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EXPO CHGO ONLINE
8 - 12 April 2021 -
MILES MCENERY GALLERY PRESENTS EXPO CHICAGO ONLINE
WHITNEY BEDFORD, TOMORY DODGE, INKA ESSENHIGH, SHANNON FINLEY, BEVERLY FISHMAN, PIA FRIES, RICO GATSON, DAVID HUFFMAN, WARREN ISENSEE, RAFFI KALENDERIAN, TOM LADUKE, MARKUS LINNENBRINK, HEATHER GWEN MARTIN, DOUGLAS MELINI, JASON MIDDLEBROOK, MICHAEL REAFSNYDER, DANIEL RICH, PATRICK WILSON, GUY YANAI AND LIAT YOSSIFOR -
Whitney Bedford, Veduta (Avery/Tree), 2020
"Whitney Bedford’s landscapes and oceanic vistas were emotional, elusive, uncommon, sometimes based in story, or sweetly teetering on the verge of collapse. Her relationship to the paintings—and by extension ours—was both dualistic and deeply personal. Precisely drawn renderings anchored her compositions in place with specificity, while gestural, diffuse atmospherics strutted across the armature."
- Shana Nys Dambrot in Artillery Magazine
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Tomory Dodge, Lush Thicket, 2021
"A host of textures and colors created with a variety of tools overlap one another as they fight for attention. The canvas buzzes with excitement as forms evolve and emerge from one another, much like an uneven quilt whose lines fall off their grid and now have a mind of their own. The myriad of visual languages push and pull to create a number of paintings within paintings. This handcrafted aspect is important to Dodge as he is opposed to mechanical processes and embraces the imperfections of the human hand. Whether it’s inconsistent lines, textures or patterns, it’s what he does next that saves the work and makes it interesting."
- G. James Daichendt on Tomory Dodge in The San Diego Union Tribune
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Inka Essenhigh, Blue Spruce and Waning Crescent Moon, 2021
"In American painter Inka Essenhigh’s fantastical world, the goblinesque creatures and their environments seem to be lit from within, whether cast in the cool light of the predawn morning or in the deep burnt orange of a Chinese restaurant. With nods to Surrealism and animation, Essenhigh’s landscapes are populated by characters from folklore and mythology, in some cases existing only as faceless shadows. At a time where the real world is filled with screaming headlines and endless stressors, Essenhigh’s magic garden offers a lovely, transporting respite."
- Caroline Goldstein in ArtNet News
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Shannon Finley, Over Simulation, 2021
"Just as its witty title suggests, Over Simulation indicates an alternate reality, a simulacrum of some real-world structure, perhaps. Experimental buildings by the architects Peter Eisenman or Steven Holl come to mind. But Over Simulation also seems to offer a transcendental space. On some level, it could function like a restorative crystal, with meditative properties, and even bear the purported healing potential of certain crystals like labradorite."
- David Ebony in "Shannon Finley's Hypnagogic Brainscapes"
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Beverly Fishman, Untitled (Bipolar, Parkinson's, Pain, Gerd), 2020
"The ability of Fishman’s work to draw in, encompass, and swallow the viewer proves the most redemptive feature of her self-inflicted dilemma. Most of the forms she uses have some kind of passage or gateway built in, either literally in the form of an aperture in their surface, or a color change that suggests the fundamental distinction between exterior and interior spaces."
- William Corwin in The Brooklyn Rail
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Pia Fries, pylon LU, 2020
"The paintings are structured alike to architecture, I would say, and the white field in between is a prop, or serves a supporting function. It is a link between one element and an element of support... It also constitutes a moment to rest, to contemplate, to involve the recipient, and to reflect his or her thoughts."
- Pia Fries
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Rico Gatson, Untitled (Bluesologists After Gil Scott), 2021
"The door is Rico Gatson’s chosen canvas. The bright, flat colorful abstractions seen in a series of new paintings meet the resistance of the prefabricated, ready-made object. It allows Gatson to ground his painting practice, conceptually in his training in sculpture and symbolically in what the artist calls “notions of accessibility." His hypnotic play with the spectrum of color conjures the politics of independence, liberation, and peace of the 1960s and '70s in a graphic language that emanates in lines, circles, triangles, and rectangles that form stars, fires, diamonds, and rainbows."
- Antwuan Sargent in "Rico Gatson: Spiritual Abstraction"
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David Huffman, Sublimation, 2020
"The artist has crafted a new formal language, and has reinvigorated nonobjective painting—engendering a new set of potentialities for formalist abstraction."
- Derek Conrad Murray, PhD, on David Huffman
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Warren Isensee, Flower Child, 2021
"Still committed to repetition and tight organization, Isensee deploys his wavering forms to divide the canvas into quadrants. And here is where his current works get interesting. Since the irregular shapes neither completely fill the quadrants nor perfectly abut their adjacent, mirroring forms, there are ample leftover spaces that the artist fills with almond-shaped and eye-like units, lozenges, boomerangs, and teardrops. This use of interstitial space enables Isensee to juxtapose two or more sets of colors to distinguish the larger concentric groupings from the smaller insets, and the smaller groupings from each other."
- John Yau in Hyperallergic
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Raffi Kalenderian, Christine Minas, 2021
"In my life, I have these moments, often during some mundane activity, where I have a profound revelation about something, maybe something about the nature of a certain friendship, or about realizing I may not have the life I envisioned when I was younger. I consider these to be “super moments,” a reckoning of some sort, and I think painting is a great way to try and capture a moment like this."
- Raffi Kalenderian in "Feel the Love" by Glenn Adamson
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Tom LaDuke, The Blow That Hurts The Ones That Don't, 2021
"When I first saw a Tom LaDuke painting, I was shocked. Shocked on so many levels: genuinely floored, breath taken away. It was something I had never seen before, and it was astonishing to be in the presence of a painting that was unlike any other. I was not sure what I was looking at. It was seductive and extreme and complicated; it was a new weirdness, with a committed narrative, or anti-narrative, lurking deep down. I remember feeling a great joy in its other-language-ness—its range of voices, in all their inflections, shouts, subtleties, and whispers."
- Benjamin Weissman in "Pluralizing the Act of Looking"
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Markus Linnenbrink, IWOKEUPINAMERICA, 2021
"The artist rarely uses brushes, and the closest thing to a stylus in his studio is a round bit used to create his drills, the second process he’s known for. For these, he repurposes accumulated layers of puddled epoxy from drip paintings that have hardened into a single substrate... He then carves discs into the stratified epoxy at various spots so that the ground is pocked with ringed holes. In this way, the once obscured layers are revealed to a mesmerizing effect."
- Cat Kron on Markus Linnenbrink in "Trust Fall"
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Heather Gwen Martin, Span, 2020
"Martin has spoken about her painterly process as an endurance test, wherein touch, strength, and control push against the limits of the physical. She has also confessed to consistently retracing her supple lines to arrive at the proper degree of roundness. The tangibility of these efforts places the Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly. The opposite of hard-edged abstraction—the late 1950s style that emphasized the impersonal arrangement of clean lines and contrasting hues—Martin’s approach to paint application proves to be as distinctive as her signature."
- Christian Viveros-Fauné in "Walking the Tightrope: The Art of Heather Gwen Martin"
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Douglas Melini, Untitled (Double L), 2020
"For some time now, I’ve thought of my paintings as transporters, signposts, and images that allow one to consider how one sees things, helping one to get from one space to the next. The paintings reflect my interest in visual vibrations and how our body and mind respond to vibratory experiences. I believe that art can function as a decoder, providing insights into how the world looks; a way of connecting the dots, and really seeing things."
- Douglas Melini
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Jason Middlebrook, A Thousand Years and Counting (Larix Decidua), 2021
"Today, with ten years of painting on wood under his belt, Middlebrook is often inspired by the jagged outer contours of each slab, expanding on their inherent qualities, and experimenting with hard-edge designs and blended colors that scale from light to dark. Meandering, concentric, and parallel lines give way to chevrons, triangles, and polygons in a labyrinth of colors that shimmer against the natural wood background. The resulting works are endlessly inventive, complex art objects that embrace both botany and geometry. They are at once paintings and sculptures with a large measure of admiration for abstract art and its various histories."
- Mary-Kay Lombino in "Tracing Trees"
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Michael Reafsnyder, Blue Slide, 2020
"The liquid effect is bolstered by blobs and droplets pooling over the canvas. Viewers sense an onrushing of color that swells toward them, yet that—as the vibrant bands collide with the apparent picture plane—stretches and spreads laterally toward zones of peripheral vision. The twofold visual effect is of a radiant display that is both impacted and dispersed."
- Michael Schreyach on Michael Reafsnyder in "What Painting Can Do"
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Daniel Rich, 909 3rd Ave, NYC, 2021
"Architecture, as it is commonly understood, is designed and implemented to house the human and is itself the manifestation of our constructed realities and temporalities. When looking across the street into another skyscraper or apartment building, there are both darkened and lit rooms with shadows or people mulling about....Elements like these can make architecture almost comforting in its functional uniformity, so when such signs of life are missing, the result is in an unsettling subversion that upends and questions what we’ve come to expect of both architectural spaces and the organized linearity of time."
- Emily McDermott on Daniel Rich in “A New Temporal Understanding"
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Patrick Wilson, Pacific Gold, 2021
"Planes of color—themselves often indescribable blends and inter-hues—interpenetrate and shift across one another, articulating the facture of the picture plane and the presence of, or at least the potential for, nether planes whose own relative depth keeps shifting. Some of these color planes, after all, physically advance off the canvas, built up out of so many layers of acrylic, while others, materially thinner, physically withdraw—the colors all the while playing a different, complementary game of advance-recede."
- Peter Frank on Patrick Wilson in "Patrick Wilson: Plane as Day"
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Guy Yanai, Claire and Her Boyfriend, 2021
"There’s a compelling physicality to his canvases; each stroke of his brush leaves an irregular ridge of paint across the top and bottom of the line, resulting in a canvas that feels deliberate, handmade, and intensely human. "Not every artist is able to develop a signature style, even over an entire career, but Guy has achieved a unique style that’s his alone. He can paint anything and you know it’s him. That’s very rare," says Benjamin Derouillon."
- Catherine Hong in Galerie Magazine
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Liat Yossifor, Wide Grey, 2020
"Each painting is many different compositions that were erased during the process. The hardest part of the process is searching for a moment of interest between the pictorial and the sculptural. It’s like looking for the painting’s own visual logic, one work at a time."
- Liat Yossifor
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Whitney BedfordVeduta (Avery/Tree), 2020Ink and oil on panel24 3/8 x 31 1/2 inches
61.9 x 80 cm -
Tomory DodgeLush Thicket, 2021Oil on canvas60 x 60 inches
152.4 x 152.4 cm -
Inka EssenhighBlue Spruce and Waning Crescent Moon, 2021Enamel on canvas40 1/4 x 30 1/8 inches
102.2 x 76.5 cm
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Shannon FinleyOver Simulation, 2021Acrylic on linen78 3/4 x 63 inches
200 x 160 cm
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Beverly FishmanUntitled (Bipolar, Parkinson's, Pain, Gerd), 2020Urethane paint on wood56 1/4 x 105 3/4 inches
142.9 x 268.6 cm -
Pia Friespylon LU, 2020Oil and silkscreen on wood67 x 47 1⁄2 inches
170.2 x 120.7 cm -
Rico GatsonUntitled (Bluesologists After Gil Scott), 2021Acrylic paint on wood36 x 80 inches
91.4 x 203.2 cm -
David HuffmanSublimation, 2020Mixed media on wood panel72 x 59 3/4 inches
182.9 x 151.8 cm
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Warren IsenseeFlower Child, 2021Oil on canvas25 1/4 x 25 inches
64.1 x 63.5 cm -
Raffi KalenderianChristine Minas, 2021Oil on canvas48 x 36 inches
121.9 x 91.4 cm -
Tom LaDukeThe Blow That Hurts The Ones That Don't, 2021Acrylic on canvas over panel51 1/2 x 75 inches
130.8 x 190.5 cm -
Markus LinnenbrinkIWOKEUPINAMERICA, 2021Epoxy resin and pigments on wood36 x 96 inches
91.4 x 243.8 cm
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Heather Gwen MartinSpan, 2020Oil on linen56 x 60 inches
142.2 x 152.4 cm -
Douglas MeliniUntitled (Tree Painting, Full Spectrum/Purple), 2019Oil on linen and acrylic stain on reclaimed wood with artist frame42 x 42 inches
106.7 x 106.7 cm -
Jason MiddlebrookA Thousand Years and Counting (Larix Decidua), 2021Acrylic on oak96 1/8 x 20 1/4 x 1 1/4 inches
244.2 x 51.4 x 3.2 cm -
Michael ReafsnyderBlue Slide, 2020Acrylic on linen38 x 50 inches
96.5 x 127 cm
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Daniel Rich909 3rd Ave, NYC (Large Version), 2021Acrylic on dibond78 3/4 x 57 inches
200 x 144.78 cm -
Patrick WilsonPacific Gold, 2021Acrylic on canvas28 x 42 inches
71.1 x 106.7 cm -
Guy YanaiClaire and Her Boyfriend, 2021Oil on canvas63 x 74 3/4 inches
160 x 190 cm -
Liat YossiforWide Grey, 2020Oil on linen81 x 78 inches
205.7 x 198.1 cm
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