Click for Pilson
images
Opening Reception:
Saturday, March 10, 6 to 9pm
Show Dates: March 10 to April 14, 2007
Gallery Hours: Wednesday thru Saturday, 12 to 6pm
Melissa Oreskys paintings
and drawings are plays between language and abstraction, inside and
outside, and between landscape and body transforming landscapes
into brainscapes. For her second solo with Western Exhibitions,
Brittle Flow, Oresky will show a series of paintings motivated
by glacial events or phenomena. Glaciers, massive interactions of materials
and substances, are in constant flux, changing states and forms under
environmental pressures that suggest human issues of survival, risk
taking, and persistent notions of the sublime. In these paintings she
continues her practice of incorporating linear images of nerve cells
as debris within the landscape, suggesting mental as opposed to physical
spaces. The works imagery is based on abstract forms resembling
rock, ice, and water. The recurring nerve cell forms serve a dual purpose:
appearing as foliage, cracks, or debris within the paintings and as
indicators of an awareness of painting as thinking.

Melissa Oresky, Serac, 2007
The paintings in "Brittle Flow"
grapple with various tensions such as those between liquid and solid,
movement and stillness, abstraction and reference, image and material,
rounded and angular, space and surface, fascination and fear. These
oppositional elements, states, and impulses create difficulty and internal
resistance which reflects Oresky's ideal conditions for painting: "Paintings
work optimally for me when they are on the verge of collapsing under
all these tensions: when they hold together, but just barely."
In addition to the Glacier paintings, Oresky will show Particles,
a series of irregularly shaped drawings: composites or accretions that
build upon the formal and pictorial elements that make up the glacier
paintings while also incorporating fragments of images from disparate
sources. Says Oresky: The Particles are catch-alls for which any
image and kind of image is fair game, bound only by a particular logic
of being put together; a logic of thinking.

Particles, studio view
This is Melissa Oreskys second show at Western Exhibitions, her
first in the main gallery. Oresky had her first New York solo show at
the Van Harrison Gallery in 2006 and other solo shows include a 12x12
show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Standard Gallery,
also in Chicago and at the Tzi-Urim Gallery in Israel. She has been
included in group shows at Mixture Contemporary in Houston, the DePauw
Biennial in Indiana, The Wendy Cooper Gallery in Madison, and in several
galleries and non-profit spaces in Chicago. She is 2005 recipient of
an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship. Oresky received her MFA from the
University of Illinois-Chicago and studied at the Skowhegan School for
Painting and Sculpture.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
In the Plus Gallery, Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present Tomiko
Pilsons first solo show. Pilsons lush and lurid paintings
delve deep into femme fatale archetypes and Filipino folklore, especially
the myth of the manananggal - a murderous female shape-shifter that
splits into two parts. Set in an indistinct island locale, Pilson's
sexy and fierce invented landscapes are informed by ghost stories, b-movies,
travel culture, nostalgia and sadistic love. She will show two large-scale
paintings on unstretched canvas that function as gigantic posters of
tropical nightscapes and a tiny postcard sized painting, all dramatically
hung on the walls by large concrete nails.

Femme, 2007 10" x 8"
Tomiko Pilson has been included in group
shows at the Contemporary Museum in Honolulu, the Artist Commune in
Hong Kong, Ethan Coen Fine Arts in New York, and most recently in Where
All the D*cks Hang Out at Western Exhibitions. Pilson received
her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003 and
studied at the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture in 2004.
Her work has been written about in The Honolulu Advertiser and the New
York Times. She lives and works in Chicago.