Jeremy Biles, Judith Brotman and Dutes Miller
Maculate Conceptions
June 22 – July 27, 2024
Artists Talk Saturday, July 27 at 2pm
Gallery Hours: Saturdays, 12 – 3pm & by appointment
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 22, 2024
5 – 8pm

Jeremy Biles teaches courses on religion, philosophy, and art (with a focus on surrealism) at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is the author of Ecce Monstrum: Georges Bataille and the Sacrifice of Form; co-editor of Negative Ecstasies: Georges Bataille and the Study of Religion; co-author of The Abyss, or Life Is Simple; co-editor of Noli Me Tangere; and co-editor of a recent special issue of the Religious Studies Review focusing on surrealism and the sacred. His curatorial work includes a pair of recent exhibitions at Indiana University, and his drawings and sculptural work have appeared in galleries within and beyond Chicago. He is currently working on an “anal-surrealist” project under the title The Erotics of Everyday Life.

Judith Brotman is a multidisciplinary artist and educator from Chicago. Her work includes mixed media installations, theatrical immersive environments, altered book pages, and language based conceptual projects, all of which are meditations on uncertainty, ambivalence, and the possibility of transformation. Her work frequently hovers in spaces “between”—between abstraction and figuration, deterioration and regeneration, elegance and awkwardness, generosity and obligation. Brotman’s exhibitions include: Smart Museum of Art, SOFA Chicago, Hampshire College, The Society of Arts & Crafts, Boston, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Asphodel Gallery/Brooklyn, INOVA, the DeVos Art Museum, Weinberg/Newton Gallery, Threewalls, Chicago Cultural Center, Hyde Park Art Center, Gallery 400, Tetrapod Gallery/LA, and The Illinois State Museum. Brotman’s work is in the collection of The Illinois State Museum, the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Brotman received her BFA and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies where she currently teaches.

Dutes Miller’s collages, artists books and phallic sculptures examine the spaces where the artist’s inner life, queer subcultures and mass media intersect. Miller appropriates images from pornographic websites, magazines and his own imaginings to investigate alternative standards of beauty, visualizations of lust and desire found on the internet, and power dynamics in sexual relationships.
Michelle Grabner wrote in ArtForum,

“Miller’s mixed-media collages on paper incorporating penis figures striking silly states of repose and activity are enjoyable vignettes, demonstrating nimble material interplay.”

Miller’s work is driven by an investigation of queer male sexuality through a tactile exploration of materials, most often plaster, resin and paint and also including fabric, feathers, horns and other found objects. From a conceptual standpoint, he is interested in the notion of an object that is penetrable (orifice) versus one which penetrates (phallus). Appearing to be in states of transition, his sculptures attempt to find the potential conflation of the two.

Dutes Miller’s work has been written about on artforum.com, Hyperallergic, the Huffington Post, the Chicago Reader, Time Out Chicago, New City, and the Chicago Tribune. Miller’s work has been included in exhibitions at several national venues including White Flag Projects in St. Louis and the Ukrainian Museum of Art in Chicago. His collaborative work with his husband Stan Shellabarger, as Miller & Shellabarger, won a 2008 Artadia Award and a 2007 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award and has been written about in Art in America, Artforum.com, Art & Auction, Frieze, Artnet, The Art Newspaper, Flash Art, and the Chicago Tribune. Miller received a BFA from Illinois.

Miller is represented by Western Exhibitions.

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Tags: boundary, Chicago, Dutes Miller, Jeremy Biles, Judith Brotman, Maculate Conceptions, Morgan Park