11400 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio 44106216.421.8671www.MOCAcleveland.org

MICHELLE GRABNER

I WORK FROM HOME

NOV 1, 2013—FEB 16, 2014

MICHELLE GRABNER I WORK FROM HOMEOrganized by David Norr, Chief CuratorNOV 1, 2013—FEB 16, 2014Main Gallery

Michelle Grabner (1962, Oshkosh, WI) lives and works in Oak Park, IL. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at PEREGRINEPROGRAM, Chicago; INOVA, The University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; MINUS SPACE, Brooklyn; Ulrich Museum, Wichita; and University Galleries, Illinois State University. She has been included in group exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Tate St. Ives, UK; and Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland. Grabner joined the faculty of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1996, and became Chair of the Painting and Drawing department in the fall of 2009. She is also a senior critic at Yale University in the Department of Painting and Printmaking. Her writing has been published in Artforum, Modern Painters, frieze, Art Press, and Art Agenda, among others. Grabner is co-curator of the 2014 Whitney Biennial.

WITH SUPPORT FROM

THE SUBURBAN

I Work From Home features a replica of The Suburban, an artist project space Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam founded in an 8 x 8 foot storage shed in their backyard. Positioned in the suburbs, The Suburban offers an alternative platform for contemporary art outside of the typical hierarchies. Through a commitment to challenging artists and work, The Suburban (which now includes an extension in their garage) has built up an impressive exhibition history and gained an international reputation. Openings draw a good crowd of students, artists, and supporters, who converse, relax, and snack on homemade cookies and cold beers.

At MOCA Cleveland, The Suburban features a series of installations programmed by Grabner. In typical Suburban tradition, openings take place on Sunday afternoons, at which time Museum admission will be free.

NOV 1–26KARL HAENDEL

DEC 1–31MICHAEL SMITHOPENING: SUNDAY, DEC 1, 2-5pm

JAN 5–22AMANDA ROSS-HOOPENING: SUNDAY, JAN 5, 2-5pm

JAN 26–FEB 16JESSICA JACKSON HUTCHINS OPENING: SUNDAY, JAN 26, 2-5pm

SPONSORS

This exhibition is funded by Leadership Circle gifts supporting 2014 programs and exhibitions: Britton Fund, Agnes Gund,Scott Mueller, Doreen and Dick Cahoon, Becky Dunn, Harriet and Victor Goldberg, Donna and Stewart Kohl, and Toby Devan Lewis.

2014 exhibitions are funded by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

BLUE = PANTONE DS 218-5 CGREEN = PANTONE DS 304-5 C

ABOVE: Michelle Grabner’s studio. Courtesy of the artist. RIGHT PAGE (Clockwise from top): An opening at The Suburban. Text installation designed by Lars Breuer for an exhibition by Konsortium, 2009. Courtesy of The Suburban; Michael Smith, Avuncular Quest, 2011, photography and video. Photo: Gregory Vershbow. Courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali Gallery, New York; Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Berliner Haus, 2012, ladder, canvas, pastels, acrylic, photocopies, glazed ceramic, 78 3/4 x 78 3/4 x 78 3/4 inches. Installation view, The Hepworth Wakefield, 2013. Photograph: Stuart Whipps, UK. Image courtesy of Timothy Taylor Gallery, London and Laurel Gitlen, New York. © Jessica Jackson Hutchins; Amanda Ross-Ho, CRADLE OF FILTH, 2013, inkjet print on nylon, foam, fusible interfacing, YKK zippers and sliders, cast urethane, various paints, schmuttz (dirt), acrylic paint, nylon webbing, nylon mesh, thread, 78 x 58 x 20 inches. Courtesy of Shane Campbell Gallery; Karl Haendel, High Performance Stiffened Structures, 2013, installation with multiple slide projections, Locust Projects, Miami, January 2013. Courtesy of the artist. FRONT COVER: Michelle Grabner, Untitled (detail), 2013, flashe on panel, 14 x 11 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago; BACK COVER: The Suburban, 2004. Door text by Kay Rosen and roof installation by Jeanne Dunning. Courtesy of The Suburban.

Over the past 20 years, Michelle Grabner has woven a remarkable practice of art making, criticism, and curating, driven by distinctive values and ideas: working outside of dominant systems, working tirelessly, working across platforms and towards community. I Work From Home, Grabner’s first comprehensive solo museum exhibition, presents a survey of over 100 of her works from 1993 to the present, including paintings, drawings, paper weavings, prints, video, and sculpture. All are part of Grabner’s extended investigation of appropriation, repetition, and the aesthetics and social dynamics of the domestic sphere. In its profusion and chronology, the exhibition positions the studio as core to Grabner’s remarkably diverse output, while considering her many pursuits as inextricably linked.

Grabner’s practice began taking shape in Milwaukee in the early 1990s, where she and Brad Killam settled with their two young sons after graduate school at Northwestern in Chicago. As for many artists, the challenge after leaving the community and habits of university was to sustain a high level of thinking and production within the demands of the day-to-day. Grabner’s solution to this dilemma was to consider her immediate surroundings. Setting up a studio in the basement, she began to paint things in her home, appropriating the patterns of tablecloths, linens, and crocheted blankets. Using oil-based enamel on plywood or MDF panels—cheap, common materials bought from the hardware store—Grabner scraped, gouged, and poked to translate texture and weave onto their surfaces, creating an index of her domestic environment. I Work From Home displays these works chronologically, highlighting the breadth of Grabner’s selected subjects, as well as her technical advancements. These are representational works that, paradoxically, can be considered through the discourse of abstract painting. And while Grabner’s hand and material sensitivity are vital to these works (and a constant in her studio in the years to come), she has always considered herself at core a conceptual artist; her actions are systematic and meant to question notions of originality and objecthood.

Prior to her Masters in Studio Art, Grabner earned a Masters in Art History from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and was deeply tuned into the entrenched debates of the 1980s around authenticity and invention. Her 1987 thesis and accompanying exhibition featured Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine, Alan Belcher, Kay Rosen, and Hirsch Perlman—artists intent on flaying society’s assumptions of value and authorship.1 Painters that followed this generation, including Grabner, had to face difficult questions about why they were painting. Bombarded with new influences from popular culture and new means for image production and distribution, one had to either become a painter who denied such dialogues existed, or inherit the sizeable critique of painting and proceed, carefully.

While Grabner worked through these issues in her studio, she also explored collaboration, which has continually played a central role in her practice. I Work From Home includes a full selection of video works authored by CAR (Conceptual Artists Research), a collaborative Grabner formed with Killam and their sons. Made between 1994 and 2002, many with artist David Robbins, they present both humorous and documentary chronicles of family life and suburban activities: changing diapers (Oli / Wipe, 1994), attending school performances (Appleton East High School Band, 1999), and making holiday cookies (the trilogy Cooking with Confidence, 1996, starring Robbins).2 Grabner and Killam saw CAR as a flexible platform, allowing them to pursue a range of activities, including curating exhibitions, writing, and collaborating with others, while making the most of being in Milwaukee.

As CAR focused attention on the development and activities of Grabner’s family, her children often inspired new projects. At one point, Grabner became interested in a red and blue construction paper weaving that her son Peter brought home from school. After first translating it into a painting, she decided to make weavings of her own. Some 20 years later, Grabner continues this practice, using Color-aid paper to produce patterns that recall Nordic design or low-res digital graphics. This activity connects to her interest in early education, particularly the philosophies of Friedrich Froebel, a 19th-century German pedagogue who used paper weaving to acquaint kindergarten students with the world through the manipulation of simple, familiar things. Early on, Grabner displayed her weavings directly on the floor, allowing them to bleed into one another. Eventually, she graduated to patchwork-like fields on low-lying pedestals. In I Work From Home, one such platform, 32 feet long, cuts down the center of the gallery, resembling a table runner. The weavings’ sheer abundance and endless iteration—vertical and horizontal lines, warp and weft—are both hopeful and pedantic.

In 1997, Grabner and Killam moved the family to Chicago, settling in the suburb of Oak Park. Famous for its history as the site of architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s home and studio, Oak Park was an epicenter of the Arts and Crafts movement and its contemporary political philosophy, Progressivism. Oak Park gave Grabner and Killam a historical grounding in which to set their roots. Though closer to a more established art scene in Chicago, they found it to be fractious, overly commercial, and cagey. Wanting to instigate dialogue and bring a semblance of the tight-knit Milwaukee community closer to home, they converted an 8 x 8 foot storage shed in their back yard into a project space called The Suburban. Having worked collaboratively as artists for years, this exhibition platform was a natural extension of their experiments with inclusion. Over the years, The Suburban (which now includes an extension in the garage) has hosted the work of over 200 artists, both emerging and internationally known. Largely self-funded, and intimately connected with Grabner and Killam’s household economy, The Suburban thrives on a spirit equal parts critical and hospitable. I Work From Home features a full-scale replica of The Suburban, which Grabner has programmed for the run of the exhibition with installations by Karl Haendel, Michael Smith, Amanda Ross-Ho, and Jessica Jackson Hutchins. As both a sculptural and philosophical presence, The Suburban adds an important, connective dimension to the exhibition.

After settling in Oak Park, Grabner began introducing new materials and techniques into her paintings in order to more closely approximate her sources, which consequently led to a distancing between source and output. She started to pump flock into wet paint, and later, directly onto walls in soft rainbows. For the first time, Grabner began painting without preexisting imagery, using a pale palette to create radiant, chromatic fades. Grabner often refers to these as her “good” paintings—though not in any evaluative sense. Rather, they can be seen as a search for the Platonic ideal, something to find outside of one’s self. Though these colorful works were a brief experiment, they mark the shift in Grabner’s attention, away from representations of the home as explicit subject and towards abstraction and the rigors of process.

Grabner’s approach to abstraction continued to develop into several distinct, ongoing bodies of work. In 2003, she began using the dot and point, a familiar vocabulary from her earlier textile paintings. These began as circular formations of white flashe dots on paper squares coated with black gesso, and slowly grew in size and complexity as Grabner integrated the Archimedean spiral as a motif. Pulsing and hypnotic, these works are the product of simple repetitive gestures; like many of Grabner’s intensive processes, this can be seen as a metaphor for the tedium and

banality of domestic life. The centered, radial mode of the dot tondos carried over to large silverpoint works Grabner began making in 2006 on round panels and square pieces of paper. For these, Grabner uses her full reach in a long, continuous motion, dragging the silver across the dark surfaces from the center to the edge and back, in thousands of ruled lines. Here, the form (and the form is the idea) drives the making. Indeed, Grabner’s production can be described as compulsive, compelled.

In 2010, Grabner also began using silverpoint (as well as gold and copper) to create metallic ginghams with illusory woven texture and depth. Concurrently, she developed a series of colorful ginghams in flashe or acrylic on panel, which celebrate flatness. Gingham is that everyday textile which conjures images of a picnic spread or a throw blanket. It is a pattern without orientation, and Grabner’s paintings also suggest this kind of infinite potential. Often hung in tight rows, as if tied to a clothes line, these works emphasize shifts in color and material from panel to panel, with each seeming as one of many—like fragments of endlessness. Each of Grabner’s bodies of work forces its formal parameters through subtle alterations, demanding a serialized, transitional view of how pattern takes form and develops.

Continuing to pressure the domain of abstract painting, in late 2010 Grabner began a series of all-white reliefs, for which she cuts and mounts individual sections of burlap, canvas, or linen onto chunky wooden panels, setting the woven material into multiple layers of gesso. Before mounting, Grabner often removes individual threads to create intervals, highlighting frayed edges that curve and coil like drawn lines. These monochromatic objects are often displayed on, or leaning against, white walls, making them almost invisible from a distance. That these works are tethered to textiles does not necessarily affiliate them to the domestic sphere; here, the fabrics are those typically used as “grounds” for painting. Grabner looks through surface toward structure—unlocking the woven form’s connections to the modernist grid, thereby transforming the actual material into subject.

I Work From Home includes a selection of these monochromatic reliefs hung atop a gray paper backdrop by Gaylen Gerber, an artist Grabner has often worked with. Precisely sized to cover entire gallery walls, Gerber’s backdrops (also done in painted stretched canvas, always gray) subtly highlight the conditions of display. The large sheets of paper are carefully folded down to a size that references the body, then unfolded and attached to the wall. A soft grid, made from the creases and buckles of the folds, becomes a surface upon which other actions and representations may collect and gain meaning. Set atop Gerber’s backdrop, Grabner’s monochrome reliefs constantly toggle between painting’s multiple supports; both artists bring what we consider “ground” to the fore through slight and perceptually canny means.

Such give-and-take also bears out in the mobile sculptures Grabner and Killam have created together in recent years, several of which animate the exhibition. The mobiles use Grabner’s finished canvases as raw material or building blocks to which other artworks and objects are attached, creating new dependencies and challenging the paintings’ status and autonomy. This continual repositioning is evident in other display strategies Grabner has burdened or unburdened her own works with: prone fields, installations based on mathematical sequencing, and rigid non-painterly orders such as clothes lines. Once they leave her studio, Grabner’s works are submitted to different arrangements that question their value and reconsider the very effort put into them.

Grabner and Killam’s largest mobile to date, Grabner/Killam Family Summer 2013 (2013) was commissioned for MOCA Cleveland’s three-story atrium. It consists of aluminum bleachers upon which two copies of a family photograph and two television monitors are carefully nested. The monitors play what could be described as a home movie, shot from the car by the artists’ daughter Ceal while Grabner took the family along on a heroic series of studio visits.3 Grabner/Killam Family Summer 2013 brings these collected elements together in a hovering, sidelong conglomeration about watching, gathering, and moving as a unit. Symbolic of Grabner’s passion for sport (she is an avid fan of the Green Bay Packers football team), the bleachers call up comfortable spectatorship through a hilarious reversal of positioning.

In a note left beside the manuscript for The Pale King (2011), David Foster Wallace’s last, unfinished, and posthumously published book, the author proposed that endless repetition and radical boredom could be a source of ultimate fulfillment:

“Bliss—second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color.”4

For Grabner, a necessarily rote, drawn-out method pushes her toward new aesthetic strategies. Invention, as the moment of creative expression, is beside the point. Rather, the purpose lies in noticing effects—shifts of perception, of pressure, the slight shakiness of the hand, a torn edge—and calling them to attention by folding them back into the routine. Indeed, repetition, for Grabner, is a means of animating the most everyday habits of looking.5 It is within this zone of activity, where failure and possibility thrive together, that Grabner cultivates and prospers. Perhaps Grabner’s greatest gift is her ability to let things develop, build, and fail when they must, only to recapture the energy of failure and return it to good use, where it will somehow not go to waste.

—DAVID NORR, CHIEF CURATOR

1 For example, Sherrie Levine’s “After famous artist” series—the most well known of these being After Walker Evans (1981), for which she re-photographed and reprinted Evans’s iconic Depression-era photographs. Levine was looking for a radical way to question modes of art production beyond the frame of the readymade, a discourse Grabner carries on.

2 This is a clear quotation of Martha Rosler’s video Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), in which she poses as a deadpan pedagogue, naming various implements in an aggressive tone.

3 Grabner, Killam, and Ceal drove together from San Diego to Portland, Oregon, stopping for Grabner to do studio visits along the way in preparation for the 2014 Whitney Biennial, which Grabner is co-curating along with Stuart Comer and Anthony Elms.

4 David Foster Wallace quoted in D.T. Max, “The Unfinished: David Foster Wallace’s struggle to Surpass ‘Infinite Jest’,” New Yorker, March 9, 2009, 57.

5 See art historian Briony Fer’s discussion of repetition as both a “means of organizing the world,” and a “means of disordering and undoing.” Briony Fer, The Infinite Line: Re-making Art after Modernism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 2.

LEFT TO RIGHT: Michelle Grabner, Untitled, 2008, graphite and gesso on paper, 20 1/2 x 20 1/2 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago; Michelle Grabner, Untitled, 2013, Color-aid and paper, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist and Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago; Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam, My Oyster (back), 2012, four art works by Michelle Grabner, one art work by Brad Killam, child’s chair, green washcloth, steel cable, 50 x 50 x 13 inches. Installation view, Neither Here nor There but Anywhere and Everywhere, MINUS SPACE, Brooklyn, NY, 2012. Courtesy of the artists and MINUS SPACE.

MICHELLE GRABNER WORKS FROM HOME