Gallery 2A, SOLO: Cayetano Ferrer: Eight Corners Gallery 2D, Residency: Chris Millar: Boiyd Howses and Other Hatstands
Opening Reception: Friday, September 7, 2007, 6:00 - 9:00 PM On View: September 7, 2007 - October 13, 2007
CHICAGO: ThreeWalls announces the launch of their new program, the SOLO project, opening in conjunction with their new season of residency and group exhibitions. On view in Gallery 2D: ThreeWalls summer resident, painter Chris Millar (Calgary, Alberta), and in Gallery 2A, SOLO: Cayetano Ferrer (Chicago).
Self-described as "post-interesting," Chris Millar's paintings assiduously avoid self-importance and restraint; instead, they are scrupulously excessive and immoderate, and at heart, ridiculous. Pulling from comic books, punk, television, the art world and pop culture in general, Millar's paintings put spoof through a blender, chewing up narrative arcs and spitting them back out in a vortex of idiom, ribaldry and farce. Building his paintings, literally, through a multitude of processes and acrylic layers (including dimensional footnotes that exceed the frame), Millar's craft is impeccable. Like a Faberge egg or Indian miniature the results are fetishistic, outrageously decadent illustrations of human-folly that while both overwhelming and seductive, are the ultimate construction for a turbo-culture world.
SOLO artist Cayetano Ferrer uses existing forms in order to engage in a dialog about the constant flux of the built, contemporary environment. Using inkjet prints on existing objects/architecture that reveal what these objects ultimately obscure, Ferrer exposes the relationship between the built and the rebuilt, surface and hidden, as well the delicate matter of history and memory as the present paves over the recent past in a bid to enrich economies. Ferrers work is a gentle push/pull between permanence and obsolescence, inviting consideration of evolution, mutation and modification in our relationship to our immediate environment.
Cayetano Ferrer is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Select exhibitions include "FAST - Future of Art, Science and Technology," in Daejeon, Korea, at the Daejon Museum of Art, in Brooklyn, NY, at 78 Dikeman Street, in London, England, at i-cabin, in Chicago, IL at The Plaines Project and in Oakland, CA at Lobot where he completed a residency in 2006. Ferrer was the recipient of the The Union League Civic and Arts Foundation Visual Arts Award in 2006, a Worldstudio Foundation scholarship in 2004 and the merit scholarship at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003.
Chris Millar has exhibited his fussy paintings throughout Canada and Europe, and is a current finalist in RBC Canadian Painting Competition. His work has been reviewed in Canadian Art, Legacy Magazine and The Edmonton Journal. Millar is represented in Canada by TripanierBaer Gallery in Calgary. This is his first exhibition in the United States.
ThreeWalls is a nonprofit 501(c)3 organization dedicated to contemporary art practice and discourse. Through the residency program, SOLO project and quarterly publication Paper and Carriage, ThreeWalls aims to provide opportunities for experimentation, chance, critical dialogue and context for artists, curators and writers who are at pivotal points in their careers.
