Gallery Address:
119 N Peoria St, Ste 2A
CHICAGO IL 60607 USA
(312) 480.8390
send email
Gallery hours:
Wednesdays - Saturdays
11AM to 6pm
April 22 to May 27, 2006
In Gallery 1
Pedro Velez: GODFUCK | images
In Gallery 2
Matthew Northridge:
Further Afield
In Gallery 3
Carroll & Gaydos:
Plantfucker
PEDRO VELEZ
Pedro Velez' third solo show at Western Exhibitions, GODFUCK contains aggressive and disparate elements aligning themselves in the form of large scale collages, photography, painting, cute girls, flyers, sodomy, cement, pseudo performance, Benetton, and Hope, where Velez questions the making of taste in contemporary society, the curatorial decision making process, politics, and morality. Featured works include "Puerto Rican-Jewish Benetton", a large size manipulated Benetton banner; "Didactic", a series of photographic vinyl banners depicting images of students acting in front of a drawing made by Velez on a chalkboard; and "Sad Teddy Bear", a wall of 30 altered book pages, collages and flyers featuring pages torn from the Illustrated History of Las Vegas, The History of the Panama Canal, Aunt Louisa's Book of Fairy Tales, and prints from more intimate sources.Velez is an artist, curator and writer who works from both Chicago and his native Puerto Rico. This show travels to us from his gallery in San Juan, Galeria Comercial (check out our joint ad in the March Artforum). Velez' solo shows include Ingalls and Associates in Miami, The Hermetic Gallery in Milwaukee, TBA Exhibition Space in Chicago and is currently in Cultural Contamination, curated by Gean Moreno at the Centro Cultural Espanol in Miami. During the 2005 Miami art fairs, Velez was selected by NADA to do a special project: HELL IN LAMB UC. He'll be bringing posters from that project to share. Chicagoans will remember Velez from his rabble-rousing days as a MFA recipient from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as well as the instigator of the publishing and curatorial project FGA.
MATTHEW NORTHRIDGE
Drawing on a wealth of aerial photos collected from reference books, Matthew Northridge's first solo show at Western Exhibitions, "Further Afield", is a recent installment of an ongoing series. In each composition, Northridge carefully removes the architecture from the existing photo, relocating buildings within the confines of a blank page. Presented as a white void, the landscape becomes an invisible yet defining element. Northridge's collages often utilize popular printed material to create idealized, architectonic structures.Matthew Northridge has exhibited both nationally and abroad, including The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Irish Museum of Modern Art and others. His 2003 solo show at Gorney Bravin + Lee in New York was reviewed in Art in America and Time Out New York and his installation in "Out of Site" at the New Museum was reviewed in Artforum and The New York Times. In 2005, he was a recipient of a Pollock-Krasner grant and an artist-in-residence at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Northridge received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
CARROLL & GAYDOS
Carroll & Gaydos ongoing collaborative series, Plantfucker, explores an obsession with plant life, thus exposing a new kind of fetish. In each mixed-media drawing, a gardener is engaged in various sexual acts with different flora. Using wildly disparate styles, Carroll & Gaydos mash-up Egon Scheile-esque gestural figure drawing with exquisitely rendered illustrations of botanicals, a la royal-commissioned prints of the 19th century.This is Carroll and Gaydos' second solo show at Western Exhibitions. They have exhibited widely throughout the Baltimore/Washington DC area, including the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, American University and the Korean Embassy. Their work has been written about in the Washington Post, Baltimore City Paper, The Capital Times (Madison) and the Korea Times. They both received their MFA from Maryland Institute, College of Art and currently live and work in Baltimore, Maryland.
ALL IMAGES © WESTERN EXHIBITIONS & EACH INDIVIDUAL ARTIST