirror and Bone

In galleries one & two

March 3 to April 22, 2023

 

For his fifth solo show at Western Exhibitions, Richard Hull presents new paintings of bulbous, energized abstracted figures, broadening the amorphous heads and hairstyles he’s depicted for the past several years into fully-formed characters. Before graduating from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago in 1979, Hull joined the legendary Phyllis Kind Gallery, the primary dealer of many of Chicago’s Imagist artists. At the time, his paintings were known for their abstracted architectural interiors. More recently, Hull has returned to the loose-limbed figuration of the Imagist era. Considered more romantic and painterly than his forebearers, his repetitive gestures and inscriptions limn reverberating abstract heads and bulbous hairstyles. Imagining these abstract portraits to be inner mirrors, containers in which repetitive thinking and behaviours are visualized, Hull has now added bodies and limbs. Utilizing both galleries 1 and 2 at the Western Exhibitions Chicago location, this show opens on Friday, March 3 with a free public reception and runs through April 22, 2023. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11 to 6pm.

In gallery 1, Richard Hull’s newest paintings and drawings depict multiple figures in various enigmatic tableaus, born of frenetic marks that somehow coalesce into coherent scenes or events. Are the figures in conversation? Confrontation? The narratives are slippery with senses of disorientation, discombobulation and vertigo. Compositions are complex, influences run deep (Max Beckmann, Philip Guston, H.C. Westermann to name a few) and his techniques utilize his vast index of pictorial tools. Whereas Hull’s earlier “stolen portraits” paintings relied upon interaction with the viewer, the characters are now more autonomous, free to interact within the painting plane, and sometimes are even a little naughty. This change came about, to quote the artist, “simply from a desire to have the characters stand up, literally.” The color pink dominates the five paintings on view in gallery 2. It is an intense pink that belies the notion that pink is soft and nonaggressive, so strident is Hull’s hue. The paintings are in conversation with each other about how very similar things might still maintain a uniqueness of character. The pink is the same pink in each painting.

Richard Hull has paintings, drawings and prints in the collections of several museums including the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Smithsonian Museum, Washington, D.C.; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Smart Museum, Chicago. He has exhibited his work at many of the above institutions as well as at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO; the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Contemporary Arts 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 lives and works in Chicago.

Pictured: Departure, 2023. Oil and wax on linen, 48h x 60w in.

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For his fourth solo show at Western Exhibitions, Remastériser, Marshall Brown presents collages from three new and ongoing bodies of work. Brown, an architect and artist, continues his ongoing project to give form to the interactions between architecture and power through acts of world-making. He utilizes the power of collage as a medium that changes the terms of authorship and challenges outdated definitions of originality. In his most recent work Brown dissects images by contemporary architectural photographers and artists who take architecture as their subject, using the historically disruptive properties of collage and montage to create new forms, spaces, and narratives. The show opens on Friday, April 28 with a public reception from 5 to 8pm, and will run through June 17, 2023. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm.

For Remastérise, Brown presents selections from three collage series. Prisons of Invention andPiranesian Maps of Berlin debuted in his survey of collage work at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art [SBMA] in the fall of 2022, foregrounding the conceptual foundations of his explorations at the intersection of architecture and art. The final, and newest series, Forgeries, will be on view for the first time at Western Exhibitions.

The worlds portrayed in the Prisons of Invention series invoke an expanded range of scales, from architectural to urban to landscape, while challenging our experience of gravity, orientation and space-time. Borrowing their name from Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s etching series Carceri d’invenzione (ca. 1749-50), these collages mark a significant increase in scale and complexity, creating immersive visions reminiscent of the Italian master’s multilayered imaginary prisons. The enlargement process requires seams to be used both within and between image fragments. Artist’s tape for temporary positioning is not removed but remains as part of the work, and the source material comes entirely from a select group of photographers working on architecture, urbanism, and landscape at the beginning of the 21st century.

Recalling Piranesi’s map of the Campus Martius (1762) and the map of Rome, created with Giambattista Nolli (1748), Marshall Brown’s large (96 x 72 inches), multi-paneled collage Piranesian Map of Berlin, ca. 1800-1690 exists at the intersection of reality and uncertainty, portraying cities that could have been or others that might yet be. The source material is a series of technical documents created by the Berlin Senate Department for Urban Development and Environmental Protection in 1986, shortly before the city’s unification. Here Brown is investigating how urban plans project order by abstracting urban reality, reveling in the precision and beauty of maps to reassure us that we know enough to continue building in the face of constant uncertainty. James Glisson, curator at the SBMA, states in the catalog for Brown’s show there, “both Piranesi and Brown take maps as forums for dreaming and imagining, sheets of paper transformed by the artist’s willful intervention. Neither, however, creates maps of mythical realms, alien planets, or an Earth centuries hence. Their dreaming is circumscribed by history and its manifestations in the built environment.”

The Forgeries are Brown’s newest body of work that responds directly to contemporary art’s portrayals of architecture. In these pieces, Brown dismantles photographs by several contemporary artists and reassembles them to create collages that borrow pictorial strategies from the early modern architect and prolific collagist, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The Forgeries play a double game. Brown retools Mies’ pictorial flatland as a mirror to reflect contemporary art’s gaze back on itself and constructs new spaces that subvert our attempts to separate the two creative worlds of architecture and art.

 

Marshall Brown is an artist and architect whose work creates new connections, associations, and meanings among disconnected architectural and urban remnants. His 2022-23 show, The Architecture of Collage at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, was Brown’s first solo museum exhibition and the most comprehensive presentation of his collages to date. Brown’s work is held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Photography and the University Club, both in Chicago. Brown has 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 in a 10-year survey, Recurrent Visions: The Architecture of Marshall Brown Projects, at the Princeton University School of Architecture. Marshall Brown received his masters’ degrees at Harvard University. He is an associate professor with tenure at the Princeton University School of Architecture, where he directs the Princeton Urban Imagination Center. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Pictured: Museum , 2023, collage on Arches watercolor paper, artist’s tape. 22.5 x 30 inches

 

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For Somewhere between the Eyes and the Heart, his first solo presentation at Western Exhibitions, Leasho Johnson considers the human condition by rethinking notions of looking and seeing, daring the viewer to contemplate what they know versus how they feel about diverging factors of one’s humanity. In his mixed-medium paintings, often executed on paper and then mounted to canvas, Johnson utilizes the effect of Fragmentation as a methodological foil for disruption and coping with a legacy of violence on the black queer body. Combining charcoal and homemade paints as well as natural dyes, Johnson straddles the line between fluidity and chance, as well as precision and improvisation. Somewhere between the Eyes and the Heart opens in Gallery 1 at Western Exhibitions, Chicago on June 23 with a free public reception from 5 to 8 pm and will run through August 12.

Leasho Johnson refers to his paintings as portraits, though he uses the word ‘portrait’ loosely as these works are not representations of anyone in particular; Johnson uses the “portrait” format to focus on more intimate subjects, a moment, or a memory. For example, Grammazone recalls childhood memories of eavesdropping on his mother’s conversations with her friends, touching on topics of silent violence, and subtle acts of revenge between lovers sometimes because of domestic abuse or cheating, remedied by using this poison. The rhythms of No Wanga Gut, a popular song by the dancehall artist Tiger, are embedded in this painting as admonitions of accepting food from strangers. These childhood memories and moments mark the social anxiety and, at times horror, he remembers from this time.

Free to be constant in my excess (pictured above) is a painting born of a conversation with a colleague regarding tall athletic women and their presence. Fighting back against the American Far-Right’s agenda against trans youths and the so-called ‘woke’ agenda, Johnson ponders how much both masculinity and femininity are bound up in one body and how gender is expressed in the excess of both what is expected and what is performed but never the ideal of either.

Born from layer upon layer of charcoal blended seamlessly with brushy strokes of painted color, Johnson’s matte black silhouettes stand starkly against atmospheric color-fields, as they sample from and interrogate stereotypical notions around blackness and its inhumanity. In a recent interview with Rianna Jade Parker in Frieze, Johnson discussed his striking palette: I want all the colours to be able to merge into black. I think about Blackness as a substance. In terms of space—in terms of being—blackness can be seen as a void. But it’s a void full of potential: there are so many possibilities within that universe. It’s all about a feeling, a mood.

 

Leasho Johnson (1984, Montego Bay, Jamaica) received a BFA from Edna Manley College in 2009, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2020. In fall 2022, Johnson was an artist-in-residence at Fountainhead, Miami. Most recently, his work has been exhibited at Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada; TERN Gallery, Nassau; Harper’s, Los Angeles and East Hampton; Western Exhibitions, Chicago; FLXST Contemporary, Chicago; Suzie Wong Presents, Kingston; National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston; The Green Gallery, Milwaukee; and National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, Nassau. Johnson’s work has been written about in Frieze, Chicago Magazine, The Miami Rail, Fader, and Caribbean Beat, among other publications. Johnson splits his time between Jamaica and Chicago.

 

Pictured: Free to be constant in my excess, 2021. Charcoal, distemper, watercolors, acrylic, oil, oil stick, and collage on paper mounted on canvas. 52h x 55w x 2d in.

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View the show on our website here

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Ruby T offers paintings that are meditations on the fraught genre of landscape painting through the lens of ecstatic queer earth worship. Mega Meadow Liquidation opens in Gallery 2 at Western Exhibitions, Chicago on June 23 with a free public reception from 5 to 8 pm and will run through August 12. 

The paintings in this show feature grass, flowers, water, and leaves that float and slip across scraps of marbled silk and beaded tendrils. Some imagery is rendered with a quick and cartooning hand while other moments are slow, observational, and meticulous. Ruby creates her painting surfaces by stitching together and embroidering silk and drop cloth. The effect is a collision of texture, structure, and meaning; not unlike the meadows of the so-called United States, which are both teeming with vibrant plant and animal life, as well as centuries of trauma and dispossession.

Ruby made these paintings during and shortly after a residency at Shandaken, which takes place in a meadow on Lenape land, very close to the home and studio of transcendentalist landscape painter Thomas Cole. Thomas Cole and his romanticist Hudson River School cohort created paintings that served as infrastructure for the nationalist mythology of the United States as “wild,” “untamed,” and “natural” i.e. ripe for colonization. Ruby went to the meadow with a desire to spiritually affirm her non-belonging to that land and redirect her own transcendentalist and earth-loving tendencies toward an inverted, or queer, project of deconstructing Cole’s mythology of landscape painting. Meditations, private performances, and rituals gave way to a tangle of images and stories which she then translated into the works in this exhibition.

In Meadow Composite Wholesale Liquidation Transcendence Blowout, meadows and grasses from the Hudson River Valley and Provincetown stack and dip beyond each others’ borders, zooming in and out of rendering, as Ruby’s fear of losing sight of them (to the dark; to their destruction) makes her paint them more quickly. In Flower Gut System, the artist’s intestines merge with the meadow’s root systems, creating a warped and gnarled digestion system that bulges and shrinks as sea levels rise and super shopping centers continue to liquidate and liquidate so hard that they turn into meadows again and certain flowers and grasses are still deep in the earth, waiting.

This is Ruby T’s second solo show at Western Exhibitions and she has had solo and two-person exhibitions in Chicago at Randy Alexander Gallery, Roots & Culture and The Back Room at Kim’s Corner Food. Group exhibitions and screenings include Hales Gallery in New York; Hyde Park Art Center, Iceberg Projects, Weinberg/ Newton Gallery, Gallery 400, ACRE Projects, and Roman Susan, all in Chicago; and at Monaco in St. Louis. Her work has been written about and reviewed in the Chicago Tribune, Newcity, The Chicago Reader, and Chicago Artist Writers. Ruby T received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016 and lives and works in Provincetown, Mass.

 

Pictured: Meadow Composite Wholesale Liquidation Transcendence Blowout, 2023, oil, acrylic, and machine embroidery on silk and dropcloth, 32 x 23.5 inches

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Journie Cirdain thinks of the drawing surface as a locus for thought, puns, personal narrative, scraps of information, remembered art history, daydreams, desires and other tangled remnants of everyday life to magically become visual. For Cirdain, drawing is the flower child of art; it’s non-aggressive, laid back, experimental, lascivious, and sometimes deceptive, at least to a less observant person. For her first show at Western Exhibitions, Cirdain combines traditional drawing tropes—still life, observational drawing, even bouquets—with invented images from the subconscious that elucidates her place in the world. The show opens on Friday, September 8 with a free public reception at our Chicago location from 5 to 8pm. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm.

Cirdain’s drawings are materially minimalist, pared down to wood, graphite, and paper. Visually, they explode with a Baroque detail as Cirdain scuffs and cobbles her images together, growing organically. These are notes from the forest, a tongue in cheek psychedelic attempt to mark down the infinite and ineffable way in which all things touch, change and create each other. 

Cirdain directs her images by a word, object, or with her actual body, which is placed into the center of the surface like a stone. A wide range of scratches, scribbles, smears, and detailed drawing techniques reveal the system of connections that builds upon a philosophical inquiry about how to live life. For her, drawing elaborates, crosses out, copies, and plays with the art that came before it. Her images are sometimes ironic, sometimes earnest, as Cirdain wrestles with imposed parameters, histories, and situations in her life. Her compositions are contrived together from real life observation, from the memory of the observation, or from the idea that the observation insights. They are then glued together with the myriad and infinite number of details that are specific to her experience and location at the time of making.

These drawings hold a wide-open attitude towards life. Still lives come alive, and the human experience is augmented by otherness. Borrowing from the emotional tenor of a fairy tale, Cirdain’s drawings are sometimes beautiful, sometimes gruesome, and often impossible. Cirdain enjoys taking things one step further. For example, not just a memento mori, but a memento mori which borrows from 600,000 years of human impact on the death and life cycle. She asks questions which are not limited by judgements about what matters or doesn’t. What happens while we sleep? How do flowers experience desire? What is a tree's perspective of time? 

Journie Nikala Cirdain (born 1993, Santa Rosa, California) has shown in exhibitions at The Green Gallery in Milwaukee, Leo Marchutz School in Aix-En-Provence, France and in Illinois at the Elmhurst Art Museum, Bridgeport Art Center and Patient Info. Her work in the 2023 Western Exhibitions Drawing Biennial was written about in Hyperallergic and Chicago Reader and her writing has appeared in Chicago Artist Writers and FNEWS Magazine. Cirdain received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she was the recipient of the New Artist Society full merit scholarship, and currently lives and works in Chicago, IL.

 

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The Runner, a new animated film and project series by Lauren Wy, foregrounds her second solo show at Western Exhibitions. Taking a cue from late 60’s and early 70’s films, especially Le Weekend by Jean-Luc Godard, the animation and its attendant sculptural edition distill the spirit of fantasy escapism, of running away into a dream. The show opens on Friday, September 8, with a free public reception at our Chicago location from 5 to 8 pm. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11 am to 6 pm.

Wy’s animated film is a surrealist collage experiment utilizing analog processes with digital tools and altered frame rates to create a time-based pseudo-narrative drawing that embraces a raw provisionality. The short film is presented alongside a series of large-scale drawings and paintings on thin, mechanically flat synthetic surfaces. Inspired by American New Wave cinema and Science Fiction literature, Wy weaves her personal narrative into the collage as a further exploration of the Auto-theory elements present in her recent Autodesire series. The Runneranimates saturated dancing color scenes of vintage cars speeding through dream landscapes. A woman character is an archetype, a titan, a goddess, a replicant, a Chimera, shapeshifting from human to animal to machine; from human skin to cheetah running, from feathered bird to Mercedes Benz; always pitched forward in the perpetual forward motion of running. 

The Runner is a forgotten tarot card, found only in very special edition card decks blessed by an infinite alien intelligence. The Runner is a political riot, outsider angel, animal hybrid, telekinetic. The Runner rides the hard metal body of a car to and through desire. Long desert roads like the surface of Mars; forests darker than hell. The Runner is always a seeker; they are about seeking. Seeking Tanis, Runner Available. *

Lauren Wy (USA, b. 1987) focuses on desire, the body, and the psyche, producing artworks that materialize in a fragmentary narrative, a residue of process and color. Western Exhibitions presented her first solo show post-grad school in 2021, debuting the first five Chapters of her multi-chapter project AUTODESIRE, individual drawings from a massive graphic novel — each presented on two small handmade wood panels, hinged, as to function simultaneously as drawing/sculpture/artist book — depicting an abstracted story of a heroine who is making a journey through a bacchanalian road trip. Chapter 9: Grift X of AUTODESIRE was recently acquired by Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, in Turin, Italy. Elements of the AUTODESIRE series have been presented at Castello di Rivoli, Biblioteca Reale in Turin, Western Exhibitions in Chicago and at the art fairs ArtVerona, Artissima and NADA Miami. Wy has been included in the 6th Athens Biennial in Greece and shown at Societe Interludio in Turin, Over the Influence in Los Angeles, Kunstraum Walcheturm in Zurich and Apparatus Projects in Chicago. Wy received her MFA from Northwestern University in 2020 and currently lives and works nomadically. Her Italy-based work is represented by Peola Simondi Gallery.

*Seeking Tanis, Runner Available is a reference to the Tanis Podcast by Terry Miles. The Runner is not affiliated with or represents this podcast.

 

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Deb Sokolow’s fifth show with Western Exhibitions opens with a free public reception on Friday, November 3, from 5 to 8pm. 

Concurrent with this show, Sokolow’s work will also be on view in the 5th iteration of the Chicago Architecture Biennial.

Deb Sokolow (b.1974 Davis, CA) is an artist and writer whose schematic drawings and books visualize an idiosyncratic architectural future with both criticality and humor. A number of these maquette-like renderings respond through a feminist lens to the history of architecture and to the social engineering involved in designing the built environment. Her work has been included in the 4th Athens Biennale (Athens, Greece) and in exhibitions at Museum für Gegenwartskunst (Siegen, Germany), Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, Netherlands), The Drawing Center (New York), the Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (Hartford). Sokolow’s drawings have been reproduced for BOMB Magazine, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Best American Comics and in Phaidon’s Vitamin D2. Collections include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. She received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and a BFA from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Sokolow, based in Chicago, is a recipient of the Artadia award, two Illinois Arts Council Agency visual arts fellowships and is on faculty in the department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University.

Image: Visualizing an Interstitial Zone of Space , 2023, Graphite, crayon, colored pencil, pastel and collage on paper, 11h x 8 1/2w x 1d in

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View the show on our website here 

Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present Courttney Cooper’s second solo show at the gallery, America’s Octoberfest. Zinzinnati. U.S.A., featuring exuberant drawings of his hometown. Cooper’s subjective, large-scale aerial-view sub-maps of Cincinnati utilize found copier paper, ballpoint pens, and a deep knowledge of the city built upon a lifetime of traveling on city buses, walking downtown, and taking car trips with friends. Hand-drawn from memory over the course of 6 to 12 months, each map bursts with passionate energy, dedicated observation and sly commentary on the only city this 45-year-old has ever lived in.

Rendered in ballpoint pen on stitched-together sheets of paper that Cooper collects from his day job at a local Krogers, his maps are the product of both observation and memory. Cooper often depicts the city in an aerial three-quarter view, meticulously transcribing changes in its architecture and environment based his own encounters around town. These drawings also represent an imaginary layer of the city that only Cooper inhabits, what he calls Zinzinnati USA. In this city, it’s always Oktoberfest — a smorgasbord of revelry in which the cityscape is layered with fantastic imagery and text.

 

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From Western Exhibitions’ founder, Scott Speh, in a 2016 interview with Artinfo:

I was initially drawn to Courttney’s maps as I grew up in Cincinnati, so I had a personal relationship to imagery. But I think anybody could look at these and, even if they had no idea where Cincinnati even was, they could be awed by the mark marking, the undulations of space, and even the drawings as objects. Collecting papers from work, he glues it together and then folds it over and over so he can carry it wherever he goes, continually adding to it until deeming it finished. The works end up being almost quilt-like, especially as they age. A piece from 2011 has the consistency of an old dollar bill — it’s got this kind of thickness and weight to it, but it’s also soft. We hang the drawings unframed for this reason: they have a sculptural quality, taking on a kind of life of their own once they get on the wall.

One of the things I find fascinating on a formal level — and one of the aspects of his work that remains constant — is his conception of space in a three-quarter view, like an architectural rendering. The buildings have dimensionality to them and it’s almost like if he was like a bird flying over the hill from Northern Kentucky and can behold Cincinnati from that direction. These are works about imagination as much as they are documentation.

 

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Courttney Cooper’s Cincinnati Map from 2011 was recently acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and he was the subject of a feature in Raw Visionsummer 2022. His solo show at Intuit: The Center for Intuit and Outsider Art in Chicago in spring of 2016 was reviewed in artforum.com and New City. His 2-person show (with Cole Carothers) at The Cincinnati Art Museum in 2013 was reviewed in CityBeat and AEQAI and he has exhibited extensively in the Greater Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky area including the Contemporary Art Center and The Carnegie Visual and Performing Arts Center, Covington, KY and is a studio resident at Visionaries + Voices, a non-profit arts organization that provides support for artists with disabilities, offering them professional studio space and that allows them to grow professionally and personally. His work at Western Exhibitions’ booth at the 2017 Outsider Art Fair was lauded in artnet and Brut Force. Cooper is the recipient of a 2015 Wyn Newhouse award and his work is included in a number of private and public collections including Cincinnati Art Museum and Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft.

 

Pictured: Cincinnati Map, 2018. Ink and collage on bond paper, 72h x 93w in.

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Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present Gayleen Aiken’s first ever show in Chicago, Gayleen Aiken: I Have Many Hobbies, organized by Peter Gallo and Sean Horton. Gayleen Aiken (1934–2005), a self-taught artist from Barre, Vermont, produced paintings and drawings that combined narrative text and image, cardboard cut-outs, and handmade books, often featuring a cast of recurring characters which she called the Raimbilli Cousins, members of an imaginary extended family that she invented as a child. The show will open in Gallery 2 at Western Exhibitions’ Chicago location with a free public reception on Friday, January 5, from 5 to 8 pm, and will run through February 24, 2023.

 

I first saw Gayleen Aiken’s paintings at an upstairs gallery and frame shop in Hanover, New Hampshire in the late summer of 1980. [...] Assembling the works for this exhibition has been, in many ways, a second chance for me to experience Gayleen’s work for the first time. It was also bittersweet as I revisited my memories of Gayleen, but also of my great friendship with Don who predeceased Gayleen in 2002. I sorted through hundreds of things many of which have never been publicly exhibited – and which perhaps Don had not even seen. Most of these works were discovered in the artist’s small living space after her death in 2005. These included, among other things, paintings, drawings, signs, cut-out figures, lists, broadsides, scrapbooks, handmade chapbooks and comics which are still being sorted through and documented at the former G.R.A.C.E. gallery in Hardwick, VT, which currently functions as a sort of makeshift archive for Gayleen’s enormous body of work.

Gayleen was a multi-media performance artist and the endless stream of artifacts she created were the elements of a sprawling but never finished gesamtkunstwerk. Those of us who had the good fortune to visit the artist at her home had to commit, prior to arrival, entire afternoons which she filled with elaborate and sometimes relentless programs of music, poetry, art, puppet shows, demonstrations of her latest gadgets, samplings of her fabulous record and music roll collections (among the many marvelous things in her tiny living space was an upright player piano…). I remember most fondly one winter afternoon Don and I arrived for a very short visit. Gayleen had arranged three colored lights – red, blue and green – on a dresser and spent the time making marvelous observations about the spectrum of light that bathed the wall behind them; it was stunning.

It is highly unlikely that a small selection (no matter how large that small selection might be!) of Aiken’s works could convey the range and beauty of her project; or the degree to which her life and her art were interwoven; there is simply so much material and so many ways to approach it. For example an entire exhibition could be devoted to the way her work documents the technological transformation of musical experience during the second part of the last century. Beginning in the late 1950’s Gayleen even made extensive notations in her scrapbooks on who bought televisions in her neighborhood! Another could map out the ways that modernity during her lifetime had transfigured the countryside between villages and cities from orchards to strip-malls and housing developments. What this selection does highlight is the degree Gayleen devoted herself to her subjects and themes and the brilliant maneuvers she pulled off to keep these subjects and themes so alive.

– Peter Gallo

 

Gayleen Aiken (1934-2005, Barre, VT) has been featured in exhibitions at the American Visionary Museum, Baltimore; the Fairbanks Museum, St. Johnsbury, VT; the Vermont Granite Museum, Barre, VT; the Henry Sheldon Museum of Vermont History, Middlebury; the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, Williamsburg, VA; the Gallery at Lincoln Center, New York; Horton Gallery, New York; Luise Ross Gallery, New York; and KS Art, New York; among others. Her work is currently featured in If You Build It, They Will Come: Visionary Artists & Their Environmentsat the American Visionary Museum, Baltimore.

The artist is in the permanent collection of the American Folk Art Museum, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Museum of American Folk Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others. She is the subject of Jay Craven’s award-winning film, Gayleen, and was a recipient of a Vermont Council on the Arts fellowship. In 1997, Harry B. Abrams, Inc. released Moonlight and Music: The Enchanted World of Gayleen Aiken. Her artwork has been featured in The New York Times, Raw Vision, The Brooklyn Rail and The Boston Globe.

 

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View the show on our website here 

Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present our fifth solo show with Elijah Burgher. In Our Lady of the Latrines, Burgher focuses his ongoing engagement with iconography from ancient history and religion in a new series of drawings that take as their subject the notorious 3rd-century Roman emperor, Elagabalus. The drawings will be accompanied by a presentation of sketchbook pages and research notes as well as an essay by the artist exploring the occult dimensions of the myths surrounding the life of the emperor. Our Lady of the Latrines opens in Gallery 1, alongside Juliet Jacobson’s show in Gallery 2, at our Chicago location on Friday, February 23 with a free public reception from 5 to 8 pm. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11 am to 6 pm.

During their* brief reign, the teenage emperor, Elagabalus, shocked the senate, soldiers, and general public by replacing Jupiter at the summit of the pantheon with the Syrian solar deity, Elagabal; coercing senators to participate in rituals from the eastern provinces that they deemed exotic and uncouth; and committing the sacrilege of marrying a vestal virgin so as to bear god-like children. They were also said to have made political appointments based on penis size, prostituted themself in the imperial palace, built a luxurious suicide tower so they could perish in style, and smothered guests to death at a dinner party with an avalanche of flower petals. Elagabalus ruled a mere four years until their assassination by the praetorian guard in 222. By one account, they hid from their pursuers in the palace latrines where they were discovered and slain. These thrilling but dubious stories and others like them form the basis of Elagabalus’s myth: the boy emperor as corrupt tyrant, sexual deviant and religious zealot. In the modern period, starting roughly with the Decadent art movement, Elagabalus’s fortunes began to turn. They have been subsequently recast as an uncompromising aesthete, anarchist and sexual martyr. Originally demonised, Elagabalus has belatedly been deified by their admirers nearly two millennia after their death.

 

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Wheels, Holes and Coins for E/H (Constant Shallowness Leads to Evil), 2023. Graphite and watercolor on paper, 16h x 12w in.

 

In Burgher’s essay on the emperor, originally published in Religious Studies Review and presented at the Occulture Conference in October 2023, he brackets considerations of the historical person who came to be known as Elagabalus and focuses on the myths and legends surrounding them instead. He interprets these accumulated stories and images as the centuries-long formation of an egregore, a spiritual entity generated by collective patterns of belief. Burgher states that “the concept has the advantage of emphasising a collective relationship to images, and positing both the demonic power of those images and the agency of individuals and communities in sustaining and even drawing power from those images through imagination and ritual.” He additionally asks what a belated deification and contemporary cult of Elagabalus would entail: “What is her desire? How do those of us who count ourselves amongst her lovers best serve her? What do we gain—or lose—in devoting ourselves to her?”

Burgher sketches a response to these questions in “Our Lady of the Latrines” through sustained meditation on the likeness of Elagabalus, drawing from surviving imperial busts and coins as well as later representations in the works of Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Simeon Solomon and others. The artist elaborates their image with hatched colored pencil over washes of watercolor. The technique imparts a flickering, chromatically intense surface to the portraits that summons the spirit of the emperor into the present. Other works depict salacious anecdotes about the emperor’s life. “Judgment of Paris” pictures Elagabalus playing the role of Venus on stage while senators in the audience react with a mixture of disgust and excitement. In “The Black Stone,” an orgy of revellers gyrate around the phallic meteorite that was the focal point of the cult of which the emperor served as high priest. In these latter works, Burgher loosens his grip on his materials, allowing his line to dance more freely around the paper and the watercolors to pool and reticulate. These modestly scaled works on paper serve a devotional function while ironically engaging with the hoary conventions of history painting. The exhibition will also include a selection of Burgher’s sketchbook pages, composition studies and research notes, a key component of his practice that has not been regularly shown.

 

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Judgment of Paris, 2023, Colored pencil and watercolor on paper, 14 x 10 in.

 

*Elagabalus’s gender and sexuality have been the subject of recent debates. For instance, the North Hertfordshire Museum in the UK recently reclassified Elagabalus as transgender and now uses “she/her’ pronouns for the emperor. This press release makes use of “they/them” to encompass traditional and revisionist accounts of the historical person as well as their many mythic avatars, including fin de siècle, surrealist, gay, and trans renderings of the emperor’s story and image.

 

Elijah Burgher is an artist and occasional writer currently living in Berlin. His work was featured in Scrivere Disegnando: When Language Seeks Its Other at Centre d’Art Contemporain, 2020; For Opacity at the Drawing Center in New York City, 2018; the 2014 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City; the 2014 Gwangju Biennial; and The Temptation of AA Bronson at the Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam, 2014. He has recently exhibited at the Schwules Museum in Berlin, LAXART in Los Angeles and the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa. He has attended residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Fire Island Artist Residency. His work has been discussed in The New York Times, Art in America, Frieze, ArtReview, Artforum and was included in VITAMIN D2, the hardcover survey of contemporary drawing. He received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. Elijah Burgher is represented by P.P.O.W in New York City, Western Exhibitions in Chicago and Ivan Gallery in Bucharest.

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View the show on our website here 

Juliet Jacobson makes pictures about pictures. Her still life drawings, made with gouache on paper and a patient tender hand, are meditations on how images are constructed. Jacobson makes pictures that are not so much about what is depicted, but rather about the experience of seeing, investigating the slipperiness of perceived reality. This show, her first at Western Exhibitions, opens in Gallery 2 at our Chicago location, alongside Elijah Burgher’s show in Gallery 1. A free public reception will be held on Friday, February 23 from 5 to 8pm. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm.

Jacobson borrows from a literary approach when assembling her compositions. She takes particular inspiration from how novels are able to combine a dizzying number of perspectives, prompting readers to juggle different characters’ voices and variable modes of address, each with a unique frame of reference. The process for each drawing includes painting, photography and collage. She often uses photographic material, posters, prints, or stock photos as substrate for her compositions. The original single-point perspective embedded in photographic material becomes fragmented when rephotographed. This is complicated even more by the undulating surface of crumpled or torn paper, further highlighting the many facets of perspective.

Jacobson depicts elements at actual size on top of their photographic referents. These elements are drawn from everyday life. For this show she has focused on roses, each with a different backstory: garden flowers stolen from a parking lot near the studio; blooms plucked from outside her apartment window; and showy commercial varieties purchased in bodegas and upscale flower shops. Each plant is rendered in a trompe l’oeil manner with great fidelity and detail. Each photograph is portrayed with hyper realism, capturing everything from lens distortion to the crinkle of the photographic paper. These works also often include Jacobson’s own art-making process, such as dabs of paint in the margins of the picture where she has tested color, areas of negative space, and half-rendered areas that appear unfinished. These modulations in process offer a more directly graphical mode of expression. Because of this Jacobson’s drawings are philosophical meditations on the blend of clarity and confusion that accompanies everyday acts of sensing, looking, and knowing.

Juliet Jacobson (b. 1977, Puyallup, WA) has shown work in the 2008 Busan Biennial in Korea, The Warehouse Gallery at Syracuse University, and in group exhibitions at The Sphinx Northeast in Hudson, NY, Ritter/Zamet in London, AreoPlastics in Brussels, and in New York City at Klaus von Nichtssagend, Blackston, and Friedrich Petzel. She has had solo exhibitions at Planthouse and Two Rams, both in New York City, Season in Seattle, and Kevin Bruk in Miami. Jacobson’s work was recently featured on Platform and has been written about in The New York Times, Artforum and Art News. Jacobson received her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999 and her MFA from New York University in 2006. She currently splits time between New York City and Cold Spring, NY.

Image: Something R , 2023, Gouache and pencil on paper, 30 1/2 x 22 1/4 inches

 

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View the show on our website here

DURING EXPO CHICAGO, PLEASE JOIN US FOR ART AFTER HOURS  FRIDAY, APRIL 12TH, FROM 5-8 PM

Western Exhibitions is thrilled to announce our first solo show with Frances Waite, I Love it Here. Waite makes subversive photorealistic figurative graphite drawings that inhabit the zone of tension between truth and fantasy during intimate moments. The female crotch, mostly, is the focus of this body of work, though there is a butt or two. I Love it Here will open with a public reception on Friday, April 12, from 5 to 8pm, and will run through June 1, 2024, in gallery 2 at our Chicago location. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm.

When working on the drawings for I Love it Here, Waite noticed a note taped to her wall that read: “IT GETS WORSE.” This bleak rejoinder served as a reminder of how much was out of her control. Focusing on this note gave her a mantra to repeat during studio time: “Frankie, look how bad it can be, how nice it is to be here drawing this crotch instead.”

Waite’s graphite renderings depict up-close-and-personal moments of connection, exploration, and awe. Gentle and curious, the drawings allow viewers to understand her appreciation of these moments, even if there is an impending doom that creeps in around them. Waite elaborates on her position below:

 Despite my lifetime so far in the arts, the wonderful other artists I know, the shows and the reading, I’ve always felt very outside of this community when it comes to the actual drawing. Not at all in a bad way, and not because what I’m doing is really so different from what my peers are doing, but because the world I live in when I make these things only has room enough for me. I’m an expert in escapism and the only rule that applies is, I’m going alone. It feels in many ways that all the other things that come with art making, titles and names and context and history and “do you like it?”, couldn’t possibly have anything to do with this thing I’m doing. What I’m doing is unfolding one second into forever turning my phone off.

How many seconds do you get to watch somebody you love unbutton the top button? Or the light hit that thing so nice. Or the hair swirl down the drain. And how could that ever be enough? I want to sit in that moment and waste some time. I love it there :)

Frances Waite (b. 1993, Rochester, NY) has had solo shows at Setareh X in Düsseldorf, Elijah Wheat Showroom in New York and Cob Gallery in London and has been included in group shows at Adult Contemporary, Nashville; New Discretions, NYC; Western Exhibitions, Chicago, among several others. Her work has been written about and reproduced in Playboy, Elephant, Fukt Magazine for Contemporary Drawing, Dazed, Office Magazine and Vice's The Creators Project. In 2018 Vogue included Waite in their “World 100,” recognizing the most influential creators of the year. Waite received a BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York in 2015 and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Image: She's Perfect, 2022. Pencil Drawing on Arches Hot Press Watercolour Paper, 12h x 16w

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View the show on our website here

DURING EXPO CHICAGO, PLEASE JOIN US FOR ART AFTER HOURS  FRIDAY, APRIL 12TH, FROM 5-8 PM

Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present our fourth solo exhibition with Edie Fake. Featuring a new body of gouache on panel paintings in Gallery 1, Fake shifts away from concerns over ecological disaster in favor of a focus on the power and wisdom of plant life, and the pace at which it grows and unfurls. The show opens at our Chicago location on Friday, April 12 with a public reception from 5 to 8pm, and will run through June 1. Gallery hours are Tuesday-Saturday, 11am to 6pm. 

Plotted out beforehand using graphite pencil, rulers and protractors, and hand-painted with the illusion of hard-edged precision, Fake’s compositions are reliant on the logic of Tarot card design and draw inspiration from the spiritual diagrams of Emma Kunz. Featuring a newfound focus on fabric patterns and perfume bottles, this body of work is also dotted with flower blossoms, sometimes still attached to daisy-chained or trellised stems. Similar to Fake’s guided meditation drawing instructions published in the New York Times during quarantine, the bold, graphic line work and luminous color gradation of these new works conjure up an Ernst Haeckel botanical illustration set in stained glass.

While much of Fake’s previous work has focused on what the artist calls “ecstatic architecture,” this new series of paintings evolves that concept through an exploration of what might be considered ecstatic ecology.

Edie Fake (b. 1980, Evanston, IL) is a painter and visual artist whose work examines issues of trans identity in queer space, through the lens of architecture and ornamentation. Fake has exhibited in solo shows at Berkeley Art Museum and Film Archive; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse; Providence College Galleries, Rhode Island; in New York City at The Drawing Center, Broadway Gallery and Marlborough Gallery, and has recently exhibited publications, paintings and a large wall installation in Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Fake’s work is held in the collections of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, Columbus; Des Moines Art Center, Iowa; RISD Museum, Providence; KADIST, San Francisco; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas; and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California. His work has been written about and featured in Artforum, Art in America, New York Times, The Paris Review, Art News, Art 21, Juxtapoz, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. Fake received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2002. He is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and Broadway Gallery in New York and currently lives and works in Twentynine Palms, California.

Image: Bustle, 2024. Acrylic and gouache on wood panel, 48h x 48w in.

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Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present our first solo exhibition with Krista Franklin, any bright spark. Using handmade paper, found ledgers, text, collaged images from vintage magazines, and pulped album covers (among other materials) as a form of visual poetry – she is also a well-regarded published poet – Franklin’s work takes a haptic approach to archiving and inventorying personal and universal joy, beauty, pain, and transformation. Says Franklin: “Collage is an act of resistance. It is not only a thing to be made, but a way of making anything.” The show will open with a public reception on Friday, June 7, from 5 to 8pm, and will run through August 17, 2024. Western Exhibitions is located at 1709 W Chicago Ave, Chicago, IL. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm.

The exhibition includes a salon-style wall of unframed collages, some of which riff on Franklin’s love of the biosphere, the amorphous, the natural world, and an enduring love of the Marvelous. Themes, ideas, visuals include: dreamscapes and landscapes; “the supernatural”; the natural world in its most exaggerated or fantastic forms; hybridity; journal pages, cut-ups, writing as submerged and subtext; layers; the legible and illegible. This wall is an unadulterated introduction to Franklin’s hands-on, textural approach to thinking and making.

Franklin is an image hunter. Drawing from personal and public archives and collected printed matter – most specifically vintage magazines from the 1950’s through the 70’s – Franklin moves between the past and present through deft manipulation of Black ephemera, photographic archives, and publications. Her paintings and collages drift between the physical and metaphysical worlds and the Fantastic, and reflect her interest in the collisions between cultures and spaces, real and imagined, ultimately turning collage into a way of seeing, focusing on what has been cut out and what has been pasted in. 

Exhibited for the first time, Franklin’s multi-media series of collaged paintings containing spiral, tornado-like gestures with brush, pencil or pen, reflect growing up in Dayton, Ohio where the threat of tornadoes is prevalent; her mother and sister are both survivors of separate severe weather encounters. The swirling gestures function as a record-keeping of familial and geographical memory. Franklin uses ledger paper as support for collages in another body of work. The ledgers, found in an old railroad yard and gifted to her by an artist in Iowa, function as a visual allusion to the inventorying and itemizing of human life during and after the transatlantic slave trade and all its attending histories and horrors. The titles of three of the works are borrowed lines from Katherine McKittrick’s book, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (2006), which also largely informs some of the visuality that takes shape in this series. She will also exhibit collages for the first time inspired by William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s method of the cut-up, one of the writing processes she uses to write poems and lyric essays. 

Much of Franklin’s work centers Black music and culture, here boldly realized in her series “Heavy Rotation” on view in Gallery 2. “Music is the underscore for everything I do,” Franklin says, “It’s the pulse of everything I make and write.” This series, started in 2014, consists primarily of works in handmade paper formed from pulped and deconstructed album covers. The paper itself is the artwork, not just a substrate for collage/drawing/painting, often with graphics from the cover art embedded or barely visible. Paradoxically, for work created from musical artifacts, the pieces in this series are about visual quietude. “Heavy Rotation” is Franklin’s attempt to discover if sound and memory can be visually or otherwise “captured.”

Krista Franklin (b. 1970) creates books, poetry, collages, handmade paper, installations, murals, performances, sound works, sculptures, and lectures. She is the author of Solo(s)(University of Chicago Press, 2022), Too Much Midnight (Haymarket Books, 2020), the artist book Under the Knife (Candor Arts, 2018), and the chapbook Study of Love & Black Body (Willow Books, 2012). She is a recipient of the Helen and Tim Meier Foundation for the Arts Achievement Award and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. Her solo shows include Solo(s) at the DePaul Art Museum in Chicago, which traveled to Colorado College; The Poetry Foundation in Chicago; and the Chicago Cultural Center, among others. She’s been included in group shows at the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Konsthall C, Stockholm, Sweden; the Oakland Museum of California, CA; the Columbia Museum of Art, South Carolina; The Carnegie, Covington, KY; as set dressing for national television shows; and in Chicago at Museum of Contemporary Photography, Stony Island Arts Bank, National Museum of Mexican Art, Gallery 400, Hyde Park Art Center, Produce Model and RUSCHWOMAN. She has been published in Poetry, Black Camera, The Offing, Vinyl, and in several anthologies and artist books. Franklin received her MFA from Columbia College Chicago in 2013. She lives and works in Chicago.

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Please join us on August 31 at WX Chicago from 10 AM to 4 PM for an extraordinary opportunity to dive into the vibrant world of the WesternXeditions artist book and zine inventory during our summer sale! Most titles will be available at prices 20 to 50% off the retail cost.  In addition to the books and zines, we are offering some empty picture frames, in excellent condition, from our inventory, at low, low prices.

Artists included:

Academy Records, Michelle Blade, Marshall Brown, Elijah Burgher, Jessica Campbell, The Colleagues, Vincent Como, Corpus Corpus, Mary Climes, Abraham Díaz, Inés Estrada, Edie Fake, Derek Fansler & Scott Wolniak, Joey Fauerso, Nicholas Frank, Aron Gent, Kenya Hanley, Terrence Hannum, Nina Hartman, Amelia Ishmael, Sarah Jones & Corkey Sinks, Damara Kaminecki, Angee Lennard, Leah Mackin, Miller & Shellabarger, Dutes Miller, Matt Morris, Rachel Niffenegger, Paul Nudd, Robyn O'Neil, Onsmith + Nudd, Maria Petschnig, Kristen Romaniszak, Stan Shellabarger, Deb Sokolow, Ruby T, Mark Wagner, Western Exhibitions, Ella Weber, Faith Wilding, Scott Wolniak.

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Details

Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present our first solo show, “Great!” with Cathrine Whited, whose deadpan drawings transform mundane and everyday items into revered icons. Whited’s charming, slyly simple drawings combine image and text to document and archive the world around her, with subjects ranging from household objects to food to cartoon characters. Her process starts with making a list — “What’s in my fridge” or “Things that make up a sandwich” — as a jumping off point. Each item on the list is drawn with graphite and colored pencil, distilled to its essential elements, and labeled underneath, akin to a Victorian-era scientific journals and classifications of nature. Whited is meticulous in this process as an index of erasures is often visible, marking her desire to render the image, and especially the text, perfectly. Her subject-centered renderings are neat, clean, and void of background and are a vehicle for viewers to isolate, experience, and analyze our collective everyday interaction with often overlooked objects and culture that surrounds us.

Cathrine Whited is a studio resident at Visionaries + Voices, a non-profit arts organization that provides support for artists with disabilities, offering them professional studio space and that allows them to grow professionally and personally. Whited has been included in shows at the Cincinnati Art Museum, Western Exhibitions in Chicago, The Riffe Gallery in Columbus, The Carnegie Art Center in Covington, KY, Indigo Hippo in Cincinnati, and Summertime Gallery in Brooklyn, her work has been written about on the website Elephant, The Columbus Dispatch and Hyperallergic, and has been featured on Bounty Paper Towels. She lives and works in Cincinnati.

The show will open with a free public reception on Friday, September 6, from 5 to 8pm at our Chicago location alongside a solo show by Aya Nakamura in Gallery One. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm.

Image: Turkey/Chicken , date unknown, graphite and colored pencil on bond paper, 8.5 x 11 inches

 

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Details

Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present our second solo show with Aya Nakamura, featuring a group of new drawings that revolve around vision in meditation, and its relationship to inner visions and dreams. The show will open with a public reception on Friday, September 6, from 5 to 8pm at our Chicago location, alongside a solo show by Catherine Whited in Gallery Two. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm.

Aya Nakamura’s work is influenced by a philosophy of mind that does not exclusively locate consciousness in the human, derived from interacting with plants and following posthumanist research in biology and anthropology. Nakamura’s drawings are colored pencil on handmade paper of different sizes and shapes, which have a physicality and assert themselves during the drawing process. Variegated lines move across, alongside and into fields of color, and these assemble into amorphous compositions that appear to simultaneously build and dissolve. Some have visual links to existing symbols and objects, which provide a starting point and focus. Inspirations for recent drawings are various but orbit around a cataclysmic event, the passing of a loved one in the spring of 2021. They are meditations on death and metaphysics, and provide a space for questioning, grief, memorial, humor, and healing.

Aya Nakamura’s first show at Western Exhibitions in 2022 was reviewed in New City. She has shown at venues in the United States and abroad, recently at Secrist Beach and Heaven, both in Chicago, and at The Hangar and Dawawine in Beirut, Lebanon; Supa Salon in Istanbul, Turkey; Mana Decentralized in Jersey City, NJ; and MPSTN in Fox River Grove, IL. She is the recipient of the Denbo Fellowship from Pyramid Atlantic Art Center and the George and Ann Siegel Fellowship from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a member of Chicago API (Asian, Pacific Islander) and Artists United (CAAU). Nakamura was born in Japan and educated in France and the United States, holding a BA in Fine Arts and Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania, and a MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Nakamura currently lives and works in Chicago.

Image: Warming , 2024, Colored pencil on handmade paper, 31 1/2h x 31 1/4w in

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 Western Exhibitions is humbled to announce our second show of the 2024 Fall season at our Chicago location, an exhibition that plumbs the history of the gallery through archival materials, press releases and the gallery owner’s to-do journals. Please join us for the opening reception on Friday, November 1 from 5 to 8pm. The show, 20 Years of Western Exhibitions, will run in Gallery 1 through December 21. In Gallery 2 during the same time frame, we are showing paintings by the New-York-by-way-of-China artist Zhi Ding, a new artist to us. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11am to 6pm. 

Western Exhibitions, started by Scott Speh as a nomadic space in 2002, put on shows in other people’s spaces, friends’ lofts and Speh’s apartment. Western Exhibitions participated in the second Stray Show, one of the first satellite fairs, in tandem with Art Chicago. (“Stray” was a term coined by Chicago critic Chuck Mutscheller in 2000 to describe the spaces involved in the resurgence of the alternative art scene in Chicago during the late ’90s.) The gallery then moved into an actual space, a shared “loft” with Lisa Boyle in 2004. They co-habited two locations in West Town the next four years until Speh finally quit his day job in 2008.  The gallery moved into the West Loop, then the heart of Chicago’s contemporary art gallery scene, at the behest of Shannon Stratton, who was moving her seminal not-for-profit gallery Threewalls into a larger space in the 119 N Peoria Building and asked us to take over their old lease. 

A couple years prior, through the help of friend (and patron) Jason Pickleman, the gallery sold several artists books by Miller & Shellabarger to Lew Manilow, the legendary Chicago arts patron who helped found Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art (and was a political activist proud to be on Nixon’s enemies list.) In planning the first show in the new space by Stan Shellabarger which would focus on his artist book practice, Speh asked Pickleman, who had designed the catalog for the Manilow artist book collection to tell Lew about the show. Jason replied “YOU call him.” So Speh did, with great trepidation, in September 2008. The call was brief as he stumbled to remind Manilow who he was and what Lew had bought from the gallery. Manilow quickly cut Speh off to say “I can’t talk to you right now, the stock market is collapsing.” Speh groaned to himself: “How did I pick the worst time ever to quit my day job?”

And somehow, the gallery muddled through The Great Recession, participating then in a disastrous Armory show in March 2009 while the market was at its very bottom (the work we showed was great, mind you; it was disastrous as we couldn’t sell anything). We moved the gallery into the old Tony Wight Gallery space around the corner on Washington Boulevard, then moved again with the other two galleries in the Checkered Cab building, Document and Volume, to our current location on Chicago Avenue. Most of the rest of the Chicago gallery scene followed us to West Town. We opened a second location in 2022 in Skokie, yes, Skokie! All told, the gallery has had 6 locations and 3 logos; participated in over 60 art fairs, near and far; and has put on 233 shows that have included 425 artists. We are proud to also report that the gallery’s very first intern (a position she created herself), Jamilee Lacy, continued on into a successful curatorial career and is now Executive Director of the Frye Art Museum. So today, we look up from our laptop to realize that the gallery has been in business for 20 years. How’d that happen?!

20 Years, 6 Locations, 3 Logos, 233 Shows, 425 Artists

Image: Postcard from our first brick-and-mortar show, courtesy of The Anthony Elms Artist and Exhibition Ephemera Collection because the gallery founder wasn’t smart enough to save any for posterity

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Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present Drifting Shore, our first solo show with Zhi Ding. Please join us the public reception on Friday, November 1, from 5 to 8pm at our Chicago location alongside a show celebrating the gallery’s 20th anniversary in Gallery One. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm.

By observing and exploring her father’s simplified and idealized vision of the American Dream in a new series of small paintings, Zhi Ding not only reveals a romanticized and tailored American fantasy deeply rooted in the hearts of his generation but also uses it as a basis to further explore the human desire to escape and search for utopia, along with the paradox embedded in these dreams. The exhibition’s title implies this—the shore is both a point of departure and arrival. Drifting suggests less autonomy and more randomness, as one is controlled by a higher power. The “drifting shore” symbolizes a visible/tangible yet unattainable anchor point—a homeland that cannot be returned to, a destination that cannot be reached. It is not a real endpoint, but a vessel for carrying certain fantasies and hopes.

Certain motifs drift through the exhibition: a floating lawn, a red-roofed house with no doors, and burning cigarettes. The pristine lawn and the red-roofed house embody the American Dream as imagined by Ding’s father and his generation in China. At the same time, they reveal a certain longing and a concrete vision of a utopia that lived deep in the hearts of their generation. For Ding, one of the most familiar images of her father is of him smoking alone. She combines this personal memory with the vision of a perfect lawn, which symbolizes her father’s idealized version of himself in a better life, to create these melancholic yet absurd images. The burning cigarettes, a symbol of his identity and habits, clash with this idealized vision, foreign to the polished suburban life they admire; creating a tension — a sense of fragility and combustibility—this dream feels precarious, as if it could be destroyed at any moment.

In “In Silence, In Tears,” a blurred face and a simplified red-roofed house stand opposite each other, filled with longing but unable to connect. In “Brave the Wind and Waves,” a figure rides on a floating lawn that mimics a magical flying carpet—portraying the American Dream as a vessel for escape and fantasy for Ding’s father and his generation. Through these works, Ding explores the complex reality of the American Dream—layered with longing, fragility, illusions, and alienation. It’s a utopia built from idealized elements, offering solace while concealing the struggles beneath the surface.

Zhi Ding (b. 1992, Jiujiang, Jiangxi, China) recently opened her first solo show in Hong Kong at MOU PROJECTS. She obtained her BS in Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Pittsburgh in 2017, her Post-Bacc in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institution of Chicago in 2021, and her MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of Art Institute of Chicago in 2023. Ding currently lives and works in New York City.

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Simone Mantellassi: Carpeting In The Kitchen Incorporated


Opening reception: Friday, September 12, 5-8pm


Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present our first solo show with Simone Mantellassi, Carpeting In the Kitchen Incorporated. Mantellassi’s paintings on paper and sculptural tableaus poke fun at the tragicomedy life, tackling subjects ranging from two former American presidents, Captain Ahab, Ronald McDonald and the axis of evil, to the ancient superheroes of Ellenic Greece and the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. Inspired by a trove of artists and filmmakers including David Lynch, Alejandro Jorodowsky, Josephine Halvorson, and Philip Guston, Mantellassi works in an aesthetic fully his own; mixing comic book storytelling, surrealism and formalism into a distinct visual language. The show opens in Gallery 2 at Western Exhibitions in Chicago on September 12 with a public reception from 5 to 8pm. and runs through November 1. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm.


His works on paper echo the multi-perspective quality of comic book pages and surrealist art as overlapping storylines and viewpoints cohabitate in one plane. Nonsensical alignments of objects and narratives intermingle with a humorous, dreamy color palette, often paired with poetically off-kilter titles in his second language, English. Pastries (real and fake), trees, pipes, body parts, treehouses, scenes from the kitchen, shoes and trash from the woods all expand and contract between resolution and dissolution, animating a dreamlike quality where highly vivid thoughts remain incomplete and half-formed.


From certain drawings, Mantellassi creates three-dimensional sculptures—compact, diorama-like compositions composed of everyday materials in plexiglas casing. The humor and irony of his work is made concretely manifest in these objects, whose crumply, crude surfaces and “imperfect” finishes are precisely where the work culminates most fully; stage-sets for the tragicomedy of life where narrative and its artifice are on display simultaneously.


In The Status Of Things As They Have Been an irregularly contoured rectangular slab of pink styrofoam leans back in a clear plastic vitrine, with white overalls painted on it, a torso shape as a stand in for the artist, perhaps. The title of the work is painted cartoonishly on each side of the slab, with quirky sculptures made from commonplace materials inhabit the space. On the back of the vitrine the Mantellassi scrawled on a painted banner “I DIDN’T LIKED RONALD REAGAN THE FIRST TIME AROUND ANYWAY” as a discrete viewer gazes up at it from the bottom right of the plane.


A similar pink slab forms the central image in the work on paper Ronald McDonald And The Axis of Evil On Frakt Boulevard P.M. Instead of being adorned by overalls, this shape serves as the ground for a tumbling tableau of Guston-like forms: boots, human faces, headstones, beer cans, trees hiding fat pixies in their leaf clouds, street signs and hats, punctuated by a head of a pink man at the bottom of the page exclaiming in a comic book balloon “FUCK! IT’S THE AXIS OF EVIL.” We are particularly enamored with another sculpture in vitrine titled “Piece of Skin From My Forehead Enlarged Quite A Bit.” Descriptions defy it, you’ll have to see it in person.


A self-taught artist, born and raised in Florence, Italy in 1971, Simone Mantellassi moved to the United States in 2002 and lives and works in Gilbertsville, New York, in the Western Catskills. His work has been shown at and is in the collection of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. Other exhibitions include the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, Buller Space in New York, NADA New York and KIPNZ in Walton, NY.


Image:

Little Jimmy On Big Jimmy (The Jimmies), 2022

Acrylic on paper

30h x 22w in



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Jornie Cirdain: The Gloaming


Opening reception: Friday, September 12, 5-8pm


Western Exhibitions is pleased to present The Gloaming, Journie Cirdain’s second solo show with the gallery. Cirdain’s large allegorical drawings exist at the intersection of the human and animal, internal and external, magic and reality, and ultimately, life and death. The show opens on September 12 with a public reception and runs through November 1. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm.


Another word for twilight is gloaming, which influences Cirdain’s almost exclusive use of a crepuscular value range of graphite. She meticulously renders moments of tension between the human and non-human, reimagining art historical subjects (still lives, nudes, and luxury items) as living participants in an enmeshed environment. With a film director’s focus on drama and a romantic flirtation with the macabre, her drawings betray an exquisite attention to light surface as a chandelier becomes an environment for cobwebs; a spiderweb glistens like crystal; a bouquet hangs next to the site of its extraction; an environment shows beheaded tulips. Her drawings engage with ideas about living and dying as entangled beings.


Journie Nikala Cirdain was born in 1993 in Santa Rosa, California. In 2017, she received her BA in Liberal Arts in the Great Books at St. John’s College and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has shown in exhibitions nationally and internationally, including The Green Gallery in Milwaukee, Elmhurst Art Museum in Illinois, A Gallery in Seattle, and in Chicago at Goldfinch and Patient Info. Cirdain lived and worked in Chicago for the past five years and is now on her way to Queens.


Image:

Chandelier (Crystals), 2025

Graphite on paper mounted on aluminum dibond

60h x 48w in


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Western Exhibitions 6th show with Los Angeles-based artist Lilli Carré is a two-part exhibition: in Gallery 1 is Fallen Anvils, featuring ceramic sculpture and hand-painted acetate cels and in Gallery 2, the animated film Evacuations.


The exhibition is anchored around the animated short film Evacuations (2025). Painted formless figures haunt recent photos of emptied-out public spaces. As cel-animated smear frames, they perform various repetitive acts in these settings, with movements expressing a helpless, frantic energy felt in our current moment. The film is a string of varied evacuations – earth and organs are emptied, situations are fled. The figures become displaced from their locations, as their environments dissolve and their printed record evaporates.


Gallery 1 holds 20 individual cels chosen from the film out of over 1,000 hand-painted animation frames, certain frozen instants of transitional smear frame energy. Throughout the room sit ceramic mutations of classical anvil forms, inspired by the heavy, hammered cartoon object known for falling unexpectedly out of the sky. Hand-drawn lenticular elements are embedded into the anvils, adding unexpected life and motion into their weight. Evacuations was recently included in the Ottawa International Animation Festival, winning Best Sound Design.


From the jury: “Sound creates the physical experience in film, moving from its source directly to the body. Our selection employs sound playfully juxtaposed with image and movement to create a whole stronger than its individual parts.”


Fallen Anvils + Evacuations opened on Friday, November 7 and runs through December 20.


Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11am to 6pm.


The gallery will be accessible by appointment during the holiday break.

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Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present Spaces for People, Systems for Spaces, a group show about the built environment — cities, buildings, structures, urban planning — featuring 15 artists from across the States who make art about architecture. 


Kim Beck

John Behnke

Marshall Brown

Courttney Cooper

Shir Ende

Edie Fake

Jazmine Harris

R.J. Juguilon

Makayla Lindsay

Aya Nakamura

Brian Petrone

Deb Sokolow

Ryan Standfest

Marvin Young

Joe Zaldivar


Image: Joe Zaldivar

Kohls Department Store in Upland, 2024

marker and watercolor on paper

18h x 24w in

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Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present our fifth solo show with Marshall Brown, Palaces and Prisons, a two-part exhibition presenting collages from Brown’s new Palaces of Industry series in Gallery 1 and in Gallery 2, never-before-shown works that continue his ongoing Prisons of Invention series. Marshall Brown, an artist and architect, collapses reality and fiction with collage, a loophole between he shared territories of art and architecture. In these Palaces, he builds utopian visions from pure abstraction. In these Prisons, he constructs paradoxes from reality’s ruins. 


The show opens on Friday, March 27 with a public reception from 5 to 8pm, and will run through June 6, 2026. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm.

In Gallery 1, Palaces of Industry is a new series of large-scale collages on panel that returns to Brown’s earliest influences: the floating geometries and dynamic equilibrium of Suprematism, Constructivism’s photomontage tradition and layering, Giacometti’s surrealist structures, Duchamp’s readymades. He appropriates images from contemporary artists who make architecture their subject, reconstructing them as monumental collages. These are imagined futures inspired by great industrial palaces built at the birth of modernism: the Crystal Palace, factories that housed new collective labor, the production sites that promised transformation. White space floods the compositions. Fragments hover. The scale creates immersive worlds you can step inside—flatness expands into depth. Building utopian space from contemporary art’s fascination with architecture, Brown turns art’s gaze at architecture back on itself. These are not pictures. They are visions.

In Gallery 2, these never-before-shown works continue his ongoing collage-on-paper Prisons of Invention series, named for Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Carceri d’invenzione. Brown constructs these paradoxical, labyrinthine spaces from fragments of recent architectural photography, just as Piranesi built his imaginary dungeons from the ruins of Rome. Multiple viewpoints collide and diverge within a single composition. Light and shadow emerge from hidden sources. Fragments layer and overlap, creating perspectives that can’t belong to the same space. These are visions of many moments struggling to coexist—each piece holds multiple experiences that refuse to settle into one.

Marshall Brown is an architect, urbanist, and futurist whose work creates new connections, associations, and meanings among disconnected architectural and urban remnants. His 2022-23 show, The Architecture of Collage at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, was Brown’s first solo museum exhibition and most comprehensive presentation of his collages to date. Works from the show, exploratory essays, and additional pieces are published in a book of the same name, available at the gallery. Brown’s work is held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Photography and the University Club, both in Chicago. Brown has 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 in a 10-year survey, Recurrent Visions: The Architecture of Marshall Brown Projects, at the Princeton University School of Architecture. Marshall Brown received his masters degrees at Harvard University. He is a full professor with tenure at the Princeton University School of Architecture, where he directs the Princeton Urban Imagination Center. Marshall Brown lives in Princeton, NJ and Philadelphia, PA.


Foundry, 2026, collage on prepared panel, 72 x 87 inches


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After All, Paintings and Prints presents new paintings in Gallery 1 and in Gallery 2, a retrospective, dating back to 1975, of his extensive printmaking practice. Please join us for an opening reception for the artist on Friday, June 12 from 5 to 8pm. The show runs through August 15, 2026. See more here

Image: Duet , 2023, Oil and wax ground on linen. 48h x 60w in

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