Gallery Address:
119 N Peoria St, 2A
Chicago, IL 60607
312.480.8390
Gallery hours:
Wednesday - Saturday
11am to 6pm
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MILLER & SHELLABARGER
Artist BioHusband and husband artist team Dutes Miller & Stan Shellabarger’s performances and artist books document the bittersweet rhythms of human relationships. Their work shifts between moments of togetherness and moments of separation, between spaces of private and public, protection and pain and visibility and invisibility.
Performance works are always enacted in public and always together. Untitled (Pink Tube) is an on-going performance where the artists simultaneously crochet the ends of a long pink tube, a metaphorically loaded (penis, umbilical cord, etc.) object that both unites and separates them. “Between the Sheets” reclaimed the bed, often the locus of outrage and disdain expressed by the Christian right toward queers, as a site where people turn to each other for compassion, comfort, and safety. “Untitled Performance (Sewing)”, Miller & Shellabarger stitch themselves together from ankle to neck using a needle and thread while sitting adjacent to one another. In a new work, "Untitled (Grave)", debuted at the Volta art fair in Basel in 2008, Miller & Shellabarger dug, in close proximity to each other, two holes, deep and large enough for each man to lie in. They then dug a small tunnel between the holes that enabled them to hold hands while lying in the graves.
Their artist books include Butter Books, an on-going project for which they collect, clean and bind into a book every wax paper butter wrapper from every stick of butter they consume in a year (Miller is an accomplished pastry chef). The book’s pages, filled with butter wrappers, both attract and repel the viewer. The Silhouette Books, a multi-volume set that presents silhouettes the two make of one another, modernizes the folk art tradition of cut-paper silhouettes by combining the sentimental, the documentary and psychological ambiguities engendered by odd alterations made to the images.
Dutes Miller and Stan Shellabarger are a 2008 recipient of an Artadia Chicago Award and a 2007 recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award. Western Exhibitions presented solo projects of their work at the Volta Show in Basel, Switzerland, the NEXT art fair in Chicago, Illinois, and at the NADA art fair in Miami, all in 2008. Recent performances have been presented at the Hyde Park Art Center, 44/46 Performance Festival in Chicago, the Suburban in Oak Park, Illinois, the Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita and the Illinois State University galleries. Their work has been written about in Artforum.com, Art & Auction, Frieze, Artnet, TimeOut Chicago, and the Chicago Sun-Times. Miller & Shellabarger also maintain separate artistic practices.They live and work in Chicago.
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