Reed Anderson is fresh from his 2nd solo show at Galerie Leyendecker in the Canary Islands. His hole-punched, air-brushed, drawn, doodled, & collaged mixed-media drawings were recently in the Whitney Museum at Philip Morris show Five by Five and at Clementine Gallery in NY. Many may recall solo show at Standard Gallery in Chicago last September with eerie coincidence.
Sang-ah Choi just received her MFA from the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana and brings an obsessive interest in Asian animation and pop-culture mixed with an exploration of her own Korean heritage. A site-specific installation of stickers computer manipulated from her drawings will play with your perception.
Matthew Higgs is not only a writer and Curator of Art and Design at CCAC Wattis Institute in San Francisco, but he’s a British born artist who shows his intelligently conceptual framed bookpages with Murray/Guy Gallery in New York. With the book’s title operating as the crux for each piece, Higgs employs the element of slapstick to make his often deadpan gestures. Alexa Horochowski was born in Missouri, raised in Argentina until age 10, and currently lives and works in Minneapolis. Of course her work would deal with issues of her Latin heritage couched within her Midwestern sensibilities. New hand-stamped sumi ink drawings from her series Vaqueras will cover the walls with a bevy of cowgirls lassoing and hanging from the trees.
Lump Lipshitz is a prolific artist living and working (running his own gallery LUMP) in Raleigh, North Carolina. His quirky and personal drawings incorporate snippets of contemporary culture from Prada to Spiderman to Elton John and seen in shows from Bill Arning’s “Achieving Failure: Gym Culture 2000″ to Omar Lopez-Chahoud curated room at the Hotel Nash Miami in December 2001.
Dave Muller (who just happened to have a drawing of his mixer board) found time to make new work despite his huge solo show at BARD (including 250 pieces, traveling to UCLA Hammer Museum in Oct, catalogue with essays by Amada Cruz & Matthew Higgs). The work continues his ongoing series of smart, colorful drawings that recontextualize and often wryly reinterpret posters and announcements for other artists’ exhibitions. Muller lives in LA where he is represented by Blum & Poe.
Chris Patch and Joel Ross live and work here in Chicago and are both graduates of the School of the Art Institute; however their roots in Maine and Texas respectively has certainly influenced their chosen paths — Chris with a vast interest in nature and commercial illustration and Ross investigating odd and lonely characters along a long stretch of highway. Ross was the inaugural show in my gallery last May and Patch will have his first solo show here in the Spring. Both will be featured in the Project Pages of the upcoming issue of Bridge Magazine later this summer. Patch will also be the group show HERE AND NOW featuring 25 of the best young artists in Chicago curated by James Rondeau from the Art Institute; Gregory Knight, Director of Visual Arts, and Lanny Silverman, Curator of Exhibitions, from the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs; and Marianne Richter, from The Union League Club at the Chicago Cultural Center (Oct-Dec 2002). Ross’s photographic series Playing Dead will be in “GUN CRAZY” curated by Brett Levine at the University of Alabama opening August 16.
Simon Periton works with familiar images from album covers to skull-and-crossbones to domestic animals to create his unique paper cut-outs — the delicate handicraft often subverted by his clashing appropriations. Periton lives in London and is represented by Sadie Coles.
Wayne White’s anachronistic word paintings created on mass-produced, thrift store landscape prints are smart, funny, and seductive. Perhaps it has something to do with his diverse background born in Tennessee, moving to NY to study with Art Spiegelman and spending 10 years as cartoonist for New York Times, Rolling Stone, & Village Voice then as set designer for Pee Wee’s Playhouse, finally moving to LA to continue painting but winding up as Art Director for Peter Gabriel’s Big Time & the Smashing Pumpkins’ Tonight Tonight music videos, production designer for Jim Henson, and animator and puppet designer for Beakman’s World! White recently had a solo show at Clementine and is represented by Mark Moore Gallery.
