ANDREW RAFACZ continues the spring 2014 season with Master Plan, a solo exhibition of new paintings by John Knuth. The exhibition continues through Saturday, May 10, 2014.

For Knuth, the most basic level of alchemy can be transcendent. Whether he is working with sugar, smoke or insects, the common and fleeting are repurposed and given new meaning. Much of his project is centered on the natural world and its potential in the process of art-making. He intends to create something that is beyond the normal, daily existence or identity of his chosen material or participant.

To create the paintings in Master Plan, John Knuth feeds watercolor paint to hundreds of thousands of common houseflies. The flies regurgitate the paint on the canvas. As they eat, they digest externally. Every time they land on a surface of something there is a chance they will deposit what they just ate on that surface. That mark is called a flyspeck. To control this process, the artist builds boxes that limit the flies’ movements to the surface area of the canvas. The final paintings are comprised of millions of small dots of paint, determined by inevitable deposits of these flies. While created with a degree of chance, the artist, through research and continued refinement of his process, is largely in control of where and to what amount the paint is applied. The colorful paintings reside in a space between landscape and abstraction. For Knuth, they are analogous to the man-made infrastructure of Los Angeles, with denser areas next to marks that are sparser and sprawl about the canvas.

JOHN KNUTH (American, b. 1978) lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He received an MFA from USC and a BFA from the University of Minnesota. He currently has work on display in We’ll Wear a Jolly Clown Mask at The Speed Museum in Louisville, KY, PARK Self-Titled Space, Tilburg, Netherlands, and New Prints 2014/Winter at the International Print Center New York, New York, NY. He has had recent solo shows at Marie Kirkegaard Gallery, Copenhagen, DE and Human Recourses, Los Angeles, CA. He has shown his work internationally in Sweden, Germany, Denmark, Iceland and Mexico, and nationally at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Locust Projects in Miami, Another Year in LA, Stephen Cohen Gallery, Andrew Rafacz Gallery in Chicago, Southern Exposure in San Francisco and the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

–

ANDREW RAFACZ continues the spring 2014 season with A Prairie, a solo exhibition of new photographs, painting and sculpture by Daniel Shea. The exhibition continues through Saturday, May 10, 2014.

Daniel Shea’s exhibition A Prairie consists of works that speak to the potential of mythologizing an historical narrative. Examining the construction of this mythology specifically in southern Illinois, the artist creates a fictional narrative, grounded in reality, through stilted monuments.

The exhibition contains photographic extracts from two books, Blisner, Ill. and Blisner, IL which examine what has happened in a single Rust Belt town during the process of deindustrialization. In addition to these photographs, A Prairie presents a new sculpture of a stoplight cast in concrete and a wall painting.

Encompassing a cinematic chronology that begins in rural pastures and ends with a symbol of infrastructure and the drive to order, A Prairie condenses the mythology of early industrial America to its most salient elements. The work questions the perceived robustness of human progress against the backdrop of an inevitable entropy.

DANIEL SHEA (American, b. 1985) lives and works in New York, New York. He received his MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He published his first monograph, Blisner, Ill. in conjunction with a long-term residency at Columbia College Chicago and a book release at the Museum of Contemporary Photography and will publish the follow-up book in September 2014 through fourteen-nineteen books. He recently completed a residency at Light Work in Syracuse, NY. He has exhibited at The DePaul Art Museum, The Museo de Arte Acarigua-Araure, Venezuela, MDW Art Fair, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Asia Society in Beijing, and Gallery 400, among others. His work has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, Sculpture Magazine, The Fader, New City and Esquire Russia. This is his first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Official Website

More events on this date

Tags: Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Daniel Shea, John Knuth, West Loop