A curatorial venture
by Monique Meloche and Douglas Levine

Dec 12, 2003 – Jan 24, 2004

Dec 12 – 31, 2003 curated by Monique Meloche
Jan 9 – 24, 2004 curated by Douglas Levine

Art does NOT need to match your sofa — please join us for 2 consecutive exhibitions exploring the boundaries of the space above the sofa. While the sofas remain constant during the run of the exhibition, the show is curated in 2 phases: first by Monique Meloche from Dec 12 -31 and second by furniture/interior designer Douglas Levine Jan 9-24 selecting artwork from moniquemeloche gallery artists.

SOFAs generously provided by:
Casati Gallery
Gary Lee Partners
Orange Skin
Salvage One
Richard Wright

Oct 24 – Dec 6, 2003

I am a Negro artist demagogue producing work that allows me to embrace and reject any cultural signifiers that I choose to confront. Using what David Hammons once called “cultural abstraction” as a vehicle, I make photos, videos and sculptures that not only work as devices for self-indulgent muckraking, but also provoke bouts of hopeless nostalgia. The ideas addressed, hair to language to violence and social uprising, all work as tools in my devious plan to spelunk the bottomless agenda of cultural identity politics, word.

Sept 5 – Oct 11, 2003

Monique Meloche: Hi Chris, any news on what can I expect in the gallery for your New Pictures show????

Christopher Patch:
Paintings on canvas (varying sizes) and a shitload of drawings/watercolors in many shapes and sizes (actually most are 8 x 10 inches, many framed…oh, yeah and a large cut-out that I’m waiting to get back from the framers. I would also like to paint some images on the walls (that part is a surprise–even to me). Images range from swamps to mountains, seascape/nautical, drawings may be anything from rainbow trout to high school students (from 70s yearbooks). Sorry if this all sounds pretty vague but I am bringing an assortment and will see how/what works in the space.

The following is a list of catch words and phrases that may be of some help in writing a press release (not in any particular order):
unspoiled scenic wonders, symphony of color, American wonderlands, awe-inspiring, majestic, weirdly beautiful, unreal-idyllic, “super nature”, deadpan, wonky, summer love, strangely familiar, awkward, melodrama, fake-o realism, homespun-fantasy-craft, saturated color, muted color, high contrast-hard edges, use of abstraction, floating chunks-o-color, perceptions of nature, culture’s representation of natural world, fictionalized worlds?, ambiguous backdrops?, sentimentality.

responding to/inspired by/influences:
books/magazines/films/photography, more specifically commercial art of the 1930s-50s, See America posters, National Parks, Reader’s Digest books on nature, museum display murals, American artists like Charles Burchfield; Rockwell Kent; Fairfield Porter; Milton Avery; Arthur Wesley Dow; Herge (creator of Tintin), women’s health manuals (1970s), Time Life Special Editions for Young People, high school yearbooks (vulnerability and awkward moments).

Christopher Patch (American b.1974, lives Maine) has his MFA from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago (2000) and marks his return to Chicago with his first solo show at moniquemeloche gallery. Recent group shows include “Here and Now” at the Chicago Cultural Center curated by James Rondeau, Greg Knight, Lanny Silverman, and Marianne Richter; “On a Clear Day” with Suzanne Caporael, Anne Chu & Christina Hejtmanek at Gahlberg Gallery; mixer03 at moniquemeloche; and a special project for Bridge Magazine “Kooky Kave Kut’N'Fold.”

Jul 10 – Aug 30, 2003

an ornithological group show of work in all media:
asianpunkboy (NY)
Ann Craven (NY)
Carlee Fernandez (LA)
Lane Hall/Lisa Moline ( Milwaukee )
Alexa Horochowski (Minneapolis)
Guy Hundere (San Antionio)
Cindy Loehr ( Chicago )
Chris Patch  ( Maine )
Pamela Wilson ( San Francisco )
Something literally is in the air — and it’s not just the pigeons lurking around the meat packers across the street, so please join us for this ornithological group show featuring: asianpunkboy’s owl with bombastic diamond eyes whose aesthetic equilibrium lies between frail beauty and virtual banal kitsch; Craven’s rococo bird paintings, which seem like greeting card fodder on the surface, are so richly painted and resonate with honesty; Fernandez altered taxidermic birds and branches that James Scarborough referred to as the sculptural equivalent to Lon Chaney’s metamorphosis into the Wolf Man; Hall/Moline’s large-scale laser and ink-jet prints of baby birds that challenges the architectural space of the gallery and its environs; Horochowski’s sexually precocious, coloring-book style painting of cowgirls with birds; Hundere’s Ornithomancy, a video animation of a sky filled with Taschen 747 airplanes set in motion by birds in flight; Loehr’s opening night performance and resulting installation continuing her exploration of her grandfather’s slides birds of Florida; Patch’s Birds painting adapted from a 1960s vintage amateur photography magazine; and Wilson’s subtle, abstract Aviary drawings and paintings inspired by her recent stay in London.

May 2 – 31, 2003

“By Chance refers to the act of choosing, how does one make a choice…. In the end it all goes according to circumstance. Choice is regulated many times by taste, and taste is regulated by learned behavior among other things.”
- Carla Arocha 2003

This exhibition of new work by Venezuelan-born Carla Arocha will feature new paintings (including a super-charged piece based on the image above titled “Vanessa”), a wall of abstract drawings, and site-specific installation. Her meticulously-crafted and optically-challenging work exudes an air of obsession while revealing subtle acts of random disarray. Arocha’s investigation of the intersection of style, substance, and the human condition continues to be seen through a veil of pattern-based work all the while challenging the notion of “painting” itself.

Arocha currently lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from University of Illinois in Chicago. Her work is in there permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Fundación Banco Mercantil, Caracas; British Airways, O’Hare Internatinal Airport, Chicago; Saks Fifth Avenue Boca Raton, Florida; American Express, New York, New York; and numerous private collections. Recently she was included in several important exhibitions throughout Europe including Fonkeling (shimmering) at Cultureel Centrum Stombeek, Grimbergen, Belgium curated by Luk Lambrecht; Politicas de la Diferencia: Arte Iberoamericano de Fin de Siglo, a group show of contemporary Latin American artists curated by Victor Zamudio Taylor still traveling; and most recently featured at ARCO up and coming booth – Madrid Spain curated by Victor Zamudio-Taylor.

Mar 21 – Apr 26, 2003

These lush color photographs are the latest images from her ongoing series Morning and Melancholia, featuring the artist’s new fascination with sweets within the still-life context. Drawing on the classical arrangements of Dutch-Flemish still-life paintings, her photographs explore the domestic objects that are touched, devoured, and discarded. “By photographing the remains of a meal,” Letinsky says, “I am exploring the formal relationships between ripeness and decay, delicacy and awkwardness, control and haphazardness, waste and plenitude, pleasure and sustenance.”

A graduate of the Yale University School of Art, Letinsky is currently Associate Professor of Art at the University of Chicago. Letinsky has received numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000, and her work is in the collection of The Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among many others. Her series Venus Inferred was published as a book by the University of Chicago Press in 2000, and her work was recently included in Blink: 100 Contemporary Photographers (Phaidon Press, London, 2002). Recent solo shows include Edwynn Houk, New York; Jane Jackson, Atlanta; Stephen Bulger, Toronto; and group shows at The Kinsey Institute and Winnipeg Art Gallery, Manitoba. Letinsky will have a solo show at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago in Spring 2004.

Feb 7 – Mar 15, 2003

Born in Argentina, Alexa Horochowski (pronounced Hor-oh-HOE-ski) creates installations combining photography, video, murals, and sculpture that explore the dichotomy of her Latin roots and her Midwestern identity — she has been living and working in Minneapolis since 1999. Her playful, often self-mocking, sometimes saucy, and always provocative work had landed her in a series of impressive exhibitions over the past year.

Winter Wonderland is an installation that includes a series of large-scale color photographic portraits (like the self-portrait above subtitled “Snowbound”) depict the exotic and rebellious spirit necessary in the survival/enjoyment of a Midwestern winter along with “tragic dioramas” sculpted in footstool form, photo murals, wood paneling and faux fur. She has had solo shows at the Soap Factory and Franklin Art Works in Minneapolis and was recently in the Big and Beautiful drawing show at Artspace in Kansas City alongside Louise Bourgeois, Julie Moos, Kara Walker, & Andrea Zittel. She’ll have her first solo show in Argentina this March at Braga Menendez/Schuster in Buenos Aires. Horochowski has both a BA and Journalism degree from University of Missouri and an MFA from University of Michigan (1996).

Jan 17 – Feb 1, 2003

Monique Meloche is pleased to present a historic show of photos by Charlie Ahearn and other pioneers of hip and hop and graff photography to celebrate the release of Yes Yes Y’all, the Experience Music Project oral history of Hip-Hop’s first decade (edited by EMP curator Jim Fricke and Charlie Ahearn, director the seminal hip-hop film Wild Style that just celebrated it’s 20th anniversary. The 300-page book published by Da Capo Press contains photos shot by Ahearn in the Bronx “…documenting the music’s many phases before Run or DMC ever grabbed the mike. Witnesses such as Afrika Bambaataa and Kool Herc — as well as many more-obscure players — shed light on everything from the gang culture that gave way to early hip-hop crews to the commingling of uptown’s B-boys and downtown’s art scenesters to the eventual marginalization of DJs and break dancers in favor or rappers.” Jon Caramanica Rolling Stone Magazine November 28, 2002.

This traveling exhibition is generously sponsored by the Experience Music Project and has taken on quite a different flavor at each venue. The show opened at Deitch Projects in Williamsburg (Nov 2002), SandroniRey Gallery in LA (Dec 2002), moniquemeloche in Chicago (Jan 2003), Punch Gallery in San Francisco (March 2003), and finally at EMP in Seattle.