Gallery
Address:
1821 W Hubbard, Suite 202
Chicago, IL 60622
Mailing Address:
1747 W Division
Chicago IL 60622-4093
312.307.4685
Gallery hours:
Wednesdays - Saturdays
noon to 6pm
March 10 to April 14, 2007
In the Main Gallery:
MELISSA ORESKY: Brittle Flow
Click for Oresky images
- In the Plus Gallery:
TOMIKO PILSON
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 Oresky’s 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 work’s 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, 2007The 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 Oresky’s 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 Pilson’s first solo show. Pilson’s 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.
ALL IMAGES © WESTERN EXHIBITIONS & EACH INDIVIDUAL ARTIST