Corbett vs. Dempsey

Corbett vs. Dempsey</a> is pleased to present <a target="_blank" href=https://www.mutualart.com/Gallery/Corbett-vs--Dempsey/"/Artist/Albert-Oehlen/840587705FF51756">Albert Oehlen</a> &amp; Kim <a target="_blank" href=https://www.mutualart.com/Gallery/Corbett-vs--Dempsey/"/Artist/Kim-Gordon/89B3F50DBCE3F4C4">Gordon, an exhibition of new paintings and multi-media works. This is Oehlen’s fifth show with the gallery and Gordon’s first exhibition in Chicago.</p><p>In this exhibition, German-born artist Albert Oehlen presents three monumental pieces on shaped aluminum. With enamel paint marks applied directly to the raw substates, which are cut into “omega” shapes similar to those of some newer Oehlen works, these 12-foot-tall, 15-foot-wide metal paintings come equipped with sonic transducers on each of their four adjacent panels. When amplified, the paintings act as de facto speakers and project sound vibrations into the room. Oehlen invited Kim Gordon to make soundtracks for the works. She developed these sound recordings in direct material relationship with the paintings, using the transduced metal plates as amplifiers for her electric guitar. Rather than simply making these sounds for the paintings, she made the sounds on them. Gordon’s bracing improvisations, lasting around 8-minutes each, explore a wide range of colors, from chords, drone, and feedback to electrical noises made with the unplugged guitar cord. The works play intermittently, erupting energetically, then relaxing into silence, their metal forms and the gestural lines inscribed on them supercharged by Gordon’s music. In addition to these three works made collaboratively by the two artists, the exhibition presents a new canvas by Oehlen and a group of small, vibrant paintings by Gordon.</p><p><br></p>" />

Sun Ra</a> and his band the Arkestra began decorating their own record covers. Partially as an economical way to make small batches of LPs for sale at their concerts, and partly as a continuation of their pioneering DIY activity with their artist-run record label Saturn Records, Ra and his cohorts would gather together, using colored pens, pencils, paints, and collage to design unique jackets for their albums, offering them to the audience from the edge of the stage at the set break or after the show. The rarest of these used fragments of shower curtains from the legendary Sun Ra house in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in their elaborate collaged designs. These covers are of course now prized fetish objects. Many of them were compiled in the book Sun Ra: Art on Saturn: The Album Cover Art of Sun Ra’s Saturn Label (Fantagraphics, 2022), which situated the handmade covers in context with their more commercially (however still small-batch) produced, offset-printed counterparts.</p><p>In Nothing Is, organized by John Corbett and Albert <a target="_blank" href=https://www.mutualart.com/Gallery/Corbett-vs--Dempsey/"/Artist/Markus-Oehlen/A3665067F2E45FC9">Oehlen for the JUBG in Köln and <a target="_blank" href=https://www.mutualart.com/Gallery/Corbett-vs--Dempsey/"/Organization/Corbett-vs--Dempsey/59FA7DC7D8BA4EF8">Corbett vs. Dempsey</a> in Chicago, a wide range of contemporary artists from varying locations and backgrounds is invited to make their own handmade record covers for specific Sun Ra LPs, whether actual or fictional. The show takes its title from a Ra poem (itself reprinted on the ESP LP called Nothing Is):</p><p><br></p>" />

Rodney Graham</a>'s atypical single-channel piece, a music video for a song written and performed by the artist, featuring bucolic scenes of cherry blossoms and paddling swans intercut with images of a guitar lovingly caressed by a pink fur puff.</p><p><br></p>" />