Front cover image: Field Study 1, 2016 (detail) Back cover image: Field Study 2, 2016 (detail)
Justin Cooper Wallpapering the Infinite April 9 – May 28, 2016
Published in April 2016, on the occasion of Justin Cooper’s fourth solo exhibition with moniquemeloche.
© 2016
Wallpapering the Infinite explores Justin Cooper’s continuous series of intricate, largescale drawings and sculpture, as well as his recent experiments in site-specific installation. In this, his fourth solo exhibition with moniquemeloche, Cooper’s works on paper hover above a field of AstroTurf, amongst a new series of illuminated garden hose lamps and chandeliers. Cooper’s practice examines the ways in which simple lines delineate space, dangling precariously between the hinged and unhinged by using obsessive mark making. Peppered with visual glitches, the artist creates thresholds and opens up thin areas where things exist for a brief moment without definition. Within the artist’s practice, a crosspollination of media, he creates an ongoing search for these lines, often using mundane materials like garden hoses, wheelbarrows, and office supplies in formal and conceptual manifestations. These new drawings and sculptures continue to investigate the relationships that bounce between the comedic and the frenetic according to circumstance. Justin Cooper (American, b. 1976, lives NY) has a MFA in sculpture, performance, and video from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2005), a BFA from the University of Colorado (2003), and studied at the Sorbonne, Paris (2002). He has been an artist in residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine (2007); Franconia Sculpture Park, Minnesota (2009); Redline, Milwaukee (2010); Fountainhead, Miami (2013); and Art OMI in Ghent, NY. Cooper has performed and exhibited worldwide, in Hong Kong, Berlin, Rio de Janeiro, New York, Philadelphia, London, Los Angeles, Miami, Mexico, Milwaukee and Sweden. Since his last exhibition at moniquemeloche in 2012, Cooper has had solo shows at Time Equities, Inc. Art-in-Buildings, NY; testsite, Austin, TX; Hoffstra University, NY; Living Arts, Tulsa, OK; and Storefront Ten Eyck, Brooklyn. Chicago audiences are familiar with his work included in Production Site: The Artist’s Studio InsideOut, Curated by Dominic Molon at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the
MCA owns several drawings and video in their permanent collection. Cooper is currently a Visiting Sculpture Professor at the University of Southern Florida in Tampa. In conjunction with his show, Justin Cooper has invited Miami-based video artist Benjamin Zellmer Bellas to exhibit in Porcelain Projects
Opposite: Spreadsheet Study, 2016 (detail)
Wallpapering the Infinite, 2016 Installation views
This page: Minutes, 2016 Pen, marker, colored pencil, graphite on paper 45 ž x 54 ½ x 2 inches Opposite: Minutes, 2016 (detail)
Justin Cooper’s Breakdown by Whitney Tassie, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Utah Museum of Fine Arts, April, 2016 Wallpapering the Infinite at Monique Meloche Gallery is Justin Cooper’s cleanest show to date. In place of the giant, spatial scribble of garden hose or PVC piping of past installations, there are five four-foot hoses standing erect like green exclamation points. Where Cooper’s earlier drawings tried to escape off the walls, hanging studio-style from binder clips, the seven drawings here are contained behind glazing in nondescript frames that fade into the walls of the white cube gallery. In this seeming shift toward simplicity, Cooper co-opts the slick aesthetic of design showrooms. His Garden Hose Chandelier and Hose Log Lamps pointedly blur the line between formal sculpture, surreal fetish, and designed domestic furnishing. His large-scale drawings evoke wallpaper, and the AstroTurf on the floor completes the image: a “rug” that ties the room together. However, despite the finished, balanced and controlled face of the exhibition, a closer look at the work reveals a deeper, nagging breakdown.
The phenomenon of a structure collapsing on itself, which was present in Cooper’s past messy installations and intricate performances, is more clearly distilled in his new drawings. With pen, marker, colored pencil, and graphite, he lays out a complex system of interrelated lines, shapes, and colors. As he repeats the neural-like network over and over, small unintentional irregularities in the artist’s marks create ripples throughout the drawings, particularly in Spreadsheet 2 and Index. The effect of these many slight variations is magnified in a completed drawing, causing the overall composition to veer off course. Revealing his improv performance roots, Cooper believes that nothing is a mistake and refrains from judgment or correction. He simply continues, comparing the process to how mutations drive evolution over time. Cooper’s earlier drawings read like sketches or ephemeral props, but the large-scale drawings in Wallpapering the Infinite stand on their own. They follow a predetermined logic, and half joking, Cooper likens them to the instruction-based conceptual wall drawings of Sol LeWitt—if they were executed by drunk scab workers. But Cooper isn’t sloppy. His drawings are extremely labor-intensive, taking up to three months to complete. The process can be tedious, even tortuous, but Cooper thrives on the discipline needed to fully commit to the concept. This tightly focused energy serves as a counterweight to the more frenetic and improvised aspects of his practice, yet even within these drawings (and within the whole exhibition), imperfections persist in a form of controlled chaos.
Cooper’s Hose Log Lamps read like three-dimensional versions of his drawings. The repetition of patterns, shapes, and colors—stubby brown cylinder + thin green line + glowing white sphere—references machine-made design and the detachment of Minimalism, but minor deviations again underscore a human touch. Each log has a unique shape; each hose has its own crooked lean. Descended from Hose Log sculptures the artist has been making since 2005, these new sculptures are more uniform in composition and scale, but still generate the ever uncanny effect of a gravity-defying garden hose growing out of a tree stump, now augmented by a mystical glowing orb atop the hose nozzle. The title Wallpapering the Infinite conjures the image of eternal weekend warriors climbing up and down ladders, installing patterned paper on the walls of endless suburban tract homes. At once, it encompasses interior decorating and the sublime, the stuff of the everyday and the surreal. Conflating a mundane human activity with an abstract physical impossibility, it is an apt expression of the many pushing and pulling forces in Justin Cooper’s work. What is the line between order and chaos, the real and the unconscious, the comedic and the disturbing? Cooper’s physical representation of systems collapsing suggests that something is awry. His amplified glitches scratch at the veneer of perfection that mass-produced commodities and cookie-cutter suburban living purport to offer. The lawn is growing up the wall, and it has teeth. * This essay was informed by a Skype interview with the artist on April 1, 2016.
Wallpapering the Infinite, 2016 Installation view
Spreadsheet 2, 2016 Pen, marker, colored pencil, graphite on paper 57 Âź x 54 Âź x 2 inches
Index, 2015 Pen, marker, colored pencil, graphite on paper 54 x 54 ½ x 2 inches
Synaptic Convention, 2016 Pen, marker, colored pencil, graphite on paper 54 ž x 102 ½ x 2 inches
Hose Log Lamp 1, 2016 Garden hose, copper tubing, live oak, lightbulb 49 x 6 ½ x 7 inches
Hose Log Lamp 2, 2016 Garden hose, copper tubing, live oak, lightbulb 49 ½ x 7 x 6 inches
Hose Chandelier, 2015 Garden hose, copper tubing, lightbulbs 45 x 23 x 22 inches
Interview with Rachel Adams, Associate Curator at University at Buffalo Art Galleries, on the occasion of Justin Cooper’s exhibition Homestretchbody at Testsite, Austin, in spring 2014 Rachel: The first time I encountered your installation with garden hoses, I was blown away. How did you first envision using that as a material? Justin: I first dabbled in garden hoses while I was in grad school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. It all began with a simple wish to see a garden hose somehow magically standing upright, ramrod straight, creating a simple line. I thought of it as a kind of minimalist hallucination. This thought process actually describes a lot of my work since it stemmed from an interest that was equal parts formal and conceptual. Formally I was intrigued by the simplicity of the object and conceptually it was still important that it be a common garden hose as opposed to just a green line of metal or something. The material choices in a lot of my work are always meant to provide a critique. After some experimentation I found that threading the hose with rebar produced the desired effect. I then went on to make a series of sculptures called Hose Logs where the logs acted as pedestals with the stiff hoses perched on top. This process eventually evolved into the large-scale installations I’ve been making for the last few years. In the testsite piece, the hoses are fitted with metal armatures to provide the “skeleton” which now allows for more involved manipulation, a process I liken to drawing in space. Rachel: Performance has consistently been a part of your practice since undergradate school. What prompted the shift in the past few years from performing around your work in the gallery to the more improvisational standup it has become? Justin: I went to undergrad at the University of Colorado in Boulder. It was here I began performing after taking a course on performance art with a great teacher, Frances Charteris, on a whim. This really blew things wide open for me artistically. Up to this point I had been doing mainly sculptural work along with some painting but was frustrated and was really hunting for a way to make my work more “me.” Performing also allowed me to access a huge amount of ideas quickly and directly that just had not made sense to explore in other mediums. There was a risk I liked to performing, an immediacy and a danger that was exciting. And probably most importantly it provided a platform to explore the comedic which has been a driving force of all my work since then. Tapping into all this really gave me and my young practice a jolt of energy that helped carry me through college and into grad school where I developed a lot of important collaborative performance relationships with the likes of Benjamin Bellas, Ross Moreno, Clinton King, Reed Barrow and Andrew Willgress. This is another essential aspect of performance: that it lends itself to collaboration.
In the last few years my performance work has been moving from an emphasis on physicality and interactions with objects to more language based work. I think this has been due to a steady evolution of my sculptural practice that has become a little more refined over the years. The objects I make these days are more “sculpture” than “prop” and have less of a direct dialogue with the performative. I’ve also been focusing more on writing and using language as a kind of object such as the brief monologues that make up a lot of my performance work now. In a sense, these are “sculpted” in their development, as well as memorized which is a sort of sculpting of the brain. I’m still very interested in the bigger physical slap-stick elements of the work but I’ve moved more towards a deadpan approach which is more about the language and delivery. It’s a little more challenging for me than running around a gallery screaming though that certainly tends to be more cathartic. Rachel: Your work utilizes everyday domestic materials such as wheel barrows, garden hose, plastic outdoor chairs, and Hawaiian lais. As testsite is the home of founder Laurence Miller, how are your thoughts about the installation different than when you work in a white cube space? Justin: I’ve always gravitated towards everyday objects as material for my sculptures and installations. They take on a different resonance in a white cube gallery context, obviously, so creating the installation at testsite is an interesting experiment for me. In previous garden hose installations there tends to be a kind of wobble between the material as both formal object and garden hose with the difference being around 50-50. At testsite, the fact that it is an actual home I feel will put more emphasis on the material for what it is with less of that perceptive wobble. This is intriguing to me because I think it allows for a more narrative read. In the context of Laurence’s home I could see the garden hose appearing more alive, menacing and out of control. Like an infestation. Rachel: Drawing is an integral part of your practice and included in Homestretchbody are new drawings. How do these drawing influence your sculptural and performative practice? Justin: Though I tend to emphasise the performative elements of my work, the true foundation, the bedrock, has always been drawing. For me, drawing is the most basic form of mark making and essentially expression itself. It has been the engine behind my practice from my earliest elementary school art classes. It’s the element of my work that continually feeds all other aspects; every idea and strategy can be traced back to my drawings in one way or another. I kind of think of it as the decoder ring to the rest of my work. This tends to just confuse people more though.
Rachel: Knowing your work for sometime now, I have always seen and felt the balance of chaos and order. Can you speak to this duality? Where does it stem from? Justin: There is another principle that I haven’t touched on directly yet and that’s the improvisational nature of much of my work. This to me embodies the chaos you mention that I try to balance out with more controlled or “scripted” elements. There is a constant tension between the two at play in my practice and it’s probably most obvious in my performances. It’s these improvised elements that lend the “danger” I discussed before as well as keeping the work fresh. Improvisation also creates a site specificity especially at a venue like testsite. You’ll recall I declined doing a preliminary visit because I want to really emphasize the spontaneous nature of these installations which I think can get lost in more formalized settings.
Homestretchbody, 2014 Indoor and outdoor installation at Testsite, Austin
Left: Field Study 1, 2016 Pen, marker, colored pencil, graphite on paper 27 ¼ x 21 ¼ x 2 inches Right: Field Study 2, 2016 Pen, marker, colored pencil, graphite on paper 27 ¼ x 21 ¼ x 2 inches
Wallpapering the Infinite, 2016 Installation view
Spreadsheet Study, 2016 Pen, marker, colored pencil, graphite on paper 15 Âź x 18 Âź x 2 inches
Hose Log Lamps 3, 4, and 5, 2016 Garden hoses, copper tubing, live oak, lightbulbs 49 x 6 x 7 inches; 48 ½ x 6 x 7 ½ inches; 49 x 7 ½ x 7 inches
Opposite: Synaptic Convention, 2016 (detail)
JUSTIN COOPER American, born 1976, lives Brooklyn, New York Education 2005 MFA, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL 2003 BFA, The University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, graduated summa cum laude 2002 Studied at the Maison Des Etudiants through the Sorbonne, Paris, France Solo Exhibitions (performances where noted) 2016 Wallpapering the Infinite, Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago, IL 2015 Justin Cooper in the project space, Storefront Ten Eyck, Brooklyn, NY Canopy, Living Arts, Tulsa, OK Contingent Doodle Relief, Rosenberg Gallery at Hoffstra University, Hempstead, NY 2014 Spreadsheet, Time Equities Inc. Art-in-Buildings, 55 Fifth Ave; New York, NY Homestretchbody, testsite, Austin, TX, exhibition catalog available 2012 Board, moniquemeloche, Chicago, IL Thin Lines, Beta Pictoris Maus Contemporary Art, Birmingham, AL (performance) 2011 Like You, curated by Cortney Stell, Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, Denver, CO (performance) 2010 Studio Visit, New Media Wall at Tufts University art Gallery, Medford, MA 2009 Nexus, Franconia Sculpture Park, Franconia, MN Interrogation, Le Flash 2009, Atlanta, GA (performance) Here/Not There, curated by Tricia Van Eyck, MCA, Chicago, IL (performances) Paranormaldise, moniquemeloche, Chicago, IL 2008 Log Roll, in collaboration with Benjamin Bellas, Pedestrian by Art in Odd Places, New York, NY (performance) Thread, Art at the Edge, Gallery 400, Chicago, IL (performances) 2006 Middle Management, moniquemeloche, Chicago, IL (performances) We’ll Miss you… as part of the Sight Unseen Festival, Cultural Center, Chicago, IL (performance) Sharks don’t ever sleep, and they don’t have any bones, as part of An Incomplete Map of Everything, Links Hall, Chicago, IL (performance) 2004 Sharks don’t ever sleep and they don’t have any bones, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, CO (performance) Group Exhibitions 2013 Headcase, Dodge Gallery, New York, NY 2012 The Chair tranceformed,Hotel Particulier, New York, NY Afterimage, Curated by Dahlia Tulett and Thea Nichols, DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, IL Phase, Redline, Milwaukee, WI (performance)
Group Exhibitions continued 2012 hi • a • tus, Grand Rapids Art Center, Grand Rapids, MI [under construction], Curated by Omar Lopez-Chahoud, Hotel Particulier, New York, NY 2011 Pulp, Beta Pictoris Maus Contemporary Art, Birmingham, AL The Open Daybook Exhibition, curated by David P. Earle, LACE, Los Angeles, CA 2010 New Work, moniquemeloche, Chicago, IL Knock Knock, Curated by Sarah Murkett & Elana Rubinfeld, Fred Torres Collaborations, New York, NY (performance) Production Site: The Artist’s Studio Inside-Out, Curated by Dominic Molon, MCA, Chicago, IL 2009 Thank you as part of The 7th Annual Midwestern Assorted Produce Snuff Shorts Film Triennial, Boots Contemporary Arts Space, St. Louis, MO (performance) i.e. Illusions, Lawton Gallery, University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, WI 2008 Only Blue Deer Lonely American (Illinois Art Council Re-mix), Alogon Gallery, Chicago, IL (performance) Video screening, AOT Gallery, Minneapolis, MN The Drawing Show, Curated by Brian Ritchard, The Beverly Art Center, Chicago, IL 2007 IRRATIONAL EXHIBITS 6, Curated by Deborah Oliver, Track 16, Los Angeles, CA (performance) Interiority, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL (performance) i.e. Between, Harold Washington College, Chicago, IL i.e. llusion, performance/exhibition, 1a:space, Hong Kong, China 2006 Working Frameworks, Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, (Skylab Gallery, Columbus, Oh; Columbia College Chicago, Chicago, IL) The World Is Flat, Gallery Lifebomb in Berlin, Germany Patheticize, Open End Gallery, Chicago, IL Amorph!06, International Performance Art Festival; Helsinki, Finland 18th Evanston+ Vicinity Biennial, Evanston, IL Pixel Dance ’06, Thessaloniki, Greece Ballroom Blitz, The James Hotel in Chicago, IL (performance) Signal and Noise performance festival in Vancouver, British Columbia In Feed, video screening at the University of Toronto in Mississauga, Ontario Smoke and Mirrors: Photography and Performance, Ohio University, Athens, OH 2005 Pixelfestival: Video, Experimental Film, and Electronic Music Festival, Berlin, Germany Uppsala International Short Film Festival in Uppsala, Sweden Prog:Me Festival of Electronic Media, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil This, this, this, this, this, this, this and this, Gallery 2, Chicago, IL Rooftop Films Summer Series, Brooklyn, NY Small Change Film Screening Series, Philadelphia, PA Portland Documentary and Experimental Film Festival, Portland, OR
Group Exhibitions continued 2005 Alchemy, Betty Rymer Gallery, Chicago, IL Island Art Film and Video Festival 2005, Prenelle Gallery, London, UK Spark Video 4.4 Screening, Spark Contemporary Art Space, Syracuse, NY 2004 One Night Stand, PAC/edge Performance Festival, Chicago, IL LA Shorts Film Festival, Hollywood, CA Emerging Illinois Artists, McLean County Arts Center, Bloomington, IL 2003 Remark/eted Trade Show, 1926 Gallery, Chicago, IL Colorado Biennial: "10+10", Denver Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, CO Dreams and Dream Makers, Escuela Nacional de Artes Plasticas, Xochimol, Mexico Performances 2016 STRATEGIES IN THE GEOMETRY OF HOMECOMING, in collaboration with Ross Moreno, Torrance Shipman Gallery, Brooklyn, NY 2015 Justin Cooper: Mowers of Ten, Art in Buildings 55 Fifth Ave; New York, NY Comedy Night, Marlborough on Broome Street; New York, NY 2014 The Big Draw: It’s Our World, in collaboration with Ross Moreno, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY The Introducing Series, in collaboration with Ross Moreno, Window 125, New York, NY 2013 Backyard Paradise, Swampspace; Miami, FL New York I Love You Sometimes, New York, NY SkowheganPerforms!, Socrates Sculpture Park; Queens, NY 2012 Yeti and Firebush Presents, in collaboration with Ross Moreno, Gallery Cabaret, Chicago, IL Phase and Bio, Redline Milwaukee; Milwaukee, WI Thin Lines, Beta Pictoris Maus Contemporary Art; Birmingham, AL SkowheganPERFORMS, Socrates Sculpture Park; Queens, NY Sculpture Center LIC Block Party, Kristen Chappa, curator – Sculpture Center, Queens, NY Ryan Travis Christian Presents, Synchronicity Space LA – Los Angeles, CA Chuckles + Avant Garde Comedy Festival, host – Cameo Gallery, New York, NY Chuckles + Avant Garde Comedy Festival, host – 1027 Grand Street Studios, Brooklyn, NY Club Nutz, Scott and Tyson Reader, curators – Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA 2011 Cult Logic, Julie Torres, curator – Airplane Gallery – Brooklyn, NY 2011 hi◦at◦us: – Urban Institute for Contemporary Art – Grand Rapids, MI Chuckles + Avant Garde Comedy Festival, host – Gershwin Hotel Theater, New York, NY Like You, Curated by Cortney Stell, Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, Denver, CO 2010 KnockKnock: That Joke’s Not Funny Anymore, Fred Torres Collaborations; New York, NY
Performances continued 2009 Here/Not There, curated by Tricia Van Eyck, MCA, Chicago, IL Interrogation, Le Flash 2009, Atlanta, GA 2008 Interior Monologue; National Hotel Miami, FL Log Roll, in collaboration with Benjamin Bellas, Pedestrian by Art in Odd Places, New York, NY 2007 Translator Please, in collaboration with Magdalen Wong; 1a Space Kowloon, Hong Kong Lens Cap, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; Skowhegan, ME 2006 Middle Management, moniquemeloche, Chicago, IL We’ll Miss you… as part of the Sight Unseen Festival, Cultural Center, Chicago, IL Sharks don’t ever sleep, and they don’t have any bones, as part of An Incomplete Map of Everything, Links Hall, Chicago, IL 2004 Sharks don’t ever sleep and they don’t have any bones, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, CO Selected Bibliography 2015 Greenberger, Alex, “Collector’s Corner: Francis Greenburger”, Artnews, Aug. 2014 Jovanovich, Alex, “Justin Cooper and Ross Moreno”, ARTFORUM, February. O’Brien, Connor, “REVIEW: Candy Colored Clown: Response to “Economy Candy” at Harbor Gallery”, The Living Blog, February. Adams, Rachel, “Homestretchbody”, testsite 14.1, Fluent Collaborative. 2012 Foumberg, Jason, “Review: Justin Cooper’s Board”, Chicago Magazine, Nov. 20 2011 Griffin, Amy, “Basilica Hudson a New Temple of Contemporary Art: NADA to Fill Hudson with Site-Specific Work”, timesunion.com, July 24. “Justin Cooper has a party with his Playful Exhibit “Like You”, Denver Post, March 4. 2010 Ritchie, Abraham. “Cohesive by Coincidence” www.artslant.com, Dec 6. Parr, Jan. “Getting the Picture”, Chicago Home & Garden magazine, May/June. Landi, Ann. “Where the Art Happens”, ARTnews, June. Oh, Janet. “Production Site” Art in America.com April 25. Pallas, J. Thomas “Review Production Site: The artist studio inside out”, NewCity, Feb 8. 2009 Wolff, Rachel. “Create and Conquer.” Chicago Social Magazine. Dec, p. 68. Holmes, Gretchen. “Colonial Willaimsburg for the Liberal Humanist: An open conversation with Justin Cooper.” Art Talk Chicago (blog). July 27. Pearson, Laura. “Extended Play.” TimeOut Chicago. June 25 - July 1. p.43 Waxman, Lori. “Justin Cooper”. ArtForum May, p. 243-44. Francis, Sean. “Ones to Watch” Chicago Tribune Magazine, April 19.
Selected Bibliography continued 2009 Schroeder, Amy. “Justin Cooper: Paranormaldise,” Time Out Chicago, Issue 209, 02.26 – 03.04. Artner, Alan. “Review: Justin Cooper”, Chicago Tribune, Feb 13. Gunn, Dan. “Review: Justin Cooper/Monique Meloche” New City Chicago, Feb 9. Apple, Lauri. “An Interview with Artist Justin Cooper.” Chicago, Feb 6. 2008 Snodgrass, Susan. “Justin Cooper” Review. Art in America. Sept. Mazzei, Rebecca. “Home Front Art: The Click Clique.” CS Interiors. Summer. Nash, Courtney. “Justin Cooper: Thread”. Flavorpill, April. Elms, Anthony. Justin Cooper: Thread. exhibition essay. Foumberg, Jason. “Eye Exam: Fantastic Antics”, Newcity Chicago, March 11. 2007 Wong, Kevin. “It’s All An Illusion,” South China Morning Post. Sep 28. 2006 “Large Gourd,” The Chicago Reader, Nov. “On the Scene: Middle Management”, Chicago Journal, Jan 19. Ferrara, Annette. “Review: Middle Management”, www.flavorpill.net, Jan 21. Workman, Michael. Review: Middle Management: “Ladies Night”, NewCity, Jan 12, p 13. Review: Middle Management, www.badatsports.libsyn.com, Jan 9 . Today’s Candy: The Weekend Guide, www.dailycandy.com, Jan 5. 2004 Review: 2003 Colorado Biennial: “10+10”, The Denver Post, Jan 14. 2003 Review: 2003 Colorado Biennial: “10+10", Denver Westword, July 15. Review: 2003 Colorado Biennial: “10+10", The Denver Post, June 5. Review: Spring 2003 BFA Student Exhibition, Daily Camera News, May 2. “Third Front Range Student Art Exhibit”, Steppin’ Out Online Magazine, Jan. 1999 Review: Juried Exhibition at Axis Mundi Gallery, Daily Camera News, Dec. 1998 “New Genre Festival”, Spot Magazine, June. “Outsider Artists”, Tulsa World News, April. Grants, Awards, and Residencies 2015 Art Omi Residency, Ghent, NY 2013 Fountainhead, Miami, FL 2010 Artist in Residence, RedLine, Milwaukee, WI 2009 Open Studio Artist Residency and Grant, Franconia Sculpture Park, Franconia, MN Summer Residency: Djerassi Resident Artist Program, Woodside, CA 2007 Summer Term: Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME 2004 Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (finalist) 2003 The School of the Art Institute of Chicago Merit Scholarship ArtsBridge Scholarship recipient
Related Experience 2016 Visiting Sculpture Professor, University of South Florida, College of the Arts 2008-10 Instructor for the First Year Program at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago 2008 Instructor for “Collaborating with the Enemy” at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago 2006-10 Instructor for “Improv Infrastructures” at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago 2005-07 Service Bureau Technician at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago 2004-05 Teacher’s Assistant, First Year Program at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago 2004 Teacher’s Assistant, Early College Program as the School of the Art Institute of Chicago Public Collections Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago MediaMath Corporate Art Collection, New York
Contributor Biographies As the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts since 2012, Whitney Tassie is known for her risk-taking salt series of projects highlighting emerging international artists like Brian Bress, Conrad Bakker, Jillian Mayer, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Together with Dia Art Foundation and Great Salt Lake Institute, the UMFA and Tassie steward Robert Smithson's iconic earthwork Spiral Jetty (1970). She continues to strengthen the UMFA's collection and has acquired work by renowned artists including Nancy Holt, Sol LeWitt, Tacita Dean, and Paul McCarthy. Before moving to Utah, Tassie worked at Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago for seven years, becoming the gallery's first director in 2009. From 2002 to 2005 she worked as an exhibitions and curatorial assistant at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art in Ithaca, New York, where she contributed to education, collections and curatorial work. Tassie holds an MFA modern art history, theory and criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA in art history and archaeology from Cornell University Rachel Adams is the Associate Curator for the University at Buffalo Art Galleries. Adams holds an MA in Exhibition and Museum Studies from the San Francisco Art Institute and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her areas of research include the crossover between contemporary art and architecture, video and new media practices, with a special focus on artists working and performing in the landscape. She was the fourth Curator-in-Residence at Disjecta Contemporary Art Center in Portland, OR, curating the 2014-15 season with artists including Andy Coolquitt, Bahar Yurukoglu, and Pablo Rasgado. From 2010-2013, she was the Associate Curator of Exhibitions and Public Programs at Arthouse at the Jones Center (now The Contemporary Austin), curating exhibitions with Devon Dikeou, Seher Shah, Amie Siegel and Ragnar Kjartansson. She is the co-founder and co-director with Catherine Gavin and Igor Siddiqui of Field Constructs Design Competition in Austin, which took place in November of 2015. Prior to moving to Texas, Adams lived in San Francisco and Chicago, curating at Queens Nails Projects and David Cunningham Projects in San Francisco and co-directing Lloyd Dobler Gallery in Chicago from 2006-2008. Her writing has been included in exhibition catalogues for Prospect.3 New Orleans, and the 2012 Texas Prize as well as artforum.com, Art Papers, Art Practical, Modern Painters, and Texas Architect. Upcoming exhibitions include Lydia Okumura: Situations, and Wanderlust—an exhibition for 2017 that was recently awarded a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Opposite: Index, 2015 (detail)
moniquemeloche was founded in October 2000 with an inaugural exhibition titled Homewrecker at Meloche’s home, and officially opened to the public in May 2001. Working with an international group of emerging artists in all media, the gallery presents conceptually challenging installations in Chicago and at art fairs internationally with an emphasis on curatorial and institutional outreach.
moniquemeloche 2154 W. Division, Chicago, IL 60622 773.252.0299 www.moniquemeloche.com