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31/10/2013

Simon Evans / Michelle Grabner

Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland MOCA, Cleveland

Michelle Grabner
I Work From Home

Organized by David Norr, Chief Curator
Main Gallery

I Work From Home, Michelle Grabner’s first comprehensive solo museum exhibition, presents her artwork as part of a varied and committed practice that also encompasses critical writing and curating. While these activities are typically separated, and placed in hierarchy, Grabner models a productively holistic approach to creative work. All of Grabner’s activities are driven by distinctive values and ideas: working outside of dominant systems, working tirelessly, working across platforms and towards community.

This exhibition surveys Grabner’s work from 1993 to the present, including paintings, prints, video, and sculptures, which investigate repetition, process, and the aesthetics and social-dynamics of the domestic sphere. Grabner’s paintings are a particular focus of the exhibition, spanning early works based on textile patterns appropriated from her domestic environment; her shift to abstraction, which continued her interest in repeated forms and gestures; and recent works that revisit textiles directly through the use of torn fabric and brightly colored gingham patterns.

In addition to her focused and isolated studio work, collaboration has always played a central role in Grabner’s practice. I Work From Home includes a full selection of video works authored by CAR (Conceptual Artists Research), a collaborative formed by Grabner, her husband Brad Killam, and their two young sons in the early 1990s. Many of these videos were made with artist David Robbins, and present both humorous and documentary chronicles of suburban activities. More recently, Grabner and Killam have produced mobile sculptures, several of which animate the exhibition. Using Grabner’s finished canvases as raw material or building blocks to which other artworks and objects are attached, they create new dependencies and question the paintings’ value and autonomy. Artist Gaylen Gerber, with whom Grabner has often worked, has produced a backdrop for one of the gallery walls, subtly reframing a selection of Grabner’s relief paintings on panel.

An important feature of the exhibition is a replica of The Suburban, an eight-by-eight foot artist project space that Grabner and Killam have maintained next door to their home in Oak Park, Illinois, since 1999. The Suburban has presented the work of over 200 emerging and established artists, gaining an international reputation for its program. At MOCA Cleveland, The Suburban will host a series of installations by artists Karl Haendel, Michael Smith, Amanda Ross-Ho, and Jessica Jackson Hutchins.

Michelle Grabner (1962, Oshkosh, WI) lives and works in Oak Park, IL. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at PEREGRINEPROGRAM, Chicago; INOVA, The University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; MINUS SPACE, Brooklyn; Ulrich Museum, Wichita; and University Galleries, Illinois State University. She has been included in group exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Tate St. Ives, UK; and Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland. Grabner joined the faculty of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1996, and became Chair of the Painting and Drawing department in the fall of 2009. She is also a senior critic at Yale University in the Department of Painting and Printmaking. Her writing has been published in Artforum, Modern Painters, frieze, Art Press, and Art Agenda, among others. Grabner is co-curator of the 2014 Whitney Biennial.

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Simon Evans
Only Words Eaten by Experience

Organized by Rose Bouthillier, Assistant Curator Toby Devan Lewis Gallery

Simon Evans meticulously assembles simple materials like paper scraps, scotch tape, pencil shavings, and white-out into diagrams, maps, flowcharts and diary entries that obsessively catalogue the fragments of life. His text-based drawings, weavings, and embroideries share confessional, often humorous observations. Only Words Eaten by Experience presents a comprehensive overview of Evans’s work from the past five years. The exhibition includes Evans’s first tapestry work, Letter to the Future (2011), which replicates the look of handwriting on legal paper with carefully hand-stitched words addressed to the Future, describing an unimpressive past, and signed by William Shakespeare. In other works on view, Evans navigates the world, creating plots for dwelling and escape, and inventories of personal and cultural symbols. These expressions model a hierarchy of needs guided by uncertainty, tenderness, and the poetic absurdity of existence.

ARTIST BIO:
Simon Evans (1972, London, UK) lives and works in New York. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (MUDAM), Luxembourg; Aspen Art Museum; White Columns, New York; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. A travelling two-person exhibition featuring Evans and Öyvind Fahlström was held at Kunshtal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen and Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Germany. Evans's work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including at Louisana Museum, Humlebaek, Denmark; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; Tate Modern, London; Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, Germany; the 12th Istanbul Biennial; and the 27th São Paulo Biennial.

Image: Simon Evans, Escape and Rescue Plan, 2008, pen, paper, scotch tape and white out 23 1/4 x 28 inches. © The Artist / Courtesy James Cohan Gallery, New York/Shanghai.

Press contact:
Sarah N. Rehm, Communications Manager 216.421.8671 events@MOCAcleveland.org

Exhibition Opening Night: Fall 2013 November 1, 2013 / 7:00pm
Free and open to all
7pm: Artist + Curator Talk
7pm: Family Art Studio
8pm: Opening Night Party Begins with Live Performance by Johnny and the Apple Stompers
10pm: Party ends at MOCA and continues at Uptown

Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland MOCA
11400 Euclid Avenue Cleveland, OH 44106
Hours:
Tuesday through Sunday: 11am - 5pm
Open late Thursdays until 9pm
Closed Mondays
Admission:
Free for MOCA Cleveland Members and children 5 and under
$8 General Admission:
$6 Seniors (Ages 65+)
$5 Students (with valid ID)
Free admission for all visitors on the first Saturday of the month

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