Things we said we'd never do again
June 18th to July 23
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 18 from 6 to 9pm
Gallery Hours: Fridays & Saturdays, noon to 6pmImages from the show here!
Amanda Browder
Wo Nob Man (Late Night Connection)
digital photo
Things We Said We'd Never Do Again at Western Exhibitions celebrates the one-year anniversary of Western Exhibitions' re-location to a "real" gallery space. Our first show at the space, This Thing We Do, was a sprawling 38-artist show, and we vowed to never do another group show again: so much for this idea. And hence, the title of the show! Things We Said We'd Never Do Again combines a mix of new and established talents, working in multiple mediums: bucolic installation/sculpture, psycho video, delicate collage, sexy and disturbing paintings, photos and drawings, and one giant painting that virtually covers the entire 30 feet of the north wall of the gallery.
Carl Baratta's intricate, wildly colorful paintings of battle scenes draw from many different sources including Persian miniatures, 1970's glam rock fashion, and Kung-Fu movies. Baratta recently received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Amanda Browder photographed a still sleepy, one-time conquest wearing one of Browder's "wo nob" sculptures, an abstract form inspired by the psychedelic and sexual nature of comic books. Browder has recently exhibited at Lothringer 13, in Munich, Germany; White Columns in NYC; Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago; 4-Color Pen show at the General Store in Milwaukee, and Van Harrison Gallery in Chicago; Wendy Cooper Gallery in Chicago and will be included in a show this summer at Mixture Contemporary Gallery in Houston.
Amy Hauber's MYTH DRAWINGS, a series of large mixed media collage/painting/drawings, serve as visual representations of a self-absorbed world in a time of global unrest and the mythic quality that these momentous events take on the American collective consciousness. Hauber lives and works in upstate New York and has had recent solo shows at St. Lawrence University in New York, Wight Museum of Art in Wisconsin, and at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside and has work in the permanent collection at the John Michael Kohler Art Center. She's shown in Chicago at the Stray Show and the Ukranian Institute of Modern Art and her work has been written about in The Reader and New City.
Jason Lee constructs idealized sculptural landscapes. Lee places hovering cast rubber ducks over clusters of lightboxes confining photographic expanses of grass and ponds. This piece was recently seen in a solo show at the Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art. Lee lives and works in Cleveland and has exhibited in Chicago, New York City and extensively in Northeast Ohio.
Dale Malner is a founding member of the Madison collective Fieldwork and an award-winning trade show booth designer. Western Exhibitions heralds Malner's triumphant return to painting by unveiling a thirty-foot long expressionist canvas that will occupy an entire wall of the gallery. Malner has shown at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Hermetic Gallery in Milwaukee and KB gallery in Brooklyn.
Josh Mannis' videos and photo collages are performance arenas for interior moments of epic scale and a behavioral psychology bounded by misinformed appropriations of high modernist aesthetics, and by a homegrown mash-up of rock and roll mysticism. Mannis recently received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been shown locally at 1/Quarterly, Three-Walls, the Stray Show, Van Harrison Gallery and nationally at Locust Projects and Objex Art Space, both in Miami, and most recently at The Mattress Factory Museum of Contemporary Art in Pittsburgh.
Dutes Miller's lush watercolors of pears seem to be innocuous, but closer examination reveals allusions to the body and sexual relations. Miller is a frequent performance collaborator with husband Stan Shellabarger, mostly recently seen crocheting at the Western Exhibitions booth at Art Chicago in the Park. Read about Miller's big night during the Art Chicago opening in Chicago Magazine. Miller has shown at Suitable and the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art.
Matthew Northridge's collages utilize collected and archived popular printed material to construct idealized, architectonic structures. Northridge is currently an artist in residence at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, Ireland. He has shown work at the New Museum of Contemporary Art and at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, among others. He had his first solo show at Gorney Bravin + Lee in NYC in 2003. His work has subsequently been reviewed in Art in America, Artforum, Time Out NY, and The New York Times.
John Neff's ceramic tiles and drawings expand on themes of his solo show at Western Exhibitions this fall. The guiding subject of this work is the "anthor" -- a furnace where ordinary things are fused with their ghosts, through concentrated mental and physical effort, to become works of art. Neff's work is in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. Neff has exhibited recently at the Chicago Cultural Center; The Bower in San Antonio, Texas; and at Atelier Top 25, Krems, Austria.
Tomiko Pilson's lush and provocative paintings depict cultural clashes between island and Western societies. In examining the idea of the "exotic", Pilson's work simultaneously critiques the viewer's gaze while reveling in garish colors and feral imagery. Pilson has studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
Amanda Ross-Ho's new drawings coalesce the detritus of her studio and home environments into a highly personal visual language. Ross-Ho, currently a MFA candidate at the University of Southern California, spent last summer in a residency at the stichting Kunst and Complex in Rotterdam, Netherlands. She's exhibited in a curated booth by Julie Rodrigues-Widholm at Art LA, with 1R, Dogmatic, and with Bodybuilder and Sportsmen in Chicago and the Soap Factory in Minneapolis. She was profiled recently in Venus magazine and her show at Western Exhibitions last summer was featured in Chicago's UR and New City.
Gallery Hours:
Friday and Saturdays, noon to 6pm
ALL IMAGES © WESTERN EXHIBITIONS & EACH INDIVIDUAL ARTIST