WESTERN EXHIBITIONS 119 N Peoria, Suite 2A Chicago, IL 60607 312.480.8390
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In Gallery 1: Stan Shellabarger Walking Books
In Gallery 2: Dead Center / Marginal Notes: Holt Quentel Curated by John Neff
Stan Shellabarger Walking Books
Western Exhibitions is moving, and we're thrilled to be inaugurating our new gallery space with a solo show of new work by STAN SHELLABARGER. After 4 years in a near west-side industrial complex, Western Exhibitions will transfer its operations to the 119 N Peoria Building in Chicago's West Loop gallery district. The gallery will be joining its new neighbors in holding receptions on Fridays. Shellabarger's show will open with a public reception on Friday, September 5, 2008.
Stan Shellabarger's performance and book work addresses issues relating to the body. The artist 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.
For his second solo show at Western Exhibitions, Shellabarger will show several new Walking Books, works that 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 this summer and made 5 of them at the Volta art fair in Basel in June. The books in this show capture several different surfaces form multiple locations, including a particle-board platform in Basel, Switzerland, a parking lot in Portland, Maine, the floor of Western Exhibitions old location and several others. Shellabarger will make a new book on each Saturday during the run of the show, either in the gallery proper, or somewhere in the surrounding West Loop neighborhood.
This will be Stan Shellabarger's second proper solo show with Western Exhibitions. His last show was reviewed in Art in America, artforum.com and ArtUS. Shellabarger has been invited to do performances 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. Shellabarger has been included in shows at inova in Milwaukee, the Chicago Cultural Center, the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art and has had a 12 x 12 New Work/New Artists solo exhibition at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art in December 2005. He also makes work collaboratively with his husband Dutes Miller. Together they won a Tiffany Foundation Award in 2007 and their show at Western Exhibitions in 2007 was reviewed in Time Out Chicago, New City and the Chicago Sun-Times. Their performance work at the Volta fair was covered in Artnet and at the NEXT fair was covered in Art & Antiques.
Dead Center / Marginal Notes: Holt Quentel Curated by John Neff for Western Exhibitions, Chicago
Show dates: September 5 to November 15, 2008
Dead Center / Marginal Notes: Holt Quentel is the fourth in a yearlong series of shows curated by John Neff for Western Exhibitions' Gallery Two. Each show in the program will present one piece each by two artists or a small selection of works 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 fourth show in the series, opening September 5th, presents artist Holt Quentel's large-scale painting Black 3 Gesture (B/W) Rope of 1989.
After receiving her education in Chicago and Princeton, the artist Holt Quentel (American, born 1961) rose to sudden prominence in New York's art scene of the late 1980s. Typically, Quentel's works were large-scale unstretched paintings resembling battered awnings, signs and tarpaulins. In creating these works, the artist first hand-crafted, and then carefully distressed, her canvases' surfaces. When first exhibited, the paintings' denial of a transparent relationship between process and appearance - a defining characteristic of painting after Minimalism - was often read through then-current theories of "simulation," notably Jean Baudrillard's notion that Postmodern culture values impressions over actualities. Likewise, contemporary critics related the artist's frequent allusions to the history of abstract painting to the appropriationist tactics of 1980s photo-conceptualists and Neo-Geo artists.
However, as these paradigms of art criticism faded in the early 1990s, critical attention soured on Quentel's art. Her rapid career success was characterized as a symptom of 80s art-world excesses, and her work was dismissed as faddish decoration. Quentel's last solo exhibition was held at Stux Gallery in New York in 1992; shortly thereafter she left the art world. Although she may or may not continue to practice painting, there is no available record of Quentel exhibitions during the past sixteen years.
Despite her initial reputation as an avatar of modish "Simulationist" painting, Quentel's work evades easy categorization and is not hidebound by period concerns. Her pieces are replete with unexpected formal devices, moments of striking painterly expression and virtuosic trompe l'oeil surface treatments. Still, the paintings resist reification, and often appear to be waste products rather that calculated visual expressions. (In this last respect it is, perhaps, interesting to see Quentel as a precursor of Abject Art rather than an endgame appropriationist). The artist's paintings are not necessarily dreary Postmodern souvenirs of the lofty aspirations of twentieth century abstraction; they can also be read as meditations on the practices of attention that cause artifacts to shift into and out of legibility, and thereby of fashion. Rags to riches, and vice versa.
The alteration between the exemplary and the rejected embodied in Quentel's paintings was bitterly recapitulated in her career as an artist. Viewing Quentel's art from outside the frame provided by theoretical debates of the 1980s may surprise contemporary audiences with uncommon aesthetic encounters. Likewise, attention to the story of her career provides instructive insights into how meaning and status in art are the two forked extensions of a single movement; discourse constantly advances both effects towards - and retracts them from - specific art and artists with the quick, relentless flicks of critical tongues.
By John Neff
The curator and Western Exhibitions wish to thank everyone at Stux Gallery for their assistance in realizing this project.
