Casey Jargo
Craig Kalpakjian
Yui Yaegashi
Karla Ekaterine Canseco
Adam Beris
Robert Russell
Blakey Bessire
Marissa Delano
Caroline Partamian
Ben Siekierski
Al Svoboda
Kyle Alden Martens
Ingrid Olson
Jonas Müller-Ahlheim
Alice Tippit
Josh Reames
Kevin Mcnamee-Tweed
Ria Bosman
Amy Yoes
Luca Klauba
Stephen Brandes
Bea Fremderman
Mike Rea
Fin Simonetti
Rebecca Shore
Christopher Michlig
Alberte Tranberg
Everybody
Kai Matsumiya
MISAKO & ROSEN
murmurs
OCHI
OSMOS
P.A.D.
april april
Patel Brown
Patient Info
PATRON
Selenas Mountain
Tatjana Pieters
Tiny Table Gallery
Weatherproof
Askeaton Contemporary Arts
Chris Andrews
Cleaner Gallery + Projects
COOPER COLE
Corbett vs. Dempsey
Devening Projects
BARELY FAIR is pleased to present SPOTLIGHT PROGRAM 2024. An extension of our in-person fair, SPOTLIGHT introduces the galleries and artists exhibiting at our fair.
Launching each year before BARELY FAIR opens to the public, SPOTLIGHT provides galleries an opportunity to share their galleries and artists with public before it opens for in-person visitation. After the fair, SPOTLIGHT is kept as an archive. Follow us on instagram to be notified of new additions to the program.
BARELY FAIR is operated by Julius Caesar, an artist-run project space in Chicago. Established in 2008, the non-profit project space has an ever-evolving group of artists as co-directors. They are Josh Dihle, Tony Lewis, Roland Miller, and Kate Sierzputowski at present.
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Everybody
Tucson, AZ
Everybody is a gallery in Tucson, AZ that primarily works with emerging and perpetually-emerging artists. Its beginnings in Tucson started as a warehouse project space from 2016-2018, followed by an iteration in Chicago, IL from 2019-2020.
Casey Jargo
At Barely Fair 2024, Everybody is excited to present works from Casey Jargo’s ongoing Icons series. These small 1x1 inch paintings on wood panels are derived from social media icons of the early days of Web 2.0. Beginning the works in 2015, Jargo carefully paints avatars of the digital icons that once personalized and decorated Myspace profiles, Livejournal entries, and forum posts—mining recent digital history with a mix of humor, horror, and curiosity.
Jargo reflects on the ever-changing nature of digital self expression and our selective memory of it. Mid-aughts social media is affiliated most with hyper personalization, using HTML design to build one’s own “online bedroom” of sorts, a far cry from the spoon-fed algorithmic online landscape of present day. The imagery depicted in Icons ranges from brand logos, pop media references, and innuendos on one hand, with xenophobic, misogynistic, and homophobic sentiments on the other. Here Jargo provides an unblinking time capsule to see our progress as well as the eerie moments that have stayed familiar through today.
*The Icons series has so far only been shown in life-sized exhibition spaces and fairs. Placing the already small works in a miniature booth at Barely Fair booth provides a new scale and context to view the paintings.
Casey Jargo (b. 1993, Tucson, AZ) is a multimedia artist currently residing in Brooklyn, NY. His work takes interest in how commercial products, internet artifacts and person memories stockpile over time, showing strange reflections of our former selves. He received his BFA from the University of Arizona in 2016 and is currently focusing on painting, collage, and digital work.
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Kai Matsumiya
New York, NY
Kai Matsumiya operates with the belief that the contemporary art gallery has not caught up to the realities of art, with how art lives and breathes on its own time and terms. We extol experimentation for its own sake and encourage failure; for it is failure which promotes possibilities, opportunities, and a defense of dignity. The gallery represents a number of artists working in video, sculpture, photography, installation, and painting with vital conceptual foundations. The program celebrates artists who question even the most fundamental expectations that art or society has for you rather than simply meeting them.
Craig Kalpakjian
Craig Kalpakjian lives and works in New York. From his first sculptural artworks and installations to his groundbreaking computer-generated images and videos – of which the artist was an early pioneer – Kalpakjian has consistently addressed issues of technology, surveillance, architecture, and social control. Employing skewed horizons and illusions of depth and dimensionality, his newest abstract ‘machine paintings’ examine the basic philosophical assumptions underlying western perspectival space. Kalpakjian has held recent solo exhibitions at Good Weather (Chicago), Kai Matsumiya (New York), and Oreilles Internaxioneles (Basel). His work is included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art In New York, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. He also regularly performs in the band Das Audit.
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MISAKO & ROSEN
Tokyo
Following deceased Dutch artist Daan van Golden's quotation "Art is not a competition", the gallery strives to help develop a cooperative, mutually supportive contemporary art world. Based in Tokyo, we represent 31 artists from Japan and abroad; each of whom maintains an art practice rooted in the literal; each of whom does not shy away from humor. I
Yui Yaegashi
Yaegashi’s small-scale oil paintings are rooted in imprecision, with her distinct style of patterning resulting in reductive, layered works. Yaegashi’s compositions are carefully composed, with a focus on graphic lines, veiled strokes of color, and explorations of both symmetry and asymmetry.
Yui Yaegashi (b. 1985, Chiba, Japan) lives and works in Tokyo. Yaegashi received a B.A. from the Tokyo Zokei University’s Department of Painting (2009) and her M.F.A. from Tokyo Zokei University’s Graduate School of Art and Design (2011). Her work has been included in SCHMALTZ at Guimarães, Vienna, Austria; Particularities curated by Chris Sharp at X Museum, Shanghai, China; and in solo exhibitions at Misako & Rosen, Tokyo, Japan; Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, IL; Queer Thoughts, New York, NY; and i8 Gallery, Reykjavik, Iceland. In Spring 2020, Yaegashi completed a self-directed residency in New York City supported by the Japanese Government’s Department of Art and Culture. Yui Yaegashi is represented by Parrasch Heijnen in Los Angeles, Misako & Rosen in Tokyo and i8 in Reykjavik.
Describe your image
Describe your image
Describe your image
Describe your image
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murmurs
Los Angeles, CA
murmurs is an art space located in DTLA focused on championing experimental and emerging art practices. murmurs exists to challenge what is expected of an art gallery by providing a new model of a multifaceted platform for modalities of expression that have the power to transform reality. The name murmurs was chosen for its meaning — the collective undercurrents running through a society that are not obviously apparent. murmurs has, from its conception in 2019, been dedicated to honoring the truths of our community and championing creative voices that are not being heard by other institutions.
Karla Ekaterine Canseco
Karla Ekaterine Canseco (b. 1995, San Fernando Valley, California) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles and Mexico City. Her practice explores care, love, and violence through different mediums, particularly clay and performance. She is drawn to how matter carries information that has been passed down and is present; Our bodies collapse conceptions of time and hold stories in the same manner clay transcribes in its composition and impression, like a cannibalization of touch. In making she invites her history within, daydreams, and poetics to materialize into sculptures forming her personal and shared mythologies. She is interested in how her inherited mythologies are dislocated from time allowing them to continuously unfold. She is currently conjuring a militia of canines, guards and guides of love.
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OCHI
Los Angeles, CA & Ketchum, ID
Founded in 2015, OCHI is a contemporary art gallery with locations in Sun Valley, Idaho and Los Angeles, California. Nurturing and contextualizing a diverse roster of interdisciplinary artists, OCHI highlights a mix of traditional and experimental practices that investigate the conceptual and material boundaries of art. OCHI’s program focuses on emerging and mid-career artists, collaborating with each artist to build momentum and visibility through robust activities such as institutional exhibitions, gallery partnerships, artist-initiated opportunities, educational and curatorial platforms, art fairs, and a range of press and publications. OCHI is built upon a multi-generational belief that art has the power to build community, to evoke joy, expand horizons, to define culture, and to create a future that has not yet been imagined.
Adam Beris
OCHI is pleased to participate in the fourth iteration of Barely Fair, the invitational 1:12 scale art fair, to take place at Color Club, located at 4146 N. Elston Avenue in Chicago’s Irving Park, from April 12 through April 21, 2024. The gallery will present new works by artist Adam Beris, a miniature prelude to Beris’ solo exhibition, Fantastic Best Wishes, to open on April 20th at OCHI, Los Angeles. Barely Fair will commence with a vernissage on Friday, April 12th from 6:00 to 10:00 PM PST.
Mining the cultural landscape left in the wake of pre-Wi-Fi American consumerism, Adam Beris new paintings are composed like interventionist haikus. Working with imagery rooted in campaigns for popular culture that targeted Midwestern audiences in the 1990s—freeze frames from old reruns, Superbowl commercials and radio jingles, logos from national conglomerates, magazine ads ripped from content, locally-sourced delivery menu graphics, esoteric children’s books—Beris collages, obliterates, and respawns found signs and symbols using eccentric scale shifts and massive quantities of extruded paint.
Like a cartoon fox in pursuit of a snack that also happens to be a cute bunny, Beris makes paintings that reflect desire and encapsulate the hunt for meaning. In hand-drawn animation, smear frames are stylistic visualizations of motion that distort the subject as it jumps from one place to another or duplicates parts of the subject’s body to imply rapid motion. Though smears were invented to saved time and money, animators continue to employ them for their nostalgic, comedic, and aesthetic appeal. Like a cherry on a sundae, Beris places a version of art history’s smears—abstract paintings and sculptures crafted from paint—onto appropriated cartoon smears.
Beris’ new smears are accompanied by one miniature grass paintings. Evoking finite fields riddled with the ephemera of parties, playdates, and picnics, Beris’ grass paintings are created with paint squeeze directly from the tube. Each bulbous blade of grass is grown in the studio, and an assortment of hidden objects can be found in, under, and around these fake lawn paintings. The grass paintings are also undeniably jokes about painting that lean into stoner humor—the one about the painter who never leaves the studio and has to bring the outdoors in, or painting cigarettes instead of taking fresh air breaks from the fumes produced by off-gassing paint, or “throwing” “shit” at the “ground” to see what sticks, or a collector continuing to watch paint dry years after a painting’s been hanging in their house.
One liners, zingers, quips, memes, inside jokes, and the like are essential to Beris’ practice, which he astutely combines with visual puns, slippages, decontextualized details, and statements of fact. “Painting is just a series of tricks and aha moments,” Beris says, describing his work as an accumulation of dumb jokes. This is more or less ironic considering the level of difficulty in executing Beris’ tricks—part of the joke is the effortless or casualness in appearance while understanding the high level of technical proficiency required to make the work. “You have to wade through sewage before you can swim in clear water.”
Adam Beris (b. 1987, Milwaukee, WI) received a dual degree in Painting and Creative Writing from Kansas City Art Institute in 2009. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including MCC Longview Cultural Center in Lee’s Summit, MO; Over the Influence in Hong Kong and Los Angeles, CA; Y53 and OCHI in Los Angeles, CA; The Omaha Creative Institute in Omaha, NE; and OCHI in Sun Valley, ID. Beris’s work has been featured in publications including Contemporary Art Review LA, Miami New Times, Juxtapoz, and Maake. Beris currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and is represented by OCHI.
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OSMOS
New York / Stamford, NY
OSMOS began in 1997 as a project space in Berlin. In 2013, OSMOS was re-launched by Cay Sophie Rabinowitz in New York and has since developed into a fully integrated office for curatorial and editorial activities: OSMOS Address (project space in NYC); OSMOS Magazine and OSMOS Books; and OSMOS Station (artist residence, studio, and exhibition space in the Western Catskills of New York).
OSMOS has represented the Estates of artists such as Gretchen Bender, Darrel Ellis and Bev Grant, and continued to solidify its presence supporting emerging international artists through exhibitions with Catherine DeLattre, Rose Marasco, Felipe Mujica, Jessie Lee Nash, Ivan Prerad, Freeman+Lowe, Kevin Claiborne, Adam Simon, Michele Araujo, Robert Russell, Honza Zamojski, Aaron Young, and Mathieu Mercier alongside its program of exhibitions with pioneers such as Richard Bell, Julie Knifer, Kay Rosen, Peter Roehr, Duane Michals, and Anton Stankowski. OSMOS is well known for its award-winning independent publishing endeavors, such as OSMOS Magazine and its series of first monographs with artists Wardell Milan, Eileen Quinlan, Leslie Hewitt, Bev Grant, and Rose Marasco, among others.
Robert Russell
Robert Russell (born 1971) lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He completed his MFA at The California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 2006. Russell earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Through the use of a frequently subdued color palette, Robert Russell’s representational paintings explore concepts of identity, memory, desire and authenticity. Often self-referential in nature, existential questions regarding the role of an image and the process of memory and imagination arise. Themes include (among others) teacups, art books, portraits of Robert Russell that are not the artist, clouds, pigs, children and most recently paintings of Allach Porcelain figurines. Recent solo exhibitions include Anat Ebgi Gallery, Miles McEnery Gallery, The Cabin LA, LA><ART (Los Angeles), Osmos (New York, NY) and Burrard Arts Foundation (Vancouver, BC Canada) where he was also an artist in residence.
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P.A.D.
New York
P.A.D. is an art exhibition space in historic SoHo (South of Houston) Arts District in New York City. It reflects the bustling economy of artists making, selling and promoting their artworks on the street year-round, weather permitting. The aim of the space is to platform small and editioned works by artists that are interested in embracing new contexts for exhibiting.
Blakey Bessire
For Barely Fair 2024, P.A.D. presents a group show of previous contributors to the project, Blakey Bessire, Marissa Delano, Caroline Partamian, and Ben Siekierski. Dealing with themes of pop culture from ancient scrolls to speculative fiction, shit-posting memes to amateur Pornhub titles; each artist is working through the format of engraving–either literally or figuratively.
Blakey Bessire (b. 1998) lives and works between New York City and Maine. They are a writer, birth worker, designer and researcher currently pursuing an MFA from Columbia University.
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Marissa Delano
For Barely Fair 2024, P.A.D. presents a group show of previous contributors to the project, Blakey Bessire, Marissa Delano, Caroline Partamian, and Ben Siekierski. Dealing with themes of pop culture from ancient scrolls to speculative fiction, shit-posting memes to amateur Pornhub titles; each artist is working through the format of engraving–either literally or figuratively.
Marissa Delano (b.1991) is a self-taught artist and writer based in New York. She holds a B.A. in Literature from Hunter College. Her work utilizes an array of materials drawn from the notion of ‘availabism.’ Themes of desire, the toxic nuclear family and sexual deviance often appear in her work. Recent exhibitions include NADA Foreland (NY, 2023,) P.A.D. (NY, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2018,) Walter’s (NY, 2021,) Department of Reflection (Miami, 2021,) Plank Road (NY, 2020,) New Museum’s New INC (NY, 2020,) Special Special (NY, 2020,) Serving the People (NY, 2020,) and 182 Ave. C (NY, 2019.)
Her writing has appeared in Topical Cream and Serving the People’s blog. In 2017 she founded Big Fat Baby (BFB) as an outlet for collaboration across divergent creative practices. BFB remains an experimental site for ready-made, wearable objects highlighting the work of queer artists.
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Caroline Partamian
For Barely Fair 2024, P.A.D. presents a group show of previous contributors to the project, Blakey Bessire, Marissa Delano, Caroline Partamian, and Ben Siekierski. Dealing with themes of pop culture from ancient scrolls to speculative fiction, shit-posting memes to amateur Pornhub titles; each artist is working through the format of engraving–either literally or figuratively.
Caroline Partamian is a sound and visual artist influenced by her training in dance. She works closely with the concept of abreaction – the extraction of dormant memory stored within a muscle, resurfaced through physical movement, of which an individual was previously unaware. By focusing on the process rather than anticipated result, her work encourages what can be revealed when one becomes conscious of their kinetic movement in the process of creation. Her work has taken on the form of compositions, graphic notations, sound environments, books, video, and more. She has shown work at ISSUE Project Room, BoxoPROJECTS, Marfa Open, Wassaic Project, Otion Front, Flux Factory, Anthology Film Archives, Babycastles, Compound Yucca Valley, and more. She co-founded Other Desert Radio, an experimental community-based radio station in the high desert. She also runs a small publishing press, Weird Babes, in the form of zines and prints featuring artists' and her own works-in-progress and experiments. She is also the co-founder of the Armenian Creatives group who celebrate the multiplicity of diasporic histories and modes of navigating identities via gatherings and publications.
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Ben Siekierski
For Barely Fair 2024, P.A.D. presents a group show of previous contributors to the project, Blakey Bessire, Marissa Delano, Caroline Partamian, and Ben Siekierski. Dealing with themes of pop culture from ancient scrolls to speculative fiction, shit-posting memes to amateur Pornhub titles; each artist is working through the format of engraving–either literally or figuratively.
Ben Siekierski (b. 1995) is an artist living and working in Austin Texas. In 2018 Ben graduated from The Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design with a degree in Fine Arts. Ben's work has been exhibited Internationally and featured in YNGSPC, Horst und Edeltraut.
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april april
Pittsburgh
april april is an art and poetry program founded by Patrick Bova and Lucas Regazzi in 2021. The gallery represents and exhibits a comprehensive range of practices with an artist-driven curatorial sensibility. From 2021-2024, april april operated as a project space in the front room of the founders' apartment in Brooklyn, New York. In the fall, april april will begin operating out of a storefront in the Regent Square neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Al Svoboda
For Barely Fair 2024, april april presents an installation in miniature by Al Svoboda.
Titled "Proposition (grayscale)," the booth comprises a sequence of monochromatic planks in a leaning formation, held between two walls. The room-scale painting offers an image within the architecture in response to the limits it mechanizes as support. When viewed from the front wall’s doorway, a grayscale descends its shape, expressing Svoboda’s interest in modernist technique as a kind of physical exaltation. His formal inquiry reads awe-like, finding new intimacy with the atmosphere, grazing its boundaries to elude them.
Al Svoboda (b. 1991, Syracuse, New York) lives and works in New York, NY. Negotiating between painting and sculpture, Svoboda's practice considers function as raw material, studio as found object, and storage as a shape of thought.
He received his BFA from Syracuse University and is currently an MFA candidate at School of Visual Arts in New York. Recent solo and two-person presentations include Weatherproof, Chicago, with Ben K. Voss (2023), and NADA New York with april april (2023). Selected group shows include 57W57 Arts, New York, NY (2024); Alexander Gray Associates, Germantown, NY (2023); Wieoftnoch, Karlsruhe, Germany (2022). Upcoming solo presentations include Barely Fair, Chicago and april april.
Describe your image
Describe your image
Describe your image
Describe your image
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Patel Brown
Toronto, Montréal
Patel Brown highlights alternative perspectives and encourages experimentation and innovation in both its programming and operations. Identifying gaps in representation and opportunities guided by collaboration and community; the gallery’s program looks to traditions in culture and identity, and how they are increasingly challenged by the globalized world.
Kyle Alden Martens
Kyle Alden Martens is an interdisciplinary artist based in Montréal. He graduated from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University in 2015 with a BFA in Intermedia. He is a recent MFA graduate in sculpture at Concordia University and were supported by the Dale and Nick Tedeschi Arts Fellowship, the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship (SSHRC), and the Fonds de Recherche du Québec - Société et culture (FRQSC). Throughout Martens practice whispers of touch and tension are hinted at in referential forms like gloves, marbles, knots, and reflexology diagrams. Clothing serves as an allusion, throughout his practice, to fitting and fitting in. In some cases, objects nest perfectly into places designed with care and attention to accommodate them. In others, fitting is more theoretical, calling into question how queer bodies take up space. Each series presents a cohort of friendly and fetishized objects, installations, performances, and videos—seductive yet unruly, softly rebellious. Martens is a current laureate of the Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Fellowship in Contemporary Art.
Among others, Martens has exhibited with Circa Art Actuel, Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery and Pangée in Montréal, AXENÉO7 in Gatineau, as well as the Khyber Centre for the Arts in Halifax. His exhibition PORTABLE CLOSETS, has been shown nationally at Stride Gallery, Centre CLARK, and Eastern Edge Gallery. His practice is currently supported by a Canada Council for the Arts creation grant where he is investigating sites of storage to find alternative metaphors for the proverbial closet.
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Patient Info
Chicago
PATIENT INFO is an artist run space based in Chicago. Founded in 2019 and operating in a former dermatology office, the space allows for re-contextualization and risk taking across media. Exhibitions at Patient Info are a collaborative exercise, creating an opportunity for artists to engage in the curatorial process while showcasing their work.
Ingrid Olson
Ingrid Olson (b. 1996, St. Louis, MO) makes work in Chicago, IL. She is currently thinking about the reverse side and what bleeds through. Often thinking about the futility of her actions in the studio and the beauty of bad sewing. Always searching for the hottest pink. She received her BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2018 and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2021. Recent group exhibitions in Chicago include The Bridgeport Art Center, Patient Info, and Terrain Biennial.
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Jonas Müller-Ahlheim
Jonas Müller-Ahlheim (*1993 in Wiesbaden, Germany) is a German artist who studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen and graduated in 2021 from The Art Academy Karlsruhe as a Meisterschüler with Professor Leni Hoffmann. From 2021 to 2023 he was awarded the DAAD - German Academic Exchange Service scholarship to continue his research at the Painting Department of the School of The Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), from which he graduated with an MFA. He is currently a teaching Fellow at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
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PATRON
Chicago
PATRON is a contemporary art gallery in Chicago created by Julia Fischbach and Emanuel Aguilar in 2015. PATRON is founded on the defining characteristics of a patron of the arts: a person chosen, named or honored as a special guardian, protector or supporter. With this foundation set as a cornerstone, the gallery hopes to help open new avenues for audiences to engage with and find access to contemporary art.
Alice Tippit
Alice Tippit is a Chicago-based painter and printmaker. Playfully erotic, Tippit’s surrealist-inspired canvases function as visual poems or puns, resisting their often enigmatic titles. Unfolding references from art history, advertising, and linguistic metaphor, Tippit’s carefully selected color palette, and flat, graphic style mask her carefully constructed hand-painted surfaces. Tippit holds a BFA and a MFA from the School of the Art Institute, Chicago.
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Selenas Mountain
New York
Selenas Mountain is a contemporary art gallery in New York, NY. The program presents diverse voices and mediums, focusing on thematic group exhibitions and original solo exhibitions by emerging contemporary artists.
Josh Reames
Josh Reames was born in 1985 in Dallas, TX, and currently resides in Upstate NY. He received his BFA from the University of North Texas, TX (2007) and his MFA, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL (2012). Reames has mounted solo exhibitions at Galerie Frank Elbaz in Dallas, TX; Over The Influence in Los Angeles, CA; Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago; Brand New Gallery, Milan; and Josh Lilley Gallery, London.
He has been included in group exhibitions such as I’m Feeling Much Better Now at Selenas
Mountain in Ridgewood, NY; Scenes from the American Landscape at Team Gallery, New York; Painting Zeitgeist at Achenbach Hagemeier, Berlin; Continuous Surfaces at Andrea Rosen Gallery, NYC; and Post Analogue Painting at The Hole, NYC. He was awarded residencies at the Fountainhead Residency in Miami, FL; the La Brea Residency in Los Angeles, CA; and the Ox-Bow Fall residency. Reames’ work has been written about in The New York Times, Artforum (2018), Blouin Art Info (2017), Juxtapoz (2016), Artnews (2016), and Hyperallergic (2015).
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Tatjana Pieters
Ghent, Belgium
TATJANA PIETERS is an international gallery for contemporary art located in a unique, 400 m2 warehouse in a gentrified area of Ghent. Committed to the accessibility of contemporary art within a social framework, experimentation, the broadening of the mind, and social awareness are the driving forces behind this operation. The gallery brings museum-like exhibitions that combine the promotion of emerging artists with the repositioning of mid-career/ established artists that have been overlooked.
Kevin Mcnamee-Tweed
Kevin McNamee-Tweed’s practice investigates the mechanics of meaning-making and storytelling. Embracing broad material exploration, McNamee-Tweed creates images and objects that narrate, measure, or express nuances of human experience and material reality. While much of his work may be naturally situated within the context of image-making, painting, and drawing, McNamee-Tweed works extensively with clay. Incorporating native clays and regional traditions from his home in North Carolina, the artist relies on time-honored as well as idiosyncratic uses of clay and glaze materials. He makes intimate, utilitarian objects and many things which situate themselves between categories, such as function-resistant objects, ceramic books, and wall-hanging pictorial ceramics, which have become his primary focus in recent years.
Kevin McNamee-Tweed (b. 1984) is based in Durham, North Carolina. Recent solo exhibitions include The Institute of Contemporary Art in Chattanooga, The Greenville County Museum of Art (Greenville, SC), Tatjana Pieters (Ghent, Belgium), Steve Turner (Los Angeles), Cob Gallery (London, UK), L21 Gallery (Mallorca, Spain), and Dutton (New York). He has participated in group shows in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Iceland, Greece, the UK, and Australia. Reviews of his work have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Artnet, Glasstire, and Hyperallgeric, among others. He is the recipient of numerous awards and residencies including the Ella Fountain Pratt Award, the Mildred Pelzer Grant, the Willhelm and Jane Bodine Fellowship, The Iowa Arts Fellowship, and the Montello Foundation Fellowship. A monograph on his ceramic work was published by Steve Turner (Los Angeles) in 2020. Upcoming projects include exhibitions at Museum Lucien De Gheus in Poperinge, Belgium and JVDW Gallery in Dusseldorf, as well as new books, including a monograph surveying McNamee-Tweed’s interdisciplinary practice. He is represented by Steve Turner Gallery (Los Angeles), Dutton Gallery (New York), and Tatjana Pieters (Ghent, Belgium).
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Ria Bosman
Ria Bosman is fascinated by colour and matter. Her colourful, abstract artworks include dozens of sketch and workbooks, works on paper, textile paintings, tile and object paintings, and monumental leather and textile structures. Characteristic are the intense colours and minimal, geometric design, rooted in a sophisticated use of colour, a great sensitivity to materials and a strong technical intuition. Ria Bosman's pure, colourful imagery is rooted in the artist's inner (experiential) world, which she expresses using terms such as peace, silence, harmony, balance, connection and intense experience. Therefore, what drives her research are not purely formal-analytical thought processes, but rather a pervasive aesthetic and a consistent attitude to life - a so-called state of mind. Her work aims to evoke a spiritual experience and emotions. She often chooses intuitively - her selection is related to what preoccupies her, and to the subjects that need further rearrangement and attention.
Ria Bosman (BE, 1956) lives and works in Ghent (BE). In January 2024, Bosman will be featured in 'Draad', a group exhibition at Museum Texture, Kortrijk (BE). Some solo exhibitions include 'GANDA', EbbenGoud, Ghent (BE), Copyright, Ghent (BE), 'ODE', Tatjana Pieters, Ghent (BE), 'VISCERAL COLOUR FIELDS', Tatjana Pieters, Ghent (BE), Galerie C. De Vos, Aalst (BE), Huize Bonaventura, Ghent (BE), Villa des Roses, Ghent (BE), Galerie Avantgarde, Antwerp (BE) and 'Linea '81', Floraliapaleis, Ghent (BE). Recent group exhibitions include 'I try to imagine how your texture felt like', Yper Museum, Ypres (BE), 'September', Tatjana Pieters, 'The Postcard Party', CC Strombeek (BE) and 'Search Party', Tatjana Pieters.
In 2022, Borgerhoff & Lamberigts published the first comprehensive catalogue on Bosman's oeuvre 'Selected Works 1978-2021', with contributions by Isabelle De Baets, Wim Lambrecht & Paul De Moor, designed by Luc De Rycke.
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Tiny Table Gallery
Chicago
Amy Yoes
Amy Yoes works in a multi-faceted way, alternately employing installation, photography, video, painting, and sculpture. A lifelong interest in decorative language and architectural space permeates all of her work. Yoes’s ongoing research into craft, architecture, and decorative art has been furthered by travel and research opportunities that included residencies at the Maison Dora Marr / Brown Fellowship Award Residency (Menérbes, France); the AIR Krems Residency (Krems, Austria); The British School at Rome Abbey Award Residency (Rome, Italy); and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Artist in Residence Program. She lives most of the year in Narowsburg, New York.
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Weatherproof
Chicago
Weatherproof is a contemporary art gallery/curatorial umbrella founded in 2022, with an office space in Chicago's Albany Park neighborhood, and a vitrine in Chicago's Logan Square neighborhood. Started by Milo Christie, who now co-directs with Sam Dybeck, the gallery's program focuses on allowing artists opportunities to present ambitious and challenging work in a site-responsive and collaborative manner. Alongside an ongoing program of exhibition-specific ephemera, Weatherproof hopes to create long-lasting connections between Chicago artists and arts communities, and those from further afield.
Luca Klauba
The breadth of occupying infrastructural spaces for fabrication unravel into a project of re-naming. Through lens based practices that articulates a body's macro-contextual proximity to an urban sprawls historical roots in industrialized systems; an endeavor taken to re-articulate cultural production within and around a post/present industrial environment poses questions on collective awareness of when Earth shifted from a finite resource, into the trapping capitalist economy infinitude of ‘land as property.’ Material inquires, poetics, a photograph to be brushed over; intaken the same as the staining of a plywood sheet used to cover over a space where a window once had sat. The plywood placed over a doorway becoming a table top, a substrate, a point to where material imbues generational understanding and articulation when one’s culture is replaced with labor - the need to consistently produce capital; a material project now undertaken to re-imbue labor, the material it utilizes, as a space for reclaiming. Culture is now re-defined as the work and daily re-articulation of where you stand, inhabit, breathe, to cry: sleep.
Luca Klauba (b.2001) lives and works on Chicago's west side. Previous projects/shows include: Cycles, Building as Form Symposium, Chicago Architecture Biennial; Braid, Weatherproof; TRANQUILITY AMIDST THE CHAOS, FLOOR_, Seoul; Could Vienna hear a whisper in Chicago, witness a light flicker?, Switch Hook Projects at Laurenz, Vienna; Could Vienna hear a whisper in Chicago, witness a light flicker? — ‘The Last Terminal Volume II, Part 2: The Ribbon-cutting Approach’, Switch Hook Projects at Rib, Rotterdam. He runs Switch Hook projects with Zola Rollins, both acting as curators, gallerists, publishers, exhibiting artists, editors, friends, writers, and collectors.
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Askeaton Contemporary Arts
Ireland
Since 2006, Askeaton Contemporary Arts commission, produce and exhibit contemporary art in the locale of a small town in County Limerick, Ireland. An artist residency programme situates Irish and international artists in the midst of Askeaton each summer, while thematic exhibitions, publications and events often occur. Through these methods, over one hundred artists projects have been realised.
Stephen Brandes
Born, 1966. Lives and works in Kinsale, Co Cork, Ireland.
Studied at Bath Academy of Art for his BA, and MA at NCAD in Dublin. In 2005 co-represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale and continues to exhibit regularly, nationally and abroad. Latest bodies of work include, “Schmerzbau: it’s not all just misery”, commissioned by and exhibited at the The Model, Sligo (2022), followed by, “The Trotskys in Kilsheelan” at South Tipperary Arts Centre (2022). Other solo exhibitions include “La Place des Grands Abysses” at Centre Cuturel Irlandais, Paris in 2020 and Uillinn, West Cork Arts Centre in 2021; “Parc do Souvenir”, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh in 2017. In 2021, Brandes had two paintings purchased for the National Collection by the Crawford Gallery, Cork.
Brandes is also co-founder of the art/food collective The Domestic Godless, who in 2022 created separate projects for; the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris; Theatre Klibuehni, Chur, Switzerland and the Museum of Literature in Dublin as part of the Ulysses 2.2 program, celebrating the centenary of the publication of James Joyce’s novel.
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Chris Andrews
Montréal, Canada
Chris Andrews is a contemporary art gallery in Montréal, Canada. The gallery opened in the summer of 2021, and operated out of a mixed use high-rise building until the end of 2022. In March 2023, the gallery moved to its current storefront location at 1660 Rue Villeray under the name Chris Andrews. The gallery's programme emerged from a desire to host dialogue between local and international artists.
Bea Fremderman
Bea Fremderman (b. 1988, Kishinev, Moldova) is a New York-based visual artist. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012. Her current research centres around feelings of global dread. Recent solo exhibitions include Cul-de-sac at Chris Andrews (Montréal), Weeds Compared to Flowers at John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Stranger Man at Atlanta Contemporary (Atlanta), How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself at Shoot The Lobster (New York), Barren Island at Prairie (Chicago), and Office Space at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco). Select group exhibitions include 12.26 (Dallas), Morán Morán (Los Angeles), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Arsenal Contemporary, april april, and The New Museum (New York).
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Cleaner Gallery + Projects
Chicago, IL
Cleaner Gallery + Projects is a contemporary art gallery in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood. Starting off as artist studios with a window gallery, Cleaner now houses 2 galleries showing contemporary solo and group shows. As we have grown our galleries, we still have affordable artist studios and also a half pipe.
Mike Rea
Cleaner Gallery + Projects is pleased to be presenting new works by Mike Rea for Barely Fair 2024. Rea has fabricated a complete fair booth experience, consisting of sculptures, hardwood floors, wall mounted speakers, and a backroom for storing product. Rea's amplifiers are a continuation of work from 2004, titled "Wall of Sound".
Mike Rea has conflated the notions of working hard and playing hard for over a decade with his bombastic wooden sculptures. Replicated and reinvented moments of cinematic horror, science fiction, comedy and drama intermingle with memory to form bizarre personal narratives. Over the years, each uncanny conglomeration of familiar objects and themes has both thrilled and confounded audiences. The delight in the experience of Mike Rea’s vision is the balance between a feeling of understanding that is quickly replaced by new, surprising discoveries. Whether as conventional sculptures standing alone, or as props in interactive installations and performances, these often-massive objects reflect a culture of humor, violence, vulgarity, and sensitivity.
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COOPER COLE
Toronto, Canada
COOPER COLE is a Contemporary Art Gallery located in Toronto, Canada.
Fin Simonetti
Fin Simonetti (b.1985 Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada) works in sculpture and stained glass. Her work examines the entangled relationship between measures of control and desires for security. Simonetti uses imagery that is designed to tap into our visceral fears, and conceptually moves between rendering sculptural forms that represent both protection and vulnerability. The artist’s frequent use of stained glass references its history as a common trade amongst Italian immigrants in Canada, including the artist’s own family.
Simonetti received her BFA from the Ontario College of Art and Design in 2009 and has exhibited internationally at Esker Foundation, Calgary; Matthew Brown, Los Angeles; Company Gallery, New York; Cooper Cole, Toronto; Interstate Projects, Brooklyn; CLEARING, Brooklyn; MoMA PS1, New York, among others. Her work has been reviewed in ArtForum, The New York Times, Art in America, The New Yorker, Cultured Magazine, and Canadian Art. This year she will be releasing her second album through Hausu Mountain, Chicago. Simonetti is represented by Cooper Cole, Toronto, Canada, and Matthew Brown, Los Angeles, USA. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, USA.
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Corbett vs. Dempsey
Chicago
Founded in 2004 by John Corbett and Jim Dempsey, Corbett vs. Dempsey is an art gallery with an associated record label, book imprint, and historical archive, specializing in contemporary art, art in Chicago, and improvised and experimental music.
Rebecca Shore
Rebecca Shore (b. 1956, Vermont) has been cultivating a personal body of work in Chicago since graduating from the School of the Art Institute in the early 1980s, drawing inspiration from a rich variety of intellectual and aesthetic sources. Her meticulous paintings and drawings have always been characterized by an abiding interest in pattern and system (she’s the daughter of a scientist) and issues of signification. Given her sensitivity to materials and background in quilting, her work can also be understood in the context of Chicago’s rich fiber arts tradition. Shore was also profoundly influenced by Chicago Imagism, whose artists were her teachers and friends. Look carefully at one of her seemingly cool, immaculate paintings and you’ll often find a layer of wry, even punning humor.
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Devening Projects
Chicago
Established in 2007 by Chicago-based artist, writer and curator Dan Devening, Devening Projects features a diverse group of emerging and established international artists. Focused on site-specific installations and energetic artist pairings, Devening Projects is the anchor of a growing gallery scene on Chicago’s West Side. Devening Projects also publishes experimental artists’ editions and multiples under the “Devening Editions” moniker.
Christopher Michlig
Christopher Michlig (b. 1976, Alaska, USA) makes work in a wide range of media, including collage, printmaking, sculpture, and film. Michlig’s work has been reviewed and featured in Artforum, The Los Angeles Times, Frieze, New City Art Chicago, among others. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently at 1301 PE, Los Angeles, Nowhere Gallery, Milan, and Devening Projects, Chicago. Michlig received an MFA from ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, California and he is currently Professor of Art and Faculty in Residence at the Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon.
Michlig’s recent book "File Under: Slime" collates a cultural history of “slime” and “sliminess,” with particular emphasis on precedents in pop-culture, contemporary art, ecology, science fiction, literature, critical theory, and cinema. With a foreword by Los Angeles based writer and curator Jan Tumlir, File Under: Slime presents a chronological series of analyses of occurrences of slime, tracking its amorphous and pervasive seepage into the cultural conscience.
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Alberte Tranberg
Alberte Tranberg’s practice is an exploration of fusion in domestic space. Works presented highlight Tranberg’s craft-based research at the intersection of industry and the home. Her manufactured weld fittings are skillfully assembled into dynamic structures that mimic the inner workings of interior spaces.
Tranberg primarily works with structural steel, drawing inspiration from both the built environment and domestic settings. Her pieces respond to the conventions and properties of her craft. The presented tubular structures symbolize physical infra¬structure while attempting to capture moments of softness and to disrupt the rigid¬ity of the everyday. Her practice engages the viewer by subverting our expectations of weight, gravity, light, and movement, inviting us into a world where the boundar¬ies of these fundamental aspects of our reality are redefined.
Alberte Tranberg (b. 1990, Copenhagen, Denmark) lives and works in Detroit, MI. Tranberg’s work has been featured in a multitude of exhibitions and design collaborations including Design Miami with Ornamentum Gallery, Materia; Detroit, Charlottenborg Kunsthal; Copenhagen, Talente 2019; Munich. Most recently Tranberg has designed a series of kitchen cabinet handles for Reform CPH’s Atelier Collection, which launched June 2023. With an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Metalsmithing and years of professional experience in the metal fabrication trade, Tranberg has honed her practice as an exercise in disrupting traditional craft narrative. Tranberg is a Fulbright Scholarship grantee and has been supported by numerous foundations, including the Danish Arts Foundation and Merchant LF Foghts Foundation.
