Contributed photo | www.westernexhibitions.com
Contributed photo | www.westernexhibitions.com
Opening this Friday, March 11, from 5 to 7 pm
Contributed photo
| www.westernexhibitions.com
For her fourth solo show at Western Exhibitions, Arrangement in the Steps of a Horse, Lilli Carré presents a new body of work that revolves around the pivot movement of the knight’s piece in chess. The exhibition title is derived from a 9th century description of the Knight’s Tour, a classic chess problem in which the knight visits each square exactly once. The show will open with a public reception on Friday, March 11, from 5 to 7 pm, and will run through April 23, 2022. The gallery will be open late on Friday, April 8 as part of EXPO Chicago’s Art After Hours program, until 8 pm.
The work in Arrangement in the Steps of a Horse pivots among mediums; Ceramic sculpture, stone mosaic, ink drawing, hand-drawn animation, and weaving are all created simultaneously, a consistent dynamic within Carré’s practice. In formal and autobiographical ways, this body of work explores constant change and repositioning; being grounded and ungrounded; a heavy step versus a light step; strategy versus improvisation. It also furthers Carré’s ongoing exploration of a contorted body in virtual and physical spaces, considering how a body is positioned and watched in relation to others.
A stone mosaic depicting three people engaging aggressively in a game rests on the ground, a long-labored image that revealed itself slowly as it was made. The mosaic squats in the room surrounded by a series of fast, impulsive ink gestures on paper, improvisational meditations on change. Embedded within the drawings, ceramics, and stone works are autobiographical pivots that occurred during the pandemic as the work was being made.
Three reimagined chess pieces stand as human-sized sculptures in the room, holding the triadic tension of a concealed power dynamic. In a hand-drawn animation titled Glazing, an animated body pivots in smear frames through the history of painting, parroting famous depictions of women. She tests the postures by inhabiting them and promptly discarding them, rejecting the fantasy that each represents. The cartoon body is confined by the frame but thrives in constant transition. The origins of cinema and animation can be traced back to the Muybridge movement study of a horse’s feet, capturing them all in midair.
Lilli Carré’s solo shows include the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio, Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica di Bologna in Italy, and Western Exhibitions. She was recently included in Private Eye: The Imagist Impulse in Chicago Art at Indianapolis Museum of Art and Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Her animated films have been shown in festivals throughout the US and abroad. She co-founded the Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation in 2010, which is held annually in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. She has several published graphic novels and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Best American Comics, Best American Nonrequired Reading and the New York Times, where she currently does weekly illustrations. She received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and MFA from Northwestern University. Carré is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and she lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
View the show on our website here
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In Gallery 2
March 11 to April 23, 2022
with
Dan Attoe, Elijah Burgher, Julia Schmitt Healy, Leasho Johnson,
Robyn O'Neil, Lauren Roche, and Frances Waite
Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present Figures, Grounds, with work from Dan Attoe, Elijah Burgher, Julia Schmitt Healy, Leasho Johnson, Robyn O’Neil, Lauren Roche, and Frances Waite. Whether viewing them as landscapes with figures or as figures in landscapes, the bodies in this show beg you to ask their origin story: Where did they come from? Why are they where they are? Where do they want to be? Is this their end or the beginning? Why are we here and for how long? Figures, Grounds opens with a public reception on Friday, March 11, from 5 to 7 pm, and will run through April 23, 2022. The gallery will be open late on Friday, April 8 as part of EXPO Chicago’s Art After Hours program, until 8 pm.
Dan Attoe’s miniature humans disrupt his depictions of natural wonders. Spouting diaristic missives, meticulously painted in silver, Attoe’s people further assert their presence despite their microscopic scale.
Drawing from mythology, ancient history, the occult, ritual magic, Elijah Burgher works at the crossroads of representation and language, figuration, abstraction and the real and imagined. His figurative drawings often feature his friends and reimage scenes from ancient myth.
Julia Schmitt Healy’s early work is instantly recognizable as coming from the bustling Chicago Imagist scene of the early 1970s. Stuffed, quilted, and finished off with zits, bandages, hair, and buttons, Healy’s characters grapple with all of life’s pleasures and absurdities.
Working across a wide variety of mediums, Leasho Johnson uses his experience growing up black, queer, and male to explore concepts around forming identity and the postcolonial condition. Born from layer upon layer of charcoal blended seamlessly with brushy strokes of painted colour, Johnson’s matte black silhouettes stand starkly against atmospheric colourfields, their heads racing and stoic.
Robyn O’Neil’s precisely drawn graphite landscapes investigate evolution, apocalypse, natural disaster, and extinction with imagined imagery that is surreal and separate from the flow of time. Personal narratives are embedded into symbolism and suggested in titles, often hinting at apocalypse without ever being fully explained.
Lauren Roche’s nude female figures interact with twisted animals among textured planes draped auras. Among their flush environment, Roche’s figures and animals tend to each other, peacefully lounging, snarling, bleeding, and existing.
Frances Waite renders horny apocalyptic meltdowns in her photorealistic graphite drawings. Her women stand by as their worlds crumble around them, living and finding simple pleasure despite chaos and waste.
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