The weather or some other accident:
Michelle Grabner, Kathleen Morris, Bronson Smillie

2-stop touring exhibition: 

Bad Water: July 12 - July 29, 2024
Joys: August 2 - 17, 2024


Bad Water documentation 


Joys documentation (coming soon)

Unfurling from a rare formal impulse, I’ve been hesitant to trap the idea with the butterfly net of language. So I cut a hole in the mesh right before this. Michelle, Kathleen, and Bronson, three artists with distinct ways, materials, and individual paths to Bad Water. A throughline: an interest in, and perhaps a rebellion against, systems of measure and organization. An attunement to the quotidian, utilitarian, public and private ways grids and other geometric imperatives permeate our lives. A way of asking how we might complicate that truth. I’m interested in how these artists challenge the arbitrary nature and coldness of the grid as foundation by exploring how this pattern, and others like it, are subject to our mess. Noticing the organic, social, and worn-in geometries that coat our environments, we may start to understand how, over time, these templates become us.

Bronson’s new series adopts retired manual paper cutters. Responding to the weathering marks, scrapes, and slivers from their past lives as scores for collaboration, he introduces new forms composed of found objects. His abstract interventions perform a magnetic divination, conceiving new logic systems of color and form that ignite these objects from dormancy. Michelle’s Gingham paintings on burlap reflect her longstanding interest in common textile patterns that permeate visual culture. Their material matter-of-factness reminds me of the heroic linens and domestic textiles passed on through a family. Individuals with perfect patina and remarkable work ethic. Kathleen’s weaving practice incorporates the plants growing in her immediate surroundings. Introducing these unruly collaborators to the rigid structure of her loom, her hanging panels embrace their own compositional logic. A collaboration between technique and natural geometry. Between planting seeds, warping the loom, and air drying the ‘woven’ foliage, the process has multiple points of departure, working across their own temporality adorned with incremental change, craft, and pedagogy.

Our exhibition title comes from “Desire and the Diagrammatic,” by Margeret Iverson. Repurposing a second-hand anecdote, the author recounts the time Gabriel Orozco came across discarded prints of Josef Albers paintings that had been damaged. Crinkled water ringlets had formed on the paper, contravening his iconic square compositions. To Orozco, the exposure to the weather or some other accident made them all the more interesting.

★★★

Bronson Smillie (b.1992, Calgary, Alberta) holds a BFA in Painting and Drawing from Concordia University and currently lives in Tiohti:áke/Montréal. He is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice involves sourcing objects and creating works with materials that no longer fulfil their purpose within late-capitalist modes of consumption. Solo presentations include Almost Begin, Afternoon Projects, Vancouver (2023), A Place for Everything, april april, Brooklyn, NY (2023), Tempo 85, Espace Maurice, Montréal  (2022), NADA New York, with april april (2022), and Forever is Closing in, MoMAPS311, Ottawa (2019). Group exhibitions include Depa Archive, Ghent, Belgium (2024); Zalucky Contemporary, Toronto, Canada (2024); Pictura Bienniale, Stewart Hall Gallery, Montreal, Canada (2023); Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York, NY (2023); AXENÉO7, Gatineau, Canada (2022); Petrohradská Kolektiv, Prague, Czechia (2021).

Kathleen Morris is a maker and educator working in the field of textiles. Her textiles practice centers on ideas of place-making and ecophenomenology, recognizing the human body as a primary site for experiencing the world, and its fundamental interdependence with innumerable species and organisms. Through her work, Morris explores notions of inhabiting a place, and plumbing the imperceptible web that connects humans to the more than human. The slow pace with which her work unfolds strengthens this sense of reciprocity, and infuses the work with time, depth, and lived understanding. Morris holds a Bachelor of Design from OCAD University, and a Master’s degree from the University of Toronto. Morris was a faculty member in the Material Art and Design program at OCAD University from 2005-2022. Currently, she is a collaborator on a SSHRC international research project entitled Craft and the Digital Turn, as well as a past and present Board member of the Canadian Craft Federation and Craft Ontario.

Michelle Grabner (b. 1962, Oshkosh, WI; lives and works in Chicago and Milwaukee) is an artist, curator, teacher and writer. Her work in painting and sculpture draws equally from a rigorous formal investigation of patterns and domestic life, and a sometimes cheeky flirtation with high modernism's affection for seriality, grids and geometries. Grabner has exhibited extensively over the past three decades, spanning solo exhibitions at galleries including James Cohan, New York; Galerie Gisela Clement, Lotharstraße; Gallery16, San Francisco; Hedreen Gallery at Seattle University, Seattle; Green Gallery, Milwaukee; Rocket Gallery, London; Autumn Space and Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago. Solo museum exhibitions include Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland; Indianapolis Museum of Art; Ulrich Museum, Wichita. She has been included in group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Akron Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Tate St. Ives, UK; and Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland. She is a Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.