Oct 17, 2010
This week: Amanda and Patricia have a ....
spirited....discussion with two of BAS's favorite artists (and the
greatest oversight in our interview history until now) Stan
Shellabarger and Dutes Miller. Go see their show, it's
awesome!
Next, Brian and Duncan talk to Courtney Fink of Art Publishing Now while at Southern Exposure.
Did we really get the "bums rush" from the Propellor fund, oh yes we did!
Lifted relevant info:
Art Publishing Now is a two-day event dedicated to the
investigation and showcasing of art publishing practices in the Bay
Area. It includes a day of presentations and critical discussions,
an after-party, an art publishers fair, library and archive.
Western Exhibitions is pleased to present an exhibition by
husband-and-husband artist team Miller & Shellabarger. The show
opens on Friday, October 15 with a reception, from 5 to 8pm, which
is free and open to the public.
This second showing at Western Exhibitions of Miller &
Shellabarger's collaborative pursuits will focus on works from
several inter-related projects including Volume 6 of their
large-scale silhouette artist books, documents from a recent
performance involving funeral pyres and intimate, discrete objects
that utilize embroidery and carved shells.
The silhouette is a key component in several of these new works.
Miller & Shellabarger first employed silhouettes in large-scale
artist books that contained their individual profiles, each one cut
by the other. We will show the most recent book in this series as
well as other silhouette-based works that use the silhouette as a
starting point, including conjoined beard silhouette collages
traced by friends and two embossed lead pieces that feature similar
imagery. We will also show larger-than-life, phantasmagorical
images, created during their "Summer Studio" artist residency
at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's Sullivan Galleries
in 2010 which take advantage of the distortions of the silhouetted
figure in light and shadow. Life-size body tracings of each other
are realized in large drawings on paper made with gunpowder, and in
a small book of photographs of body tracings made with seeds.
Additional work will include a twin set of pillowcases, each
monogrammed with their initials using hair from their beards as
thread, a delicate cameo depicting the two with their beards
intertwined carved out of sardonic shell by an Italian master
carver, and photographs from a recent performance "Untitled (Pyre)"
where they found two naturally fallen trees in the forest, chopped
them, and stacked the fireplace-sized pieces into roughly
human-size forms, and burned these pyres at dusk.
Miller & Shellabarger are a 2009 recipient of the Peter S. Reed
Foundation Grant, 2008 recipient of an Artadia Award, and a 2007
recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award. Their work
is in the collections of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art and
the National Gallery of Canada in Ontario. In 2010 they showed a
major selection of work at the Institute of Contemporary Art,
Portland, Maine, participated in the Time-Based Arts (TBA) festival
in Portland, Oregon and will have a solo exhibition in 2011 at the
Illinois State University Galleries in Normal, Illinois. Their work
has been written about in Artforum.com, Art & Auction, Frieze,
Artnet, The Art Newspaper, Flash Art, TimeOut Chicago, and the
Chicago Sun-Times. Dutes Miller and Stan Shellabarger also maintain
separate artistic practices. They live and work in
Chicago.