CHICAGO IL 60616
Shane Campbell Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition Pall by Tony
Lewis at the gallery’s new South Loop location.
Lewis’ second solo exhibition with the gallery will present three bodies of
work that continue his investigation of language structures and studio
methods within drawing and collage.
The framed drawing in the exhibition is based on the artist’s study of Gregg
Shorthand- an archaic writing system used to manually record speech. Lewis
states that the recent body of work “expands the lexicon, and accesses a
broader discussion of figure/ground within a canonized history of cosmic,
pure abstraction, while pledging the work to a writing system within
diagrammatic abstraction”. Titled Pall, the exhibition’s namesake, the work
offers a targeted description of the large-scale floor drawings in the gallery.
The floor drawings function as the centerpiece of the exhibition and serve as
living remnants of previous exhibitions. Originally begun as memorials for
a once neutralized studio practice, each drawing collects and will continue to
collect it’s own history of exhibition. The repeated exhibition of existing
floor drawings allows for provisional modes of display, maturation, and a
full lifespan of each work. For the current exhibition, Lewis will create a
new 3,000 sq. ft. floor drawing that occupies the entire exhibition space.
Lastly, Lewis’ collages are built from hundreds of small text drawings that
are methodically cut from the artist’s childhood education of Calvin and
Hobbes by Bill Watterson. Drawn and reorganized, the collages allow for
fresh subject matter to enter into the mind of a young boy and his friend,
while staying true to Watterson’s comic book design.
Tony Lewis (born 1986 in LA and grew up in Cleveland, Ohio) lives and
works in Chicago. He has a concurrent solo show at the Museum of
Contemporary Art in Cleveland June 6 – September 6, 2015. His work has
been included in exhibitions at CAB, Brussels; Andrea Rosen Gallery, New
York; Massimo de Carlo, London; and in the 2014 Whitney Biennial.