Feature Past 2014 :: Previous Exhibitions

Exhibitions 11 January – 16 February 2014

Gallery
TODD CHILTON: Stairs and Ramps Todd Chilton’s relatively small and intensely colored abstract paintings layer patterns that are bounded by the edge of the canvas, leading you to believe these paintings are easily graspable. The exhibition title, Stairs and Ramps, references the flat and manipulated space of computer games and, as well, ways to move by foot or wheelchair through architectural space. At the same time, it is also just two ways to graphically read a triangle, the shape that is the basis of the patterns in most of these paintings. Titles of the paintings point to alternate readings of what may be initially perceived. Geometry is undermined by handedness.

As the artist has noted, all these things “serve to create a situation in which the viewer becomes aware of the experience of looking. I want to create images that convey at once a sense of ambiguity, purposefulness, and humor. At times they have a sense of openness on one hand and resistance on the other. I am interested in what happens in the middle. Meaning comes through determined imprecision, broken or sagging structures, and the obvious hand that created the painting. This underscores the physical experience that takes place between a viewer and my work through surface, scale, and optical qualities, which subvert, or sustain, a sense of balance.”

Todd Chilton lives and works in Chicago. Stairs and Ramps is his second solo exhibition with Feature Inc. Previous solo exhibitions include Angled, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago, IL; Evens, Central Utah Art Center, Ephraim, UT; For January, Tony Wight Gallery, Chicago, IL; Lawrence University, Appleton, WI; Raw & Co., Cleveland, OH; and The Suburban, Oak Park, IL.Recent group exhibitions include Self-referral Nonobjective at Feature Inc., New York; bodybraingame at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago; Big Youth II, Bourouina Gallery, Berlin; Devening Projects + Editions, Chicago; Bellstreet Projects, Vienna; 65 Grand, Chicago; and Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Todd received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005, and a BFA from Brigham Young University in 2002.

Primary Argyle, 2013

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Upfront
ROBERT FONTANELLI

Robert Fontanelli hangs in the Feature Upfront with two pieces from his Afterlife series, a body of work that explores sexuality, taste, and status by amusingly conflating furniture, fashion, and the body.

Robert received his BFA from Pratt Institute, and since the ’80s he has worked extensively as an art director for fashion and beauty campaigns.

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Clay Ketter Kitchen Cabinet Wrap, 2014;

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Exhibitions 19 February - 23 March 2014

Gallery: JUDY LINN as if it is as it is of As the artist put it, “Words and pictures by nature don’t agree. There is no good fit. I can’t say what I do or have done, but I know what I want, what I try to do. I can tell how I aim. I can’t say how I land. “When I began, I hated what I couldn’t control—all the annoying things I couldn’t see in the moment of taking a photograph, the crazy stuff that jumps into the edges of pictures. Now I like that part the best. “When someone first looks at a photograph they automatically wonder, ‘What is it?’ I want a photograph that easily answers that question. I want to be extremely obvious; obfuscation is bad grammar. Hopefully, the two-dimensional arrangements of shapes on the paper will be as lively and interesting as the three-dimensional world trapped inside the photograph. There should also be something there you haven’t seen before. Something should happen in the act of looking. “I want a photograph that makes me aware of what is physically in front of me, a photograph that gives me the pleasure of getting lost. It is like asking yourself a joke: not really knowing what the answer is, giving up, and then seeing the punch line and really laughing.” Photographer Judy Linn was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1947, and received her BFA from Pratt Institute, New York, in 1969. She has had solo shows at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (2008), Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver (2007), White Columns, New York (2005), and the Fotomuseum, Antwerp (2004), and her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including “Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present” at the Brooklyn Museum (2009), “Strange Messenger” at the Musuem Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2004), the 1995 Whitney Biennial, and “From the Collection of Sam Wagstaff” at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (197)8. Linn’s photographs are in the collections of the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Getty Collection, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the International Center of PhotographyShe is the recipient of an Arts and Letters Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in Photography, a Peter S. Reed Foundation grant, and an Anonymous Was a Woman grant.		bud can, 2012
		Patti Smith 1969-1976, photographs by Judy Linn was published by Abrams in 2011. Judy Linn lives and works in the Hudson Valley. She began exhibiting with Feature Inc. in 1989 and this is her seventh one-person exhibition with the gallery > exhibition images .

Upfront:
DAVID SHAW

David Shaw jams the Feature Inc. Upfront with a text sculpture that is also figurative--that is, kisses nearing the triple x, and/or the before and after, or even yet the undead and the reborn. Part cartoon. Yet I can’t help thinking chromosomes and reproduction, X’ed out obliteration with some crucifixion and redemption thrown in.

Born in Rochester NY in 1965, David Shaw received his BA with honors from Colgate University in 1987, lives and works in Brooklyn, and began exhibiting with Feature Inc. in 1990.

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Gem, 2013