Oct 17 – Dec 6, 2008

After a year-long Fulbright Fellowship to the prestigious Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, Carrie Schneider returns to Chicago with a body of new work for her first solo exhibition with moniquemeloche gallery. Schneider sets up impossible scenarios that pit a character (usually herself) against some force of nature. Through a complex web of personal mythologies, Schneider throws herself into fantasies of escape and concealment, creating uneasy resonances with simple juxtapositions. The result is a series of large-scale photographs and two 16mm films that continue to heighten the familiar to a level of precarious strangeness.

Carrie Schneider (born Chicago, 1979 lives Chicago) earned her MFA (2007) from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University (2001). Schneider attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2007, and has just returned from a yearlong Fulbright Fellowship to the Kuvataideakatemia Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki. Her work has recently been acquired by The Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Photography. In the past year her work has been included in a number of group exhibitions including The Ties That Bind: Spencer Murphy & Carrie Schneider at Gallery 44, Toronto and Tense Territories at Santralistanbul, Istanbul, Turkey curated by Aura Seikkula. In January 2009 she will open a solo exhibition at The Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki.

September 5 – October 11, 2008

The New Escapist Promised Land Garden and Recreation Center is Rashid Johnson’s 3rd solo show at moniquemeloche. Johnson returns to his hometown to transform the gallery into a mystical, recreation space remixing black history with references to alchemy, divination, astronomy and other sciences that freely combine the natural and spiritual worlds.

“I’m thinking of this show as a creolized orgy between Sun Ra, Paul Gaugin. Kazmir Malevich, Debra Dickerson and Eldridge Cleaver (if his soul were no longer on ice). Mix in some green plants, shea butter, black soap and serve.” Rashid Johnson summer 2008.

New photographs, sculptures, and “paintings” are only part of this site-specific installation.

Rashid Johnson (b. Chicago, 1977, lives NY) is a conceptual artist who works in myriad media including sculpture, photography and video, among others. He received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2005) and his BFA from Columbia College, Chicago (2000). His work has been exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Detroit Institute of Arts; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Corcoran Museum of Art, Washington D.C.; the Institute of Contemporary Photography, New York; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; the Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago where he had a solo exhibition. Upcoming exhibitions include 21: Selections of Contemporary Art from the Brooklyn Museum opening September 19, a solo exhibition at galeria annarumma 404, Milan, Italy in November, and 30 Americans at the Rubell Family Collection, Miami in December.

June 20 – August 2, 2008

From Jamaican gangstas to a hopeful United States presidential candidate, the group exhibition Boys of Summer considers the representation of the male in contemporary art. The work, done in a variety of media by a diverse range of artists, depicts a multitude of men, some identifiable, others stereotypical or purely imagined. Issues of sexuality and power are present, but these contemporary representations go beyond to also investigate questions of race and class. Whether these artists portray men as objects of desire, symbols of hope, or signs of otherness, their loaded work underscores the power of representational images and our society’s cultural consumption of them.

Nick Cave (American, born 1959) is a Chicago-based multimedia and performance artist and fashion designer. His large color photographs feature the African American artist dawning ambiguous masks. Immediately questioning the viewer’s race assumptions, the masks look at once like a robber’s ski mask and an ethnographic object. Cave earned his MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art and is currently a tenured instructor at the School of the Art Institute. Recent solo exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, FL 2007, the Chicago Cultural Center 2006, and Jack Shainman Gallery NY 2006 among others. His work has been in important group exhibitions including Black Alphabet: Contexts of Contemporary African-American Art at The Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland 2006 and Frequency curated by Thelma Golden and Christine Kim at the Studio Museum in Harlem 2005. In 2006 he was a recipient of the coveted Joyce Foundation Joyce Award. His work can be found in the permanent collections of the Portland Art Museum, OR, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA, and the Seattle Art Museum, WA.

James Gobel’s (American, born 1972) vibrantly elaborate paintings of “bears,” or heavyset gay men, balance a gentle humor with sensuality and a loving sensitivity. Adorned with felt, yarn and fabric, the delicately pieced together paintings recall traditionally feminine crafts like quilting, yet their imagery is typically masculine. Gobel begins his creative process with photographs of people, but his final images are hybrids, portraying types rather than specific individuals. Gobel earned his MFA at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Gobel has mounted solo exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, the Hayworth Gallery, Los Angeles, Marx & Zavattero, San Francisco, and Kravets/Wehby Gallery, NY. Gobel’s work has been reviewed and featured in Art in America, ARTnews, Artforum, Flash Art, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Metro.Pop, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Bay Guardian, SF Weekly, Beautiful Decay, Flaunt, Zink, and The Believer, among many other publications.

Zane Lewis (American, born 1981) creates large scale images of pop culture icons, ranging from the Pope to Brangelina, begging questions of modern day worship. For Obama, 2007, he carefully spilt, pooled and mixed paint before fashioning the politician’s head with a knife. Barack Obama, Charles Manson and Kim Jong II are three of Lewis’s portraits in his newest series Apostles. Lewis received his BFA from the Atlanta College of Art. He has mounted solo exhibitions at galleries such as Mixed Greens, NY; Romo, Atlanta; Finesilver, San Antonio; and Saltworks, Atlanta. His work has been included in group exhibitions at institutions such as the Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, AL; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; and Museum of Contemporary Art, GA.

In her Gangstas for Life series, Ebony G. Patterson (Jamaican, born 1981) depicts well-known Jamaican criminals. In doing so, she explores contemporary notions of male beauty within a Jamaican context. Specifically, the series highlights that fashionable practice of skin bleaching within the culture of the dancehall, a place of major cultural significance among young working class Jamaicans. Patterson earned her MFA in 2006 from the Sam Fox College of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. Since 2005 she has had solo exhibitions at See Line Gallery, Santa Monica, CA; Mutual Gallery, Jamaica; and the UC Gallery, University of Montana. In 2007 her work was featured in the group exhibition Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean curated by Tumelo Mosaka at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and in 2006 she was included in the Jamaica Biennial at the National Gallery of Jamaica. She is currently in residency at the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT.

The exhibition continues with works by Oscar Cueto (Mexican, born 1976), Jesper Just (Danish, born 1974), Russell Nachman (American, born 1966), Joel Ross (American, born 1966) and more!

April 25 – May 31, 2008

“We are reminded of the mathematical paradox of Zeno of Elea…the arrow never reaches the tree because it always has to cover half the distance again and again and again, meaning it slows more and more the closer it gets to the target.”
Sabine C. Becker, Review of Dino Buzzati’s “The Falling Girl,” irreal [re]views, http://home.sprynet.com/~awhit/review2c.htm

For her 2nd solo show at moniquemeloche, Karen Reimer will exhibit her ongoing series “Endless Set” which made its inaugural debut in early 2007 at VONZWECK.

“It is a hard-line conceptual project, based on rules Reimer conceived before threading the first needle. Each crazy-quilt pillowcase is made up of a predetermined number of irregularly shaped, irregularly patterned patches. (Two, the first in the series, is made up of two patches; Thirty-Seven is composed of 37 patches, and so on.) Onto each pillowcase, the artist has stitched the accompanying prime number, a piece of white cotton fabric that is the same height in inches as the number it represents (e.g., Thirty-Seven is 37 inches tall)… As the series progresses and the numbers grow in value and height, the cases become more abstract, the sequence more oblique and indecipherable. The bright patchwork gives in to the growing swathes of white. Any portion of the number that does not fit within the grid of the pillowcase, Reimer has folded back onto itself, obscuring the prime-number sequence even further.”
- Jake Malooley Time Out Chicago issue 112

The wikipedia definition of a prime number is a natural number greater than 1 which has exactly two distinct natural number divisors: 1 and itself. For example: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47, 53, 59, 61, 67, 71, 73, 79, 83, 89, 97, 101…

Karen Reimer received her MFA from the University of Chicago in 1989. A solo show, Karen Reimer: Embroideries 1999-2005, was mounted in 2007 at the Rochester Art Center, Rochester, MN curated by Scott Stulen. Her work is published in The Object of Labor: Art, Cloth, and Cultural Production, MIT Press, edited by Joan Livingstone & John Ploof, and By Hand: The Use of Craft in Contemporary Art, Princeton Architectural Press, edited by Shu Hung & Joseph Magliaro – both published in 2007. Selected group exhibitions include such institutions as the Contemporary Craft Museum, Portland OR; Memphis College of Art, Kohler Art Museum, Sheboygan, WI; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; and Wallspace, NY. Reimer is a past recipient of both the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Grant and Artadia Chicago Grants for Individual Artists.

March 14 – April 19, 2008

Looking to hip-hop as a model for a postmodern practice, Kendell Carter refuses the classification of a “high” discourse against a street or pop culture. Carter’s sculptural installations and recent works on paper blend urban street culture with traditional decorative elements — Kangol hat lamp shades, Wassily chairs upholstered in puffy jackets, graffiti tag coat racks. The result is clever and playful, yet the superficial humor of these cultural juxtapositions only briefly conceals the historical conflicts and contemporary issues that they ultimately reference and reveal. This decorative sampling and re-mixing acts as both a celebration and parody, embodying a society where social distinctions are becoming increasingly indiscernible; traditional luxuries are antiquated, urban becomes desirable and street culture is glamorized through songs, television and music videos. Carter’s interiors highlight the idea that even the most intimate aspects of our lives are reduced to the superficial, their sole purpose being to project the desired image. The viewer, such as in life, must consider and question how to interact with these uncanny spaces. His work acts as a catalyst, spurning a dialogue involving race relations, consumerism, wealth and utility.

Kendell Carter was born in New Orleans and lives in Los Angeles. He received a BFA from Atlanta College of Art in 1994, studied environmental design at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and received a MFA from California State University, Long Beach, CA in 2006, Kendell Carter had his first solo show at the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2006/07 and received critical acclaim in publications such as Art In America, Sculpture Magazine, LA Weekly and the Los Angeles Times. Recent exhibition include solo shows at Mark Moore Gallery, Los Angeles and Finesilver Gallery, Houston, and the group show “Blacks in and out of the Box” at The California African American Museum, LA.

February 1 – March 8, 2008

For her second solo show at moniquemeloche, Cindy Loehr found inspiration in the theological poetry of Peter O’Leary and titled her exhibition Twilight Knowledge. The exhibition features Loehr’s Fuel for Constant Light – a multi-media installation consisting of six towering aluminum wings, representing the six-winged Seraphim, complete with audio accompaniment.

Spirituality has always been a concern of Loehr’s, whose meticulously hand-crafted works reference “…the benign communal vocabularies of organized religion and public display.” Lisa Kurzner ArtPapers Loehr’s interest in Angels stems from their role as intercessors between the ineffable abstraction of heaven and the concrete reality of earth. The six-winged Seraphim are the highest order of angels. Described as emanations of pure light, they are the most philosophical of the angels. Their only job is to fly around and sing, but they sing in direct communication with god. In the song for Fuel for Constant Light, human desire is sung as an earthly aspiration towards the divine. This is a subversion of traditional Christian doctrine, which sees desire as the root of all sin. Also on view is Inward Generator – a quilt sewn with photographs taken by Loehr in New York City, from dusk through night, combined with pictures by Randy Russell of his own personal shrine. The quilt is assembled to create an iconic pattern; a ritualized reordering of passing impressions. Inward Generator is inspired both by the cosmological mapping of the mandala and the dark luminance of church stained glass. Like the mandala, Inward Generator is created as a tool for focusing inward. Fuel For Constant Light was first exhibited at the Hiromi Yoshii Gallery in Tokyo in 2006, and in the group show “Place of the Transcommon” curated by Nicholas Frank at INOVA/VOGEL, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee in 2007. The title is taken from Peter O’Leary’s poem “With More Passionate Flying,” which says: “Words of angels are fuel for constant light.” Lyrics are by Loehr in collaboration with Chuck Stebelton, with Carlos Lama (vocals), Ray Chi (cello), and Jesse Peterson (background vocals). The artist would like to thank Brad & Leslie Bucher and Nancy & Gene Hooff for their production support for Fuel for Constant Light and Michael Crocker & Stephen Tan for assistance with Inward Generator.

Cindy Loehr’s work is currently included in “The Puppet Show” curated by Ingrid Schaffner and Carin Kuoni at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), University of Pennsylvania. This traveling exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue and the venues are: Santa Monica Museum of Art, The Contemporary Museum Honolulu, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, The Frye Art Museum Seattle. Selected artist include Nayland Blake, Louise Bourgeois, Maurizio Cattelan, Anne Chu, Dan Graham, Pierre Huyghe, Christian Jankowski, Mike Kelley, William Kentridge, Annette Messager, Paul McCarthy, Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, Philippe Parreno and Rirkrit Tiravanija, Kiki Smith, Kara Walker, and Charlie White. Loehr has exhibited widely, including the Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. She was awarded an artist residency with the Core Program of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (2003-05) and earned her MFA from the University of Illinois Chicago (2001). Loehr also runs the Love Letter Collection and distributes don’t give up magnets as ongoing projects http://www.collectiveexperience.org.
Loehr was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1971 and lives in New York.