I WORK FROM HOME

NOV 1, 2013—FEB 16, 2014

11400 Euclid Avenue, , 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, ; INOVA, The University of , ; 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; , 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, 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. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and poked to translate texture and weave onto their surfaces, creating an index and cagey. Wanting to instigate dialogue and bring a semblance of the tight- sections of burlap, canvas, or linen onto chunky wooden panels, setting the woven white into color.”4 of her domestic environment. I Work From Home displays these works knit Milwaukee community closer to home, they converted an 8 x 8 foot storage material into multiple layers of gesso. Before mounting, Grabner often removes chronologically, highlighting the breadth of Grabner’s selected subjects, shed in their back yard into a project space called The Suburban. Having worked individual threads to create intervals, highlighting frayed edges that curve and coil For Grabner, a necessarily rote, drawn-out method pushes her toward new as well as her technical advancements. These are representational works collaboratively as artists for years, this exhibition platform was a natural extension like drawn lines. These monochromatic objects are often displayed on, or leaning aesthetic strategies. Invention, as the moment of creative expression, is beside that, paradoxically, can be considered through the discourse of abstract of their experiments with inclusion. Over the years, The Suburban (which now against, white walls, making them almost invisible from a distance. That these the point. Rather, the purpose lies in noticing effects—shifts of perception, painting. And while Grabner’s hand and material sensitivity are vital to these includes an extension in the garage) has hosted the work of over 200 artists, both works are tethered to textiles does not necessarily affiliate them to the domestic of pressure, the slight shakiness of the hand, a torn edge—and calling them to works (and a constant in her studio in the years to come), she has always emerging and internationally known. Largely self-funded, and intimately connected sphere; here, the fabrics are those typically used as “grounds” for painting. attention by folding them back into the routine. Indeed, repetition, for Grabner, considered herself at core a conceptual artist; her actions are systematic and with Grabner and Killam’s household economy, The Suburban thrives on a spirit Grabner looks through surface toward structure—unlocking the woven form’s is a means of animating the most everyday habits of looking.5 It is within this zone meant to question notions of originality and objecthood. equal parts critical and hospitable. I Work From Home features a full-scale replica connections to the modernist grid, thereby transforming the actual material into of activity, where failure and possibility thrive together, that Grabner cultivates of The Suburban, which Grabner has programmed for the run of the exhibition with subject. and prospers. Perhaps Grabner’s greatest gift is her ability to let things develop, Prior to her Masters in Studio Art, Grabner earned a Masters in Art History installations by Karl Haendel, Michael Smith, Amanda Ross-Ho, and Jessica Jackson build, and fail when they must, only to recapture the energy of failure and return from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and was deeply tuned into the Hutchins. As both a sculptural and philosophical presence, The Suburban adds an I Work From Home includes a selection of these monochromatic reliefs hung atop it to good use, where it will somehow not go to waste. entrenched debates of the 1980s around authenticity and invention. Her important, connective dimension to the exhibition. a gray paper backdrop by Gaylen Gerber, an artist Grabner has often worked with. 1987 thesis and accompanying exhibition featured , Sherrie Precisely sized to cover entire gallery walls, Gerber’s backdrops (also done in —DAVID NORR, CHIEF CURATOR Levine, Alan Belcher, Kay Rosen, and Hirsch Perlman—artists intent on After settling in Oak Park, Grabner began introducing new materials and techniques painted stretched canvas, always gray) subtly highlight the conditions of display. 1 flaying society’s assumptions of value and authorship.1 Painters that followed into her paintings in order to more closely approximate her sources, which The large sheets of paper are carefully folded down to a size that references For example, ’s “After famous artist” series—the most well known of these being After this generation, including Grabner, had to face difficult questions aboutwhy Walker Evans (1981), for which she re-photographed and reprinted Evans’s iconic Depression-era consequently led to a distancing between source and output. She started to pump the body, then unfolded and attached to the wall. A soft grid, made from the photographs. Levine was looking for a radical way to question modes of art production beyond the frame they were painting. Bombarded with new influences from popular culture and flock into wet paint, and later, directly onto walls in soft rainbows. For the first time, creases and buckles of the folds, becomes a surface upon which other actions of the readymade, a discourse Grabner carries on. new means for image production and distribution, one had to either become Grabner began painting without preexisting imagery, using a pale palette to create and representations may collect and gain meaning. Set atop Gerber’s backdrop, 2 a painter who denied such dialogues existed, or inherit the sizeable critique This is a clear quotation of Martha Rosler’s video Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), in which she poses as radiant, chromatic fades. Grabner often refers to these as her “good” paintings— Grabner’s monochrome reliefs constantly toggle between painting’s multiple a deadpan pedagogue, naming various implements in an aggressive tone. of painting and proceed, carefully. though not in any evaluative sense. Rather, they can be seen as a search for the supports; both artists bring what we consider “ground” to the fore through slight 3 Grabner, Killam, and Ceal drove together from San Diego to Portland, Oregon, stopping for Grabner to do Platonic ideal, something to find outside of one’s self. Though these colorful works and perceptually canny means. studio visits along the way in preparation for the 2014 Whitney Biennial, which Grabner is co-curating While Grabner worked through these issues in her studio, she also explored were a brief experiment, they mark the shift in Grabner’s attention, away from along with Stuart Comer and Anthony Elms. collaboration, which has continually played a central role in her practice. representations of the home as explicit subject and towards abstraction and the Such give-and-take also bears out in the mobile sculptures Grabner and Killam 4 David Foster Wallace quoted in D.T. Max, “The Unfinished: David Foster Wallace’s struggle to Surpass I Work From Home includes a full selection of video works authored by rigors of process. have created together in recent years, several of which animate the exhibition. ‘Infinite Jest’,” New Yorker, March 9, 2009, 57. CAR (Conceptual Artists Research), a collaborative Grabner formed with The mobiles use Grabner’s finished canvases as raw material or building blocks 5 See art historian Briony Fer’s discussion of repetition as both a “means of organizing the world,” and a Killam and their sons. Made between 1994 and 2002, many with artist Grabner’s approach to abstraction continued to develop into several distinct, ongoing to which other artworks and objects are attached, creating new dependencies “means of disordering and undoing.” Briony Fer, The Infinite Line: Re-making Art after Modernism (New David Robbins, they present both humorous and documentary chronicles bodies of work. In 2003, she began using the dot and point, a familiar vocabulary and challenging the paintings’ status and autonomy. This continual repositioning Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 2. of family life and suburban activities: changing diapers (Oli / Wipe, 1994), from her earlier textile paintings. These began as circular formations of white is evident in other display strategies Grabner has burdened or unburdened her attending school performances (Appleton East High School Band, 1999), and flashe dots on paper squares coated with black gesso, and slowly grew in size and own works with: prone fields, installations based on mathematical sequencing, making holiday cookies (the trilogy Cooking with Confidence, 1996, starring complexity as Grabner integrated the Archimedean spiral as a motif. Pulsing and and rigid non-painterly orders such as clothes lines. Once they leave her studio, LEFT TO RIGHT: Michelle Grabner, Untitled, 2008, graphite and gesso on paper, 20 1/2 x 20 1/2 2 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago; Michelle Grabner, Untitled, 2013, Robbins). Grabner and Killam saw CAR as a flexible platform, allowing them hypnotic, these works are the product of simple repetitive gestures; like many of Grabner’s works are submitted to different arrangements that question their value Color-aid and paper, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist and Shane Campbell Gallery, to pursue a range of activities, including curating exhibitions, writing, and Grabner’s intensive processes, this can be seen as a metaphor for the tedium and and reconsider the very effort put into them. Chicago; Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam, My Oyster (back), 2012, four art works by Michelle collaborating with others, while making the most of being in Milwaukee. Grabner, one art work by Brad Killam, child’s chair, green washcloth, steel cable, 50 x 50 x 13 inches. Installation view, Neither Here nor There but Anywhere and Everywhere, MINUS SPACE, Brooklyn, NY, 2012. Courtesy of the artists and MINUS SPACE.