Western Exhibitions is pleased to announce a solo show of new work by Eric Lebofsky: Sculpture. Known primarily for his playful and poignant drawings and paintings, Lebofsky will dedicate his appropriately titled show to recent three-dimensional works in wood. According to the artist, these modestly scaled - "animal sized," to use his term - sculptures work with and against one another as part of a family. In making these works, the artist's studio process was improvisational: he drew inspiration both from the ancient myth of the Golem and from his cathartic and visceral work as the lead singer and saxophone player in the rock and roll band Avagami.
Lebofsky provides the following descriptions for some of his new sculptures:
"Piece of Cheese" is an actual sized piece of cheese, sitting on the floor, painted a cheesy yellow.
�OTTO� is a medium dog-sized rectangle (referencing the artist�s own dog, a bichon-poodle mix with some very antisocial personality traits) with spikes and a long phallic protrusion on facing sides (in lieu of head and tail), its palindromic composition calling to mind Dr. Doolittle's cow. The protrusions recall huge hemorrhoids. This is definitely an ass piece.
�Nostos� (def. the Homeric notion of homecoming) represents three books- Pynchon�s �Gravity's Rainbow�, Borges� �Labyrinths�, and Joyce�s �Ulysses�, one after another, each one getting smaller, with largest being 36� and the smallest being actual scale. The details on the books are realistically painted. The first two books are hollow, referencing everything beyond the boundaries of cognitive experience, and the futility of trying to understand the unknowable through a narrative. They are hollow, stripped of book content, because they can't answer any questions. The final book, �Ulysses�, unlike the first two books, has a front and back. It is a book that celebrates homecoming, and in this model, is itself a homecoming, where mystery is grounded -- this book is literally emerging from the Earth.
�Marketwatch� imagines a stock market widget on your computer rendered out of wood, a play on hardware and software, in that it's a hard wooden embodiment of soft data.
�Bizarre Love Triangle� features two 4-feet tall spears, and one very long eraser leaning against the wall. The eraser, there to soothe the aggressive tendency of the spears, is the actual width of a common eraser, stretched out lengthwise. One spear appears to be made out of wood, and is painted "wood color." The other spear appears to be made out of flint, and carved to look as if it was chiseled using epipaleolithic techniques. The eraser is intended to look as if it was made of, well, eraser.
�Distortion� is the rock n roll piece: a black amplifier cabinet, about the size of two stacked sea turtles, with eleven rows of variously colored spikes, hooked up to a wooden distortion pedal. It is an attempt to visualize the aural quality of distortion.
This is Eric Lebofsky�s second solo show at Western Exhibitions, his first in 2005, was reviewed in Art Papers and his three person show here (with Josh Mannis and William J. O�Brien) was reviewed in Time Out Chicago. Lebofsky�s artist book, �Things to do in an Ice Age� from his 2005 show is included in the artist book collections of the Museum of Contemporary in Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Lebofsky has had solo shows at Sears-Peyton Gallery in New York and Miller Block Gallery in Boston and has been included in several group shows nationwide. His band Avagami recently released their debut album, �Metagami� on Lens Records. Lebofsky received his BA from Columbia University in New York and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He lives and works in Chicago.
In the Plus Gallery
Dead Center / Marginal Notes: Dan Devine / Eugenio Dittborn curated by John Neff
Dead Center / Marginal Notes: Dan Devine / Eugenio Dittborn is the first in a yearlong series of exhibitions for Western Exhibitions' Plus Gallery curated by John Neff. Each show in the program will present one work each by two artists or a lone work by a single maker. All of the works exhibited will deal � directly or indirectly � with the relationships of centers to margins (culturally, geographically, politically and within works themselves as a formal concern). The first show will partner a 1987 concrete-and-steel sculpture by New York State based Dan Devine with an Airmail Painting by the Chilean artist Eugenio Dittborn.
The Devine piece consists of a compact concrete block open on one side to reveal the outline of an auto engine part enclosed within; Dittborn�s work is an ultra-light collage painting sent to the exhibition site from South America via airmail. The juxtaposition of these works engenders a number of provocative contrasts between, for example: contraction and expansion, heaviness and lightness, stasis and movement. This list opens onto a number of subtler oppositions and inversions, some of which are explored in curator John Neff�s brief exhibition essay.
Dan Devine�s most recent solo exhibition, �Inside Out Nascar�, a follow-up to his widely discussed �Inside Out Car� of 1998, was held at Brooklyn�s Pierogi gallery in 2006. In 2003, a retrospective of Devine�s work was mounted at Hofstra Museum in Hampstead, New York. The artist�s work has been discussed and reviewed in Art in America and the New York Times, among other publications. Devine lives in Ghent, New York, where he recently presented the �living, self-sustaining� installation Sheep Farm.
Eugenio Dittborn has an extensive and illustrious exhibition history. He work has been shown internationally since that the 1970s at venues as diverse as Documenta IX, the Centre Georges Pompidou, P.S. 1 and the Whitechapel Art Gallery. Dittborn�s Airmail Paintings are held in major museum collections worldwide. The artist is represented by Alexander and Bonin gallery, New York. Dittborn is based in Santiago, Chile.
Dead Center / Marginal Notes series curator John Neff lives and works in Chicago. His artwork is represented by Western Exhibitions, where he will be presenting a solo exhibition in May of 2008. Neff's past curatorial projects have included �Hysterical Pastoral� at the Ukrainian Museum of Modern Art and �Cold Conceptualism� at Suitable Gallery, both in Chicago. His writings have recently been published in BAT Journal #5 and in the exhibition catalog Vincent Como: In Praise of Darkness.
