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If You Lived Here You'd Be Home By Now
A series of three exhibitions curated by Booster and SevenPart Three: Jeremy Boyle & Rick Gribenas
August 10 - August 18, 2007
Opening Reception: Friday, August 10, 2007, 6-9 pm
CHICAGO, IL - rowlandcontemporary and Booster and Seven are pleased to announce the third and final exhibition within the three-part series If You Lived Here You'd Be Home By Now. Organized by Booster and Seven, an ongoing curatorial partnership between Brittany Reilly and Steph Pavone, Part Three in this series includes the work of Jeremy Boyle and Rick Gribenas.
Jeremy Boyle presents a selection of new work composed from a range of media, including small and intricate mechanical drawings rendered in ballpoint or gel pen on paper, spray-painted stencil works, and light box constructions - an engaging contrast to his otherwise diverse explorations.
Build...puncture...suspend...three terms that comprise the conceptual, emotional, and formal exploration of Rick Gribenas' sight specific interventions. "...we can't know exactly how particles will react, but we can assume they will act based on some kind of established system founded on observation. In that observation however, we know that at any moment we might have to totally change our minds."
Part Two: Posthumously Promoted, a solo exhibition by David Rothenberg*Artist Talk: David Rothenberg will lead a tour and discussion of his exhibition Saturday, July 28th between 1-3pm.
July 27 - August 4, 2007
Opening Reception: Friday, July 27, 2007, 6-9 pm
CHICAGO, IL - rowlandcontemporary and Booster and Seven are pleased to announce Posthumously Promoted, a solo exhibition by David Rothenberg. Posthumously Promoted is the second exhibition within a three-part series curated and organized by Booster and Seven, an ongoing curatorial partnership between Brittany Reilly and Steph Pavone.
For his first solo show in Chicago, Rothenberg will present a multi-disciplinary installation, including works that often cross media-specific boundaries. In the majority of these works, violence is depicted and displaced through metaphorical uses of materials. Rothenberg appropriates and scavenges the ephemera and imagery of sport hunting, road kill, and popular media depictions of violence. Imagery is dislocated from its original context or referent to bring forward new meaning. These works alternately evoke such things as the sport hunter's need to elevate his or her prey into the "worthy adversary" and the rhetorical practice of dehumanizing enemies in wartime to legitimize violence.
In Rothenberg's series of collages titled Fireworks, half toned photographs of a shot duck falling from the sky are hidden by superimposed snapshots of exploding fireworks. The overlapping fireworks images simultaneously mask the record of violence while being visually implicated in the act by its juxtaposition. In Road Paintings, 2007, Rothenberg explores a slapstick overlap between industrial and art applications of painting and photography. In a series of inkjet prints on canvas based on the four Time magazine "X-covers", for which painted X's were superimposed over the portraits of dead or defeated wartime adversaries in a macabre celebration, Rothenberg uses second-hand issues of these covers as source material, in which the subscriber's identity on mailing labels has been marked over by hand and concealed.
Part One: Chelsea Culp, AJ Fusco, Guan Rong, Ryan Swanson, and J. Patrick Walsh IIIJuly 12 - 21, 2007
Opening Reception: Thursday, July 12, 2007, 6-9pm
CHICAGO, IL - rowlandcontemporary and Booster and Seven are pleased to announce If You Lived Here You'd Be Home By Now, a summer series of three short-running exhibitions. Part One includes the work of Chelsea Culp, AJ Fusco, Guan Rong, Ryan Swanson, and J. Patrick Walsh III. This series is guest curated and organized by Booster and Seven, an ongoing curatorial partnership between Brittany Reilly and Steph Pavone. While Booster and Seven previously operated in a physical gallery space, this set of exhibitions will mark their first activity in a continued effort to facilitate the work of young artists beyond the platform of the former gallery setting.
The first exhibition at rowlandcontemporary will include five young artists from disparate practices, each in a very active moment in their studio practice. Most of the artists in this series have participated with Booster and Seven in previous projects, and it is this history that provides the strongest link between the artists in the exhibition.
Chelsea Culp's studio practice and work has developed partially out of her experience as a house painter and her identity as a modern handywoman. Culp explores and gives form to this experience, by reclaiming the symbols, tools, materials, and processes that render her activities. By appropriating materials and techniques encountered in a role outside the studio, Culp plays with the traditions of surface and structure, form and function, suggesting ways in which our world might work and look, while simultaneously noting the ridiculous limitations of building practices and spaces.
AJ Fusco's black ink abstract line drawings are inspired by the phenomenon of Stendhal's Syndrome-a psychosomatic illness manifesting symptoms of dizziness, confusion, rapid heartbeat and hallucination provoked by a visual overload of aesthetic beauty, often associated with Renaissance and Baroque masterpieces. His practice merges elements from Baroque sculpture, perceptual art of the 1960s, anatomical and geological structures, comic art and elaborate Gothic typography.
Guan Rong's painting practice requires and embraces the unique first encounter with the subject matter, though she finds the paintings always present parts of the world she inhabits, and become equivalent in that way. As a whole, her practice explores the void between image and intention through a consideration of impermanency, absence, directness, illusion, and superficiality in art and in life. The emphasis lands on the paintings' need to be perceived in the context of their becoming an object within the real world.
Ryan Swanson's prints present scenes wherein objects and bodies relate in unexpected ways, in an exploration of taste-making and constructed identity and context. Instead of trying to separate or classify, Swanson extends the rival concepts of utility and embellishment beyond exaggeration, as gestures metastasize into decorations and spaces re-organize into patterns.
J. Patrick Walsh's drawings and sculptures are presented in this exhibition to exemplify his comparisons between the production and perception of each. The wax sculptures are created with a slow and meditative approach, and are regarded by the artist as unconscious and passive, regardless of their dimension in space. His drawings are a response to random visual stimuli, social engagement, and observation, playfully embracing the mind's functional and awake state.
