X420X
Saturday, February 13th, 2010 | 6 - 8:30PM (one night only)
CHICAGO: Damian Abraham, perhaps better known as Pink Eyes, frontman of Toronto-based punk band Fucked Up, is an accomplished illustrator whose work constructs a visual language based on highly detailed and grotesque characters. X420X is Abraham’s first solo exhibition, and is comprised of two serial projects and a site-specific wall drawing. A to Z is a set of monstrous characters contorted to form a full set of the alphabet, confronting the viewer upon entrance. Abraham started this current series eight years ago, and has since developed a body of meticulously cut forms that are at once precise and boldly perverse.
Taking cues from artist/musicians pushead and Brian Walsby, Abraham’s work demonstrates the inseparability of music and illustration often found in hardcore punk aesthetics. Abraham additionally looks to the apocalyptic paintings of artist Joe Coleman, whose intricate work interweaves pop iconography with historical references to artists such as Hieronymus Bosch. His biggest influence, however, is his father, who was an illustrator in the 1960s and 70s, working for Oz and Track Records in the UK.
Damian Abraham was born in the east end of Toronto, Ontario and attended the University of Toronto. Fucked Up formed in 2002 and has since released 42 singles and two albums and received the Polaris Music Prize for the year’s best new album in 2009. They are currently represented by Matador Records. Abraham has appeared regularly on the Fox News program Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld since 2009, playing the voice of liberal dissent.
Fucked Up will perform at the Viaduct Theater (3111 N. Western) immediately following the opening of X420X. The concert begins at 9:30PM on February 13.
PARTY CRASHERS
Dick Blau
Micah Lexier
Dutes Miller & Stan Shellabarger
Davida Nemeroff
Annie Pootoogook
Carrie Schneider
November 21 – December 13, 2009
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 21, 7:00 – 10:00 pm
Gallery Hours: Sundays, 12:00 – 5:00pm
'There is a popular notion that the photographer is by nature a voyeur, the last one invited to the party. But I'm not crashing; this is my party. This is my family, my history.'
- Nan Goldin
CHICAGO: Concertina Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Party Crashers, a group exhibition featuring photography, performance, drawing, and mixed media by Dick Blau, Micah Lexier, Dutes Miller & Stan Shellabarger, Davida Nemeroff, Annie Pootoogook and Carrie Schneider.
When representing friends and family, the role of the artist is fraught with complications. Intimacy becomes public, and both artist and viewer are implicated in voyeuristic play. The presence of this exhibition in our domestic space intensifies the roles of outsider and insider, as once the audience crosses the threshold into our home, an acute sense of self-consciousness may arise as concepts of the private and public are confused.
In photographs by Dick Blau, representations of his children and long-term partner reveal the slippery relationship between candid and staged photography. At once a father documenting his family and an artist constructing a composition, Blau calls attention to the awkwardness and inhibitions that exist in the most intimate of relationships. Annie Pootoogook’s colorful drawings in pencil crayon similarly depict everyday family life. The daughter of a long line of Inuit artists, Pootoogook gives viewers a sense of contemporary life in Cape Dorset, Canada, drawing attention to and at times bridging gaps between interior and exterior, insider and outsider.
Carrie Schneider’s Derelict Self series humorously portrays the artist shadowing her older brother in a variety of staged poses. As her body awkwardly mirrors his, issues of sibling respect and rivalry are exposed in the relationship. Mirroring also occurs in the silhouettes of Dutes Miller and Stan Shellabarger. Beards entwined, the artists offer a self-contained representation of intimacy in both their physical resemblance and their roles as both subject and object.
Davida Nemeroff and Micah Lexier both use technical and stylistic manipulations to represent their fathers. In his Fax Test series Micah Lexier letterpresses faxed notes from his father, mimicking his personal script, and drawing attention to modes of familial communication and technological mediation. In What Window Light Can do For My Dad, Nemeroff exhibits not only a family vacation narrative, but she also explores the mechanisms of display. As natural light hitting a photo of her father is re-photographed, his portrait is uniquely framed and doubly mediated.
These works depict family and friends in a variety of mediums and contexts, complicated by the apartment gallery context. Entering a domestic space that is made public can be an unnerving experience, but for this exhibition, “party crashers” are welcome.
AUSTRALIA
Anthea Behm
Aron Gent
October 23 – November 15, 2009
Opening Reception: Friday, October 23, 7:00 – 10:00pm
CHICAGO: Concertina Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Australia, an exhibition featuring performance and video artist Anthea Behm and photographer Aron Gent.
Acting as a springboard for works by both Behm and Gent, Baz Luhrmann’s 2008 movie Australia provides loaded content for each artist to pick apart and reconstruct. Recently earning a spot in the Museum of Modern Art’s film collection, Australia has established a reputation as both a box office hit and a larger-than-life portrayal of Australian culture and history. Triggering questions of cultural ownership and responsibility, Behm and Gent address the cultural transmission between those represented and those representing. Though the artists work off the same source material, they diverge in form and intention. Behm strips away Luhrmann’s film to its bare structure, rupturing its cinematic devices and inserting the personal, while Gent reworks its surface qualities into an entirely new illusion through time-lapse photography.
In her single-channel video Behm, a Chicago-based Australian, diligently describes the three-hour movie from start to finish, reducing Hollywood spectacle to a deadpan monotone. As viewers watch Behm observe the movie, they are given only verbal descriptors of Luhrmann’s creation. Although free to imagine what is onscreen, viewers also receive information filtered through the artist’s subjective response.
Like Behm, Chicago-based photographer Aron Gent draws attention to the movie’s more illusory aspects. By freezing the action and creating an abstract image, he exaggerates the already stylized qualities of Australia. Gent’s work reveals deceptions of the staged image, often pairing figurative photography with landscapes. In the case of Mountainside (2009), the landscape heightens the formal qualities of the time-lapse photograph from the movie, and in this exhibition acts as a false presentation of Australia. Hollywood blurs boundaries between countries, as various locations become proxies for cultural and national identities. This exhibition allows for an examination of both filmic tropes and cultural interchanges, from the viewpoints of two very different artists.
Anthea Behm received her MFA in Film, Video and New Media from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009. Her work has been shown in various venues in Australia and beyond, including Gitte Weise Gallery (Sydney); Australian Centre for Photography (Sydney); Back Loft Gallery (Dublin); Chicago Film Forum; and BridgeArt Fair (New York). Behm is a current recipient of the New Work Grant from the Australia Council for the Arts, and is based in Chicago.
Aron Gent received his BFA in Photography from Columbia College in 2007. His work is in the collection of the Milwaukee Art Museum, and he was included in the Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward publication of emerging photographers in 2007. Gent has been included in a variety of exhibitions, including the Houston Center for Photography; GASP Project Space (Boston); and the Minnesota Center for Photography. He is currently a photography editor for Proximity magazine.
ARTIST LINKS:
Anthea Behm
Aron Gent www.arongent.com
