Western Exhibitions is pleased to present Jessica Campbell’s solo show, Dogman Lives on the Ground. Campbell’s third show with the gallery brings together works — textiles and drawings — that grapple with the death of a close friend of the artist, made in posthumous collaboration with this friend. This exhibition reflects on the pain, absurdity and humour of friendship and love, and life and death. Please join us for an opening reception on Friday, April 18, from 5 to 8pm. The show runs through June 7 and gallery hours are Tues-Sat, 11am to 6pm.

“Dogman Lives on the Ground” is a simultaneously silly yet serious turn of phrase that was typical of the artist’s friend Lee McClure. To paraphrase his brother Renny’s definition, presented at Lee’s funeral in 2023, a dog is a stupid, sweet animal who is at its core both good and very bad at once. A man, on the other hand, is an abomination, an extremely creepy, extremely manipulative, violent jerk of some kind, like Genghis Khan, who is simultaneously self-assured and proud of his accomplishments like making gizmos, constructing fancy buildings and going into outer space. “Living on the ground” is a way of countering these achievements. We can go into outer space, but at enormous cost and limited frequency. We can do brain surgery, but can also forget to take the scissors out of your brain. So, “living on the ground” is a reminder that most of us, most of the time, are just living on the ground.

Three modest cotton warp and wool weft weavings document the shared affinities and sense of humour that Campbell shared with her friend and former partner, Lee, as well as tribulations of making sense of a life cut short before the age of 40 and her place in that life. Piggy Bank Lee Brought Me Back From Halifax, depicts a brittle, kitschy plastic pig with a cartoonlike face, a gift from Lee. From the artist:

It’s the kind of cute object that I found myself often drawn to, and that I was drawn to for the course of the twenty plus years that Lee was in my life. This object, cheap, mass-produced, otherwise insignificant, has enormous significance for me now. It’s a reminder that Lee knew me, knew my interests, cared enough to travel across the country with this bank for my enjoyment. Weaving is a time-consuming and labourious process and using this process to reproduce objects that were gifted to me from Lee is a chance to ruminate on them and their symbolic weight. By remaking a mass produced, cheap plastic object in this manner, there is greater significance afforded to what might otherwise disappear on a thrift store shelf.

A series of 8 works on paper framed by curtains made from her signature technique of collaging carpet remnants form the spine of the show. The hybrid wall-works that incorporate a combination of collage elements and drawing marks related to the recent work of Campbell, with shapes and patterns pulled from Lee’s work shows Campbell attempting to make drawings that make material the experience of shared ways of thinking and the pain of loss.

She titles a piece in this series (im not lazy i dont think but i havent got a shred of entrepreneur in me), which is the last text message that Lee sent her, three weeks before he died in December of 2022. From Campbell:

A prolific cartoonist, painter and writer, after Lee’s death, I culled together some of his published works to put together a book (Boo Hoo), which I had printed to give away at his funeral. In doing so, I revisited his of the past twenty years and was reminded of our shared artistic affinities. We came of age together, went to art school together, developed as artists, thinkers and writers together. The way he draws a chair is the same as how I draw a chair. There were patterns and methods in his work that I found indistinguishable from my own, and, at this point, I cannot remember who influenced whom. This was a bittersweet realization: in part, I am extremely grateful to have some of Lee’s way of thinking intertwined with and indistinguishable from my own, but the perpetual reminders of our shared experiences and modes of work is also an extremely painful reminder of loss.

This show is an attempt to reconcile with the impossibility of Lee’s death through a series of works made for him, reflecting on his life and prolific work as an artist, writer and comedian and his relationship with the artist, his close friend and former partner. Bringing together textiles, drawings, and works made in posthumous collaboration, this exhibition reflects on the pain, absurdity and humour of being a dogman who lives on the ground.

Jessica Campbell is a Canadian artist and humourist based in Toronto, working in comics, fibres, painting, drawing and performance. Her Chicago Works show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 2018-2019 was reviewed in Art in America, Hyperallergic and Juxtapoz. She is the author of three graphic novels, Rave (Drawn and Quarterly, 2022), Hot or Not: 20th Century Male Artists (Koyama Press, 2016) and XTC69 (Koyama Press, 2018). Her comics have appeared in the New Yorker, Hyperallergic, Drawn to MoMA, and the Nib, among other publications. Her solo and two-person exhibitions include the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, Patel Brown in Toronto, SPACES in Cleveland, Field Projects in NYC, Roots & Culture in Chicago and La Galerie Laroche/Joncas in Montreal. Her work has been included in group shows at the John Michael Kohler Art Center in Wisconsin, the Art Gallery of Hamilton in Ontario, The Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton, the ICA in Baltimore, Richard Heller Gallery in LA, moniquemeloche in Chicago, and Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Campbell received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014.

Official Website

More events on this date

Tags: Chicago, Jessica Campbell, Jessica Campbell: Dogman Lives on the Ground, West Town, Western Exhibitions