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Contact:
Andrew Rafacz
Keith Couser
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BUCKET RIDER GALLERY opens the fall season with Reflections of Ourselves from Space, Andrew Guenther’s first solo exhibition of paintings at the gallery. We also present INVOKING, a group show curated by Dirk Knibbe in our project room.
Chicago, IL, September 8, 2006 – Bucket Rider welcomes the fall season with an exhibition of new paintings by Brooklyn artist Andrew Guenther. Running concurrently, in our project room is INVOKING, new video, painting, drawing, and collage by Matteah Baim, Devendra Banhart,
Bobby Burg, Becca Mann, Simone Montemurno, Plastic Crimewave, Deborah Stratman, and
J. Patrick Walsh III. The show opens Friday, September 8th with an artist’s reception from 6 to 9pm, and continues through October 14th.
Andrew Guenther’s first stateside solo exhibition since 2004 continues his interest in how contemporary notions of humanity’s grotesques operate within our organized albeit always future-leaning world. Guenther’s images continue to evoke the work of Goya and Bosch, however his settings are placed further into a doomed future than ever. Utilizing the imagery of science fiction and horror films and employing characters stripped directly from the margins of our already tentative society, he reveals the tragic yet absurdly comical ways that our natural instincts can spin terribly out of control. The new paintings describe a narrative of human space exploration and conflicts with nature and our own mortality. The artist’s simultaneous use of earthy and electric colors and his oscillation between seemingly unkempt and very attentive applications of paint add to the uneasiness of the scene being depicted, forcing the viewer to re-examine his own precarious anchor in the world. Andrew Guenther was born in 1976 in Wheaton, IL. He graduated from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. He has been included in solo and group exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York, Miami Toronto and Zurich. This is his second exhibition with Bucket Rider.
In our project room, running concurrently with Reflections of Ourselves from Space, we present INVOKING curated by Dirk Knibbe, a group exhibition inviting eight artists to address the collective act of calling upon that which is beyond the physical and immediate self.
Matteah Baim graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute, has played in the musical outfit Metallic Falcons with Sierra Cassidy and recently finished a new solo record, The Death of the Sun. She has shown at NewImageArt in San Francisco and John Connelly in New York and recently at Ateltier Cardenas Bellanger in Paris. Devendra Banhart was born 1981 in Houston, Texas and has recently shown at Daniel Reich Gallery and Canada Gallery in NYC, Jack Hanley Gallery in SF, and Atelier Cardenas Bellanger in Paris. He will be included in the forthcoming Uncertain States of America, at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo. He was also recently included in Live through This, New York in the Year 2005, published by Deitch Projects, New York. He will also be included in the forthcoming Vitamin D, published by Phaidon. Baim and Banhart have collaborated on a series of collages and reconfigured found objects entitled “ braiding the whale, braiding the sky�?
Bobby Burg graduated with a BFA in painting from the SAIC in 1999. He tours internationally with musical projects Joan of Arc, Make Believe and his band, Love of Everything. Burg’s paintings are at the same time sentimental and sarcastic, shifting from deliberate to ambiguous.
Becca Mann was born in Los Angeles, 1980 and received her BFA in painting and BAVCS in critical writing from the Art Institute of Chicago. She has shown with the General Store, Milwaukee, WI at NADA in Miami and most recently at Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita, KS. She is currently working on a solo show at 507 Rose Gallery in Los Angeles. In her new work, Mann utilizes the transportive and formal qualities of found fantasy illustration to create scenarios that are at once haunting in their illusion, but thoroughly based in reality.
Simone Montemurno was born in Manila, Philippines in 1980, and received a BFA from NYU in 2002. She exhibited with the General Store, Milwaukee, WI at NADA 2005 in Miami and at the Ulrich Museum of Art. She lives and works in New York City. Montemurno presents a new series of paintings immersed in a fascination with the visceral mythology of the shark
Plastic Crimewave was born Steven Krakow and is the brainchild of the Galactic Zoo Dossier magazine, published by Drag City. He freelances and does illustration for Arthur, Stop Smiling, Roctober and heads up the spaced-out acid punk ensemble Plastic Crimewave Sound. He recently curated 2 Million Tongues and has been profiled in L.A. Weekly, Mojo, Magnet, SPIN, Blackbook, and Fader.
Deborah Stratman is a Chicago-based filmmaker whose films blur the lines between experimental and documentary genres. She frequently works in other media including photography, sound, drawing and architectural intervention. She is presently collecting responses about FEAR (call toll-free: 1-800-585-1078) and is working on some new films about vigilante justice, utopian communities, apocalypse and other events that separate us from the system of things. She is a Guggenheim fellow and has screened work at international venues including the Whitney Biennial, Sundance and Rotterdam film festivals. Deborah currently teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
J. Patrick Walsh III received his BFA from SAIC in 2005 and recently finished a residency at the Contemporary Arts Center in Massachusetts. His work has been published on Soft Skull Press and Open City books as well as his own magazine, Busters. For Invoking, Walsh will feature a video work showing a man seemingly attacked by a long spear which may actually be helping him levitate.