Michelle Grabner
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MICHELLE GRABNER I WORK FROM HOME NOV 1, 2013—FEB 16, 2014 11400 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio 44106 216.421.8671 www.MOCAcleveland.org MICHELLE GRABNER THE SUBURBAN I WORK FROM HOME I Work From Home features a replica Organized by David Norr, Chief Curator of The Suburban, an artist project space NOV 1, 2013—FEB 16, 2014 Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam founded Main Gallery in an 8 x 8 foot storage shed in their backyard. Positioned in the suburbs, Michelle Grabner (1962, Oshkosh, WI) lives and works in Oak Park, IL. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at The Suburban offers an alternative platform PEREGRINEPROGRAM, Chicago; INOVA, The University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; MINUS SPACE, Brooklyn; Ulrich Museum, for contemporary art outside of the typical Wichita; and University Galleries, Illinois State University. She has been included in group exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary hierarchies. Through a commitment to Art, Chicago; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Tate St. Ives, UK; and Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland. Grabner joined the faculty of challenging artists and work, The Suburban the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1996, and became Chair of the Painting and Drawing department in the fall of 2009. (which now includes an extension in their NOV 1–26 DEC 1–31 She is also a senior critic at Yale University in the Department of Painting and Printmaking. Her writing has been published in garage) has built up an impressive exhibition KARL HAENDEL MICHAEL SMITH Artforum, Modern Painters, frieze, Art Press, and Art Agenda, among others. Grabner is co-curator of the 2014 Whitney Biennial. history and gained an international reputation. OPENING: SUNDAY, DEC 1, 2-5pm Openings draw a good crowd of students, artists, and supporters, who converse, relax, and snack SPONSORS on homemade cookies and cold beers. This exhibition is funded by Leadership Circle gifts supporting 2014 programs and exhibitions: Britton Fund, Agnes Gund, Scott Mueller, Doreen and Dick Cahoon, Becky Dunn, Harriet and Victor Goldberg, Donna and Stewart Kohl, and Toby Devan Lewis. At MOCA Cleveland, The Suburban features a series of installations programmed by Grabner. In typical Suburban tradition, WITH SUPPORT FROM openings take place on Sunday afternoons, at which time Museum admission will be free. 2014 exhibitions are funded by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. BLUE = PANTONE DS 218-5 C GREEN = PANTONE DS 304-5 C ABOVE: Michelle Grabner’s studio. Courtesy of the artist. RIGHT PAGE (Clockwise from top): An opening at The Suburban. Text installation designed by Lars Breuer for an exhibition by JAN 5–22 JAN 26–FEB 16 Konsortium, 2009. Courtesy of The Suburban; Michael Smith, Avuncular Quest, 2011, photography and video. Photo: Gregory Vershbow. Courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali Gallery, New York; Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Berliner Haus, 2012, ladder, canvas, pastels, acrylic, photocopies, glazed ceramic, 78 3/4 x 78 3/4 x 78 3/4 inches. Installation view, The Hepworth AMANDA ROSS-HO JESSICA JACKSON HUTCHINS Wakefield, 2013. Photograph: Stuart Whipps, UK. Image courtesy of Timothy Taylor Gallery, London and Laurel Gitlen, New York. © Jessica Jackson Hutchins; Amanda Ross-Ho, CRADLE OPENING: SUNDAY, JAN 5, 2-5pm OPENING: SUNDAY, JAN 26, 2-5pm OF FILTH, 2013, inkjet print on nylon, foam, fusible interfacing, YKK zippers and sliders, cast urethane, various paints, schmuttz (dirt), acrylic paint, nylon webbing, nylon mesh, thread, 78 x 58 x 20 inches. Courtesy of Shane Campbell Gallery; Karl Haendel, High Performance Stiffened Structures, 2013, installation with multiple slide projections, Locust Projects, Miami, January 2013. Courtesy of the artist. FRONT COVER: Michelle Grabner, Untitled (detail), 2013, flashe on panel, 14 x 11 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago; BACK COVER: The Suburban, 2004. Door text by Kay Rosen and roof installation by Jeanne Dunning. Courtesy of The Suburban. MICHELLE GRABNER WORKS FROM HOME Over the past 20 years, Michelle Grabner has woven a remarkable practice As CAR focused attention on the development and activities of Grabner’s family, banality of domestic life. The centered, radial mode of the dot tondos carried Grabner and Killam’s largest mobile to date, Grabner/Killam Family Summer of art making, criticism, and curating, driven by distinctive values and her children often inspired new projects. At one point, Grabner became interested over to large silverpoint works Grabner began making in 2006 on round panels 2013 (2013) was commissioned for MOCA Cleveland’s three-story atrium. It ideas: working outside of dominant systems, working tirelessly, working in a red and blue construction paper weaving that her son Peter brought home from and square pieces of paper. For these, Grabner uses her full reach in a long, consists of aluminum bleachers upon which two copies of a family photograph across platforms and towards community. I Work From Home, Grabner’s first school. After first translating it into a painting, she decided to make weavings of her continuous motion, dragging the silver across the dark surfaces from the center and two television monitors are carefully nested. The monitors play what could be comprehensive solo museum exhibition, presents a survey of over 100 of own. Some 20 years later, Grabner continues this practice, using Color-aid paper to to the edge and back, in thousands of ruled lines. Here, the form (and the form described as a home movie, shot from the car by the artists’ daughter Ceal while her works from 1993 to the present, including paintings, drawings, paper produce patterns that recall Nordic design or low-res digital graphics. This activity is the idea) drives the making. Indeed, Grabner’s production can be described as Grabner took the family along on a heroic series of studio visits.3 Grabner/Killam weavings, prints, video, and sculpture. All are part of Grabner’s extended connects to her interest in early education, particularly the philosophies of Friedrich compulsive, compelled. Family Summer 2013 brings these collected elements together in a hovering, investigation of appropriation, repetition, and the aesthetics and social Froebel, a 19th-century German pedagogue who used paper weaving to acquaint sidelong conglomeration about watching, gathering, and moving as a unit. Symbolic dynamics of the domestic sphere. In its profusion and chronology, the kindergarten students with the world through the manipulation of simple, familiar In 2010, Grabner also began using silverpoint (as well as gold and copper) to of Grabner’s passion for sport (she is an avid fan of the Green Bay Packers football exhibition positions the studio as core to Grabner’s remarkably diverse output, things. Early on, Grabner displayed her weavings directly on the floor, allowing them create metallic ginghams with illusory woven texture and depth. Concurrently, team), the bleachers call up comfortable spectatorship through a hilarious reversal while considering her many pursuits as inextricably linked. to bleed into one another. Eventually, she graduated to patchwork-like fields on low- she developed a series of colorful ginghams in flashe or acrylic on panel, which of positioning. lying pedestals. In I Work From Home, one such platform, 32 feet long, cuts down celebrate flatness. Gingham is that everyday textile which conjures images of a Grabner’s practice began taking shape in Milwaukee in the early 1990s, the center of the gallery, resembling a table runner. The weavings’ sheer abundance picnic spread or a throw blanket. It is a pattern without orientation, and Grabner’s In a note left beside the manuscript for The Pale King (2011), David Foster where she and Brad Killam settled with their two young sons after graduate and endless iteration—vertical and horizontal lines, warp and weft—are both hopeful paintings also suggest this kind of infinite potential. Often hung in tight rows, as Wallace’s last, unfinished, and posthumously published book, the author proposed school at Northwestern in Chicago. As for many artists, the challenge after and pedantic. if tied to a clothes line, these works emphasize shifts in color and material from that endless repetition and radical boredom could be a source of ultimate leaving the community and habits of university was to sustain a high level panel to panel, with each seeming as one of many—like fragments of endlessness. fulfillment: of thinking and production within the demands of the day-to-day. Grabner’s In 1997, Grabner and Killam moved the family to Chicago, settling in the suburb Each of Grabner’s bodies of work forces its formal parameters through subtle solution to this dilemma was to consider her immediate surroundings. of Oak Park. Famous for its history as the site of architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s alterations, demanding a serialized, transitional view of how pattern takes form “Bliss—second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, Setting up a studio in the basement, she began to paint things in her home, home and studio, Oak Park was an epicenter of the Arts and Crafts movement and and develops. conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close appropriating the patterns of tablecloths, linens, and crocheted blankets. its contemporary political philosophy, Progressivism. Oak Park gave Grabner and attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Using oil-based enamel on plywood or MDF panels—cheap, common Killam a historical grounding in which to set their roots. Though closer to a more Continuing to pressure the domain of abstract painting, in late 2010 Grabner Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you materials bought from the hardware store—Grabner scraped, gouged, and established art scene in Chicago, they found it to be fractious, overly commercial, began a series of all-white reliefs, for which she cuts and mounts individual and just about kill you.