MAIN GALLERY
DON DOE – New Work


PROJECT ROOM
D’NELL LARSON – Close Your Eyes and Think of Me.


April 28 – May 27, 2006
Opening reception: Friday, April 28, 6-9 p.m.
Gallery hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 11a.m – 6 p.m.


Contact: Tony Wight
312.492.7261 info@bodybuilderandsportsman.com


BODYBUILDER & SPORTSMAN Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings and watercolors by Don Doe, his second one-person show with the gallery. In the Project Room former Chicago and now Los Angeles based artist D’nell Larson will show a new video, Close Your Eyes and Think of Me. This is Larson’s third solo show with the gallery.

The half dozen large scale and medium sized oil paintings and several watercolors of Don Doe’s New Work continues, as Ken Johnson wrote in a previous review in the New York Times, “…a series of ''Pirate Gals'' -- pneumatic women in skimpy nautical wear aboard Old World sailing vessels --… made with delightfully insouciant finesse. While spoofing kitschy soft-porn illustration, they pique one's libidinal susceptibilities, orchestrating a playful convergence of intellect and id.”

Doe says of this work “My subject is a fantasy of a sexual identity in the make-believe life of a pirate. The theme came to me as a contradiction while reading bedtime stories to my son. Pirates represent freedom, the power to act out our impulses, and serve as a pervasive icon in our culture. However, the image my son carries of the pirate’s life is empowering. In marrying this ideal with a burlesque humor and Disney-like fantasy, the combination is alternately teasing, provocative, tender, and inviting.”

Based in New York, Don Doe received his Master of Fine Arts degree in sculpture from Yale University School of Art in 1987. Doe received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 1991 and the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation Grant in 1992. Solo exhibitions include: The Sea is Deep and Recent Paintings, Oliver Kamm/5BE Gallery, New York; Scopophilia, Bellwether Gallery; and Don Doe/Bartlett, Anna Kustera Gallery, New York. Group exhibitions include: Project Room, Bellwether Gallery, Brooklyn, New York (2001); New Figurists, RedDOT Gallery, New York (2002); Luscious Too, Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, Chicago (2002); New Drawing Acquisitions, Chicago Art Institute (2002); Toledo Area Artists, Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH (2002); Summer Show, Edward Thorp Gallery, New York (2001); High Wire, The New Yorker Gallery, Conde Naste Building, New York (2001); Pierogi Flatfiles, Block Art Space, Kansas City, MO (2001); Drawing from Brooklyn, Usdan Gallery, Bennington College, Vermont (2000); and Super Duper New York, Pierogi 2000 Gallery, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York (2000).

Project Room

BODYBUILDER & SPORTSMAN Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition by Los Angeles based artist D’nell Larson. In her new video, Close Your Eyes and Think of Me, Larson continues to explore the themes of love, longing and the possibility of emotional exchange. For this piece Larson selected a series of songs with great personal significance and asked her parents to perform them. Larson then recorded the performances in her family’s basement, where she had grown up hearing her parents rehearse love songs for their regular wedding gigs. The unembellished presentation – a single-camera shot, looping without titles or credits, the performers dressed in everyday clothing – serves to highlight the emotional content of the songs and these particular renditions by the artist’s parents. These songs, all about love, longing and loss, counter the traditional upbeat soundtrack of wedding entertainment while ultimately addressing a more accurate experience of emotional entanglement.

The songs by Joy Division, Mazzy Star, Nirvana, Interpol and the Cure are in one sense generationally specific but they become strangely familiar as translated into synthesizer-based lounge pop. The soundtrack that we hear long before seeing the images is powerful, even haunting, an auditory equivalent to the sexy sequins, rhinestones and feathers of Larson’s sculptural work. The video enacts a circuit of emotional generosity, personal history, intimacy and public performance that loops back on itself as we think about the relationship between families as much as we do about the relationship between lovers.

D'nell Larson had a show in the project room at Sixspace in Los Angeles earlier this year. Additional solo and group shows include ARCO in Madrid, Spain; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Artists Space, NYC; Institute of Visual Arts, Milwaukee; Humid, Miami; Zone at Mu Foundation, Eindhoven, Holland; and Romper Room at Thread Waxing Space. The artist has an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago.