SCOTT SPEH GALLERY
Gallery Address:
119 N Peoria St, 2A
Chicago, IL 60607
USA
312.480.8390
Gallery hours:
Wednesday thru Saturday
11am to 6pm
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artist
books, editions and more
ART
FAIR: November 4 to 6, 2011
EDITIONS | ARTISTS BOOK FAIR
http://www.eabfair.com/
548 West 22nd Street
Between 10th & 11th Avenues
New York City
FREE to the Public
Friday
& Saturday 11 AM - 7 PM
Sunday11 AM - 4 PM
Solo booth by STAN SHELLABARGER
Western Exhibitions will be presenting a solo booth by STAN SHELLABARGER, a performance artist known for his 12-hour long walks made in celebration of Equinoxes and Solstices. We will show several printed objects and artist-book hybrids that are derived from his continued interest in issues rof how the body relates to the Earth and for devising alternative methods of drawing. His September 2011 solo show at the gallery was reviewed in ArtPractical and The Chicago Tribune.
STAN SHELLABARGER
Installation view of 2011 solo show
Stan
Shellabarger's performances, artist book hybrids and printed
objects address issues relating to the body and the Earth as well as investigating
alternative drawing methods. He often takes mundane, everyday activities
like breathing, walking and writing to extreme measures in endurance-based
performance work: walking from sunrise to sunset on solstices and equinoxes,
counting every breath he takes in an 8 hour time span, filling notebook
after notebook with his signature.
“Untitled
(Walking Print)” is a long accordion-fold artist book, presented
in a gallery context stretched out across a low-slung pedestal, features
a 6-color reductive woodcut made by Shellabarger’s repetitive pacing
atop wooden panels while wearing special boots, with coarse grit sandpaper
affixed to their soles. When folded, this print resides in a hand-made
clamshell display box.
For his “Dragging
Book”, another accordion-fold piece, Shellabarger hung 10 steel
plates on a wall and while wearing sandpaper-covered gloves, dragged his
hands across the plates while pacing parallel to the wall. He printed
the plates like one would a drypoint, in red ink in an edition of 10,
and affixed one of the steel plates on the cover of each book in the edition
with a screenprinted colophon on the back cover.
Two colorful reduction
woodcuts resemble welcome mats, where Shellabarger again created the
image by stepping on the wooden substrate with sandpaper-covered boots.
Shellabarger often captures his performances in series of official photographs,
printed as archival dye-prints and framed in artists-made frames with
UV glass or plexi. Two framed black-and-white documentary-style photographs
from Shellabarger’s first-ever walking performance, "One
Year Circle, Easton, Maine" from 1993, were recently included
in a group show at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MAMAC) in
Nice, France, alongside performance luminaries Marina Abramovic, Vito
Acconci, Chris Burden, Valie Export, Paul McCarthy, among others.
Shellabarger’s “Walking
Books”, a body of work he introduced in his second
show at Western Exhibitions in 2008, marries his performance and book-making
impulses by pacing on long sheets of rag paper with graphite-soled shoes.
His footsteps create a luminous graphite/gray drawing that betrays the
pattern of the surface trod upon. The verso side of the drawing simultaneously
becomes a beautiful blind embossment of this same surface. He folds the
paper accordion style and affixes the ends to waxed MDF panels that function
as the covers of the book. Shellabarger started this series of books in
the summer of 2008 and made 5 of them at the Volta art fair in Basel that
June. The books are dependant on their locations, which include a particle-board
platform in Basel, Switzerland, a parking lot in Portland, Maine, the
floor of Western Exhibitions old location, and a gravel driveway in Michigan,
among several other sites.
Stan Shellabarger's solo shows include a pine-needle
installation at the Hyde Park Art Center in 2009, a 12 x 12 New Work/New
Artists exhibition at Chicago's Museum
of Contemporary Art in December 2005, collaborative shows with his
husband Dutes Miller at Western Exhibitions in 2010
and 2007
and his 2004 solo show at Western Exhibitions was reviewed in Art in
America, artforum.com and ArtUS. He second solo show
with Western Exhibitions in September 2008 was discussed in the Chicago
Tribune, New City and Artslant. He has been invited
perform at the VOLTA
show in Basel, Switzerland, the Time-Based
Art Festival in Portland, Oregon; Macy’s downtown department
store window during the Looptopia
festival in Chicago; Millennium
Park in Chicago; the Museum
of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Illinois
State University in Bloomington, Illinois; The Suburban in Oak Park;
and the Center of Contemporary Art in St. Louis. He has been included
in shows at inova in Milwaukee, the Chicago Cultural Center and the Madison
Museum of Contemporary Art. With Miller,
he is a recipient of grants from the Peter S. Reed Foundation, Artadia,
and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. Shellabarger received his MFA
from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and lives and works in Chicago.
