Contributed photo | www.westernexhibitions.com
Contributed photo | www.westernexhibitions.com
Rachel Niffenegger, "Opia" in gallery one // Aya Nakamura, "Wayfaring" in gallery two
now open!
In Gallery 1
January 8 to March 5, 2022
Contributed photo
| www.westernexhibitions.com
RACHEL NIFFENEGGER
The Other Side of a Mirror
by Mary Elizabeth Coleridge, aka 'Andos'
I sat before my glass one day,
And conjured up a vision bare,
Unlike the aspects glad and gay,
That erst were found reflected there –
The vision of a woman, wild
With more than womanly despair.Her hair stood back on either side
A face bereft of loveliness.
It had no envy now to hide
What once no man on earth could guess.
It formed the thorny aureole
Of hard, unsanctified distress.Her lips were open – not a sound
Came through the parted lines of red,
Whate’er it was, the hideous wound
In silence and secret bled.
No sigh relieved her speechless woe,
She had no voice to speak her dread.
And in her lurid eyes there shone
The dying flame of life’s desire,
Made mad because its hope was gone,
And kindled at the leaping fire
Of jealousy and fierce revenge,
And strength that could not change nor tire.
Shade of a shadow in the glass,
O set the crystal surface free!
Pass – as the fairer visions pass –
Nor ever more return, to be
The ghost of a distracted hour,
That heard me whisper: – ‘I am she!’
For her fourth solo exhibition with Western Exhibitions, Opia, Rachel Niffenegger braves familiar faces in curious and experimental new media. Specters the artist previously conjured through paint pours, are now generated through an obsessive digital breeding process, which combines artificial intelligence and sublimated aluminum. These wraiths are suspended amongst haunted furniture, pulled from the folds of psychedelic clay, and spiraled through mirrored metalwork. A precarious steel and brass tête-à-tête chair and uncanny rug divides the gallery. The psychological seating presents a space to ponder our unbecoming, and observe the haunted underscores of ourselves and homes in the process. The show opens on Saturday, January 8, and will run through March 5, 2022. Appointments are not necessary; masks are mandatory; gallery hours are Tuesday-Saturday, 11am to 6pm.
Rachel Niffenegger’s work has been included in museum shows at the Museum for Modern Art in Arnhem, the Netherlands; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, MI; and the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago and in gallery shows in New York, Berlin, Chicago, Liverpool, Denver, and Milwaukee, among others. In 2012 she completed a 9-month residency at DE ATELIERS in Amsterdam. Chicago Magazine named her “Chicago’s best emerging artist” in 2010 and New City named her one of “Chicago’s Next Generation of Image Makers” in 2010, this after naming her the “Best Painter Under 25” in 2009. Niffenegger, born in Evanston in 1985, received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. She is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and lives and works in Chicago.
View the show on our website here
Download press release
Image: Wraith 1, 2021. Dye sublimation on brushed aluminum chroma luxe panel, frame mount, 36 x 36 inches
Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present 10 new abstract works on paper—colored pencil on artist-produced handmade paper—by Aya Nakamura in her first show, Wayfaring, at the gallery. The show opens on Saturday, January 8 and will run through March 5, 2022. Appointments are not necessary; masks are mandatory; gallery hours are Tuesday-Saturday, 11am to 6pm.
Aya Nakamura borrows the show’s title from Tim Ingold’s Lines, a book that proposes a taxonomy of lines across different cultures and time. For Nakamura, abstraction is a way of relating intention in the moment. It is a kind of wayfaring, or of following the signs and guideposts that reveal themselves along a path in order to arrive at an end point. Nakamura works in pencil, as this slows down time enough for her to deliberate while drawing. She thinks of each element in the drawing as a consciousness that engages directly with its neighbors and aggregates into a larger entity, like an anthill. The result is a series of encounters, a permeability of space and form, embedded sensitivities, and touch.
The drawings are colored pencil on handmade paper of different sizes and shapes, which have a physicality and assert themselves during the drawing process. Variegated lines move across, alongside and into fields of color, and these assemble into amorphous compositions that appear to simultaneously build and dissolve. Some have visual links to existing symbols and objects, which provide a starting point and focus. Their inspirations are various but orbit around a cataclysmic event, the passing of a loved one in the spring of 2021. They are meditations on death and metaphysics, and provide a space for questioning, grief, memorial, humor, and healing.
Nakamura’s work is influenced by a philosophy of mind that does not exclusively locate consciousness in the human, derived from interacting with plants and following posthumanist research in biology and anthropology. Drawings like Dwelling, Wheel and Dharma Spin deal with Buddhist death rituals and beliefs, and with attempts to inculcate some of these values within herself. In other works like Where Is Your Head At? and Holes, materiality itself seemed to shift towards porosity, an overwhelming sense of things to come, or as Thomas Ligotti writes in his short story Alice’s Last Adventure: “I felt intimations of a thousand misshapen marvels—of things going haywire in curious ways, of the edge of the world where an endless ribbon of road continued into space by itself, of a universe handed over to new gods.”
Aya Nakamura has shown at venues in the US and abroad, including The Hangar and Dawawine in Beirut, Lebanon; Supa Salon in Istanbul, Turkey; Mana Decentralized in Jersey City, NJ; and MPSTN in Fox River Grove, IL. She is the recipient of the Denbo Fellowship from Pyramid Atlantic Art Center and the George and Ann Siegel Fellowship from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Nakamura is also a member of Chicago API (Asian, Pacific Islander) Artists United (CAAU), and a board member of Spudnik Press in Chicago, IL. Nakamura was born in Japan and educated in France and the US. She holds a BA in Fine Arts and Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania, an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and currently lives and works in Chicago.
View the show on our website here
Download press release
Image: Hisako, 2021. Coloured pencil on handmade paper, 45.5 x 40.5 inches
You are receiving this email because you visited the gallery or our booth at an art fair.
For those of you based in the EU, the GDPR went into effect recently. We would love to keep in touch; however, if you no longer wish to receive our email updates, you can unsubscribe by clicking the link at the bottom of this email. If you wish to remain on our mailing list, no action is required.
Western Exhibitions | 1709 W Chicago Ave, Chicago, IL 60607
Alerts Sign-up