Gallery Address:
119 N Peoria St, 2A
Chicago IL 60607
312.480.8390
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Gallery hours:
Wednesdays thru Saturdays
11am to 6pm
STAN SHELLABARGER |Artist Practice
Stan Shellabarger's performance and book work addresses issues relating to the body. He often takes mundane, everyday activities like breathing, walking and writing to extreme measures in endurance-based performance work: walking from sunrise to sunset on solstices and equinoxes, counting every breath he takes in an 8 hour time span, filling notebook after notebook with his signature.
Shellabarger's work amplifies the traces humans leave on the earth, as in his walking performances, or on objects, as in his Lightswitch and Mousepad books. The repetitive nature and long durations of Shellabarger's performances lead to massive accumulations of marks and residues that record discrete units of time and space, elegant testimonies to the ephemeral and transient nature of life. The repetition of activity is necessary so that the extremely subtle marks left by these activities emerge as clearly visible artistic interventions. Despite their laborious process of transcription, the marks left by his performances are, like the body itself, ephemeral and transient in nature.
Shellabarger’s recent body of work, Walking Books marry his performance and book-making impulses. To make the Walking Books, the artist paces on long sheets of rag paper with graphite-soled shoes. His footsteps create a luminous graphite/gray drawing that betrays the pattern of the surface trod upon. The verso side of the drawing simultaneously becomes a beautiful blind embossment of this same surface. He folds the paper accordion style and affixes the ends to waxed MDF panels that function as the covers of the book. Shellabarger started this series of books in the summer of 2008 and made 5 of them at the Volta art fair in Basel that June.
The books are dependant on their locations, which include a particle-board platform in Basel, Switzerland, a parking lot in Portland, Maine, the floor of Western Exhibitions old location, and a gravel driveway in Michigan, among several other locations. Shellabarger made a new book on each Saturday during the run of his 2008 solo show at Western Exhibitions and made several on the grounds of the 2008 NADA Art Fair.
Stan Shellabarger's solo shows include a pine-needle installation at the Hyde Park Art Center in 2009, a 12 x 12 New Work/New Artists exhibition at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art in December 2005, a collaborative show with his husband Dutes Miller at Western Exhibitions in 2007 and his 2004 solo show at Western Exhibitions was reviewed in Art in America, artforum.com and ArtUS. He second solo show with Western Exhibitions in September 2008 was discussed in the Chicago Tribune, New City, Art Letter, Flavorpill, and Artslant.
He has been invited perform at the VOLTA show in Basel, Switzerland, the Time-Based Art Festival in Portland, Oregon; Macy’s downtown department store window during the Looptopia festival in Chicago; Millennium Park in Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Illinois State University in Bloomington, Illinois; The Suburban in Oak Park; and the Center of Contemporary Art in St. Louis.He has been included in shows at inova in Milwaukee, the Chicago Cultural Center and the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. Shellabarger received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and lives and works in Chicago.
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