Contributed photo | www.westernexhibitions.com
Contributed photo | www.westernexhibitions.com
Western Exhibitions recently issued the following announcement.
Both shows open during regular gallery hours on Saturday, September 18, 11am to 6pm
New shows by
Dutes Miller in Gallery 1 and Lauren Wy in Gallery 2
open to the public on
Saturday, September 18, 11am to 6pm
Appointments are not necessary, masks are required
Dutes Miller takes full advantage of his fourth solo exhibition at Western Exhibitions to celebrate queer-sex positivity as a form of resistance to the dominant culture. In a large body of new sculpture, collage, painting and drawing, the artist depicts his vision of a queer cultural revolution still evolving—free from taboo, stigma and repression, and bursting with sexual connection and body adoration. Miller depicts the gay male nude as a medley of arousal zones, in freeform shapes and wild paint globs of desire.
Miller figures in to a movement of “image culture” artists who appropriate and reinterpret gay mass media. He pulls men from porno/physique magazines and draws all over them. He also thrusts these men into his paintings as anonymous forms, out of a past era, into an extravagant, fleshy environment. Miller borrows queer visual culture to liberate it from body-image dogma. He touches black-and-white photographic images with gold leaf, exposing men who are not typically considered sexy, exploring their bodies as desirable to themselves and to others.
Boldly, Miller’s exhibition features a series of wall sculptures, over 30 in total, hanging like specimen, each an ambiguous portrait compiled of surprising materials and bulging appendages, looking like the dangling insides and outsides of a body. A fan of Deconstructionism and the philosophy of the body, Miller follows his self-interiority into the spaces inside the body, looking for the origins of desire in the flesh itself. This essentialism is Miller’s reaction or anti-gesture to the recent re-emergence of coded gay art mostly in the form of coy abstract painting. Instead, Dutes Miller offers a steady stream of lust in its wild state.
-Jason Foumberg, Chicago, July 2021
Dutes Miller’s work has been written about on Artforum (1, 2,) Hyperallergic, Huffington Post, and the Chicago Reader. His collaborative work with his husband Stan Shellabarger, as Miller & Shellabarger, won a 2008 Artadia Award and a 2007 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award and has been written about in Art in America, Artforum.com, Art & Auction, Frieze, Artnet, The Art Newspaper, Flash Art, and the Chicago Tribune. Miller received a BFA from Illinois State University. He is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and lives and works in Chicago.
View the show on our website here
Download press release
Image: Dutes Miller studio, May 2021
Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present a solo show by Los Angeles-based artist Lauren Wy in which she will debut Volume 1 of AUTODESIRE, a graphic novel machine made of process-based drawings —a body without organs— assembled through capacious rhythms. The show will open on Friday, September 17 with a reception, from 5 to 8pm, and will run through October 30, 2021. The gallery is open to the public, with no appointment necessary, Tuesday through Saturday, 11am to 6pm.
AUTODESIRE is a saga: a collection of 232 drawings that work together as a new manifesto on the darker iteration of figural abstraction. At the start of the pandemic, Wy found herself locked out of the studio and attempted a new format of making to meet the chaotic anxiety of the moment. While working serially and automatically in a format inspired by Louise Bourgeois’ Insomnia drawings, Wy’s AUTODESIRE became a vessel or a place or a setting like a hedge garden: a place designed for one to get lost.
AUTODESIRE is the story of a heroine who is making a journey through a road trip inferno. Her story is told through an algorithm that extracts memories from her long-dead corpse. AUTODESIRE drawings are made through the layering of ultra-saturated oil crayons with rich pigment-dyed folding panels. Within these environments, forms continually refuse to settle while they embrace multiplicity, alien sexuality, and Dionysian logic. Fragmented narratives—both real and imagined, autobiographical and stolen—come in and out of resolution throughout the panels. AUTODESIRE is the multiplicity of self as voiced by the alien femme in the bacchanal at the end of the world.
Each drawing in the series is displayed on two small handmade wood panels. These panels are hinged to open flat for display on the wall or may close shut like a book to be hidden on a bookshelf. The outside of each diptych/spread is flat white and minimal as the inside opens to reveal a drawing. The inspiration for this finishing is from “devotional” images from the early modern period: small wooden hinged panels, filled with images of Christs and Madonnas, made to be carried around.
Lauren Wy’s work was most recently shown in the Western Exhibitions Drawing Biennial in Chicago IL; ANTI, the 6th Athens Biennale in Greece; Kunstraum Walcheturm in Zurich, and at Apparatus Projects and Practise Gallery, both in Chicago and this fall will be included in _Espressioni at Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Turin, Italy. Concurrent with her show here at Western Exhibitions, Wy will be showing Volume 2 of AUTODESIRE in a solo show at Dio Horia in Greece. Wy received her MFA from Northwestern University in 2020 and she lives and works in Los Angeles.
The show will open on Saturday, September 18, from 11am to 6pm, and will run through October 30, 2021. The gallery is open to the public, with no appointment necessary, Tuesday through Saturday, 11am to 6pm.
View the show on our website here
Image: Lauren Wy, AUTODESIRE, Volume 1, May 7, 2021
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