BEN STONE’s sculptures animate two-dimensional graphics into compelling and uncanny three-dimensional forms. His interest in aberrant human behavior, especially in the context of sports and familial conflicts, manifests as a sincere pursuit of profundity within sloppy, oversimplified imagery; lazy ideas transcend irony, groping towards the tragicomic. For this show, SPORTS!, his first at (northern) Western Exhibitions in Skokie, Illinois, we present a survey of Stone’s athletic-themed work. SPORTS! opens with a free public reception on Saturday, September 23, from 5 to 8pm. Gallery hours at (n)WX are Wednesday to Saturday, 12-6pm and Sundays 12-4pm. The show will be accompanied by an essay from Abraham Ritchie, excerpted in part below.

While Ben Stone’s work has been written about in Artforum, Art in America, and Artnet among many others, he says that being proclaimed the official sculptor of 670 The Score, a Chicago sports radio station, “feels so much more on target for what my interests are.” Stone has a recurring desire to make art that resonates with the everyday experience of people who live their lives going to baseball games or watching the weather forecast. He explains, “there’s some kind of connection to a general, less arty way of thinking maybe that sometimes intrigues me,” describing his making of artwork objects that communicate immediately and simultaneously have a “built in failure.” A connection in Stone’s art to more popularly shared, recognized, and reproduced forms—particularly sports photography and souvenirs—is obviously present. Stone warps these common touch points as they amplify, distort, bend and break, becoming simultaneously familiar and uncanny. Stone is one of the few artists who continually focuses on “sport” as subject matter, exposing and exploring a shared language that is widely spoken and understood, but often ignored in the rarified art world.

In Mary Lou, (1999) the figure of Mary Lou Retton is decontextualized from its source on the Wheaties box, where she was notably the first female athlete featured on the front of the box. In Stone’s figure, the image and pose become strange and take on new readings. Arms raised in victory, Retton ironically sinks into the floor above her waist, forever immobilized after a winning gymnastics routine. Extrapolated from the other associations of the original source on the “Breakfast of Champions” box, Stone reduces Retton’s iconic pose to just a concept: winning.

A series of whimsical wooden sculptures reflect time spent in gymnasiums as Stone coached his daughter’s athletic teams. Based on large-scale banners meant to be seen from a distance, Danny Volleyball (2016) reads as “volleyball” from a distance. But, upon closer inspection, one cannot help but notice the anatomical incongruity of the figure that may have been missed from afar: the figure’s head has somehow completely detached from the body and is now impossibly on the other side of the left arm reaching up for the volleyball. On the other hand, Danny Karate (2016) is only legible through its title for which specific sport it is supposed to be representing. States Stone: “They were probably hung there in the ‘80’s, intending to inspire champions via soft felt, in a realm where so many failed, were picked last and felt bad about unimportant athletic prowess. The clumsiness of the visuals are both funny and sad, just visual metaphors for inevitable failure.”

With each mysterious and humorous object, Stone ponders the condition of unnoticed beauty and delves into the psychology of low self-esteem. One source of inspiration is a crude interpretation of a baseball player used for a dog’s chew toy. In Stone’s painted cast fiberglass sculpture, Benjamin Nimajneb (2013), the two comically distorted figures become permanent adversaries, locked in a poetic struggle.

Stone’s artwork embeds personal memories, and the pieces often act as self-portraits, if not immediately overt ones. Blue Meanies (2010), while depicting an infamous 2002 incident when a father and son duo jumped a short fence at then-Comiskey Park during a White Sox-Royals game and assaulted the Kansas City first base coach, also references Stone’s own dynamic with his father. While using some “pretty poor photos” as the source images for the sculpture, Stone inadvertently ended up carving the first base coach as looking like his own father as a kind of artistic Freudian slip. Stone also sees the pure rage and beautiful futility of this act as a disruption in the system, a ghost in the machine, as if the highly intoxicated White Sox fans, William Ligue and his son, were possessed by a strange energy from an angrier time steeped in Chicago’s darker cultural histories of the thinly veiled policy of segregation of the first Daley administration, the stockyards and Steve Dahl’s infamous disco demolition.

Ben Stone (American, b. 1968) has been included in shows at the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh; Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago; The Green Gallery, Milwaukee; ASHES/ASHES, Los Angeles; Regina Rex, NYC; Locust Projects, Miami; Ten in One, NYC; among several others. In 2011 in Art in America, critic Susan Snodgrass wrote that “Stone assumes the role of interlocutor, a champion of an art earnest in all its intentions regardless of its humble origins.” In addition to the publications mentioned above, his work has been discussed on the Bad at Sports podcast and featured on newscasts on several Chicago stations. Stone’s seven-foot tall, 250 pound robot, Nuptron 4000, performed his wedding ceremony in 2004 and has moonlighted as the stand-up comedian, Bernie Circuits, for Club Nutz, in programming for both the Museum of Contemporary Art and the NEXT Art Fair in Chicago. Stone received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and his MFA from the University of Illinois-Chicago. He is represented by Western Exhibitions, lives in Berwyn and maintains a studio in Chicago.

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This exhibition is presented at Chicago contemporary art gallery Western Exhibitions’ second location, (northern) Western Exhibitions, in Skokie, Illinois. This suburban space expands on the Chicago location’s programming with approximately five specially curated exhibitions a year featuring works by artists from the gallery’s 20-year history. (northern) Western Exhibitions shares a renovated single-floor bow truss building on Skokie’s charming downtown corridor with WHO Modern, a mid-century modern-focused vintage store.

(northern) Western Exhibitions and WHO Modern are located at 7933 N Lincoln Ave, Skokie, IL 60077.
Gallery hours are Wednesday through Saturday 12-6pm, and Sunday, 12-4pm.
For interviews, images, or more information, please contact Scott Speh (312) 480-8390 // scott@westernexhibitions.com

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Tags: (northern) Western Exhibitions, Ben Stone, Ben Stone: Sports!, Skokie, Sports