WESTERN EXHIBITIONS: Jibangus plus Paul Nudd

March 12 to April 16, 2005

JIBANGUS
The Yungling: SpectRo-Nillion
plus
Paul Nudd
Black Milk

For "The Yungling: SpectRo-Nillion", arts production group Jibangus will world premiere the first cut of "The Yungling"- their three-years-in-the-making sci- fi adventure movie. In "The Yungling", protagonist Roger Elephant, a sad and lonely science lab worker, stumbles into a mystery -- he doesn't know if he is losing his mind or if inter-dimensional space creatures are attacking the people of Earth. In addition to the screening of "The Yungling", Jibangus will present object and video artwork that inspired or was inspired by the movie. In order to fully experience "The Yungling: SpectRo-Nillion", you cannot separate the world of Roger Elephant from the objects you experience in the gallery space. The goal is to thrust you into worlds of the strange and unknown in such an enveloping way that "real" and "imagined" become a difference without distinction. There is no causal relationship between the movie and the objects. The objects, the movie, and how you experience it are the same thing. Be warned: This show may break your brain.

More stills from The Yungling, click here
See the trailer for "The Yungling" here (requires fast connection)

Jibangus is Paul Fuchs, Steve Johanowicz and Scott K. Nolin, who all hail from the greater Madison, Wisconsin area. Jibangus is best known for their bizarre video shorts, combining fantasy, scruffy special f/x, and bitter irony. Their work has been seen at the Soap Factory in Minneapolis, The Fresh-Up Club in Austin, The Bower in San Antonio, the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art and at the Stray Show in the Western Exhibitions booth. In the midst of the internet boom, Jibangus won a national short video competition sponsored by the now defunct anteye.com, where they were flown out to Hollywood, CA to produce a television pilot. Their work has been written about in Germany's Der Spiegel, U.S. News and World Reports and the Wisconsin Sate Journal.

Paul Nudd's "Black Milk" (2005), a continuation of his rupturing spastic goo videos, is experienced via a five channel video installation in the Plus Gallery at Western Exhibitions. The "Black Milk" videos incorporate, for the first time in this series, black and colorless sets, object-characters, and in- between juices and fluids. In addition to this new piece, two single channel works, "Soft Explosion" and "Red Holes", will also be on exhibit for the first time. A small printed publication and some hand-crafted wall fonts will accompany these works

Before I opened the gallery, I used to write art criticism. I wrote this about Paul's work in 2002:
...hot damn, his (Nudd's) videos, I could watch them forever. In miniature, cave- like interiors, Nudd sets up hybrid scenes combining swamp-like naturalism and other-worldly f/x. The images in the video projections are always gurgling and splattering, with bubbles exploding, paint spewing, and goo dripping and oozing. I think of these videos as screen savers: there's no beginning middle or end. And they mesmerize: were I to have them on a continuous loop on a monitor in my house, I would never get anything done as I would stand there, slack-jawed, spit oozing from my chin in perfect mimicry of Nudd's feral imagery. -- Scott Speh

More stills from Paul Nudd, click here

Paul Nudd's recent exhibitions include "Summer" at Bodybuilder & Sportsman Gallery, "Salmonella in September: Perfumes of the Doomed" at Mess Hall, and "Worm Drawings" at Kansas City's telephonebooth. Paul divides his time between Chicago and Cicero, Illinois and received an MFA from the University of Illinois-Chicago in 2001.

This exhibition is made possible with assistance from the Network of Casual Art Audio Visual Department, Three Walls, thekit.org and Stan Shellabarger.