THUNDERFOXES
Josh Dihle
Mike Calway-Fagen
Dana Haugaard
Alex Kerr
Erick Medel
Miller & Shellabarger
Jaymerson Payton
Jeff Whetstone
Derrick Woods-Morrow
Performance by TEGUCIGALPAN (Carrboro, NC experimental music and recording artist
Clarq Blomquist)
Meats by Pork Stand (John Moll, Nashville, TN)
Curated by GURL DON’T BE DUMB
“I always fantasized what it would be like to be right under the pinnacle of energy, beneath two guys who have crossed their guitars together, two thunderfoxes in the throes of self-love and combat, that powerful form of intimacy only achieved onstage in front of other people, known as male bonding.”
• Kim Gordon
When Kim Gordon talks about her essay ‘Trash Drugs and Male Bonding’, she states “By writing about men locking into one another on stage, I indirectly pushed myself inside the triangle, and whatever doubts I had about pursuing a career in art commingled to create a forward wave of momentum, noise, and motion. It was also my way of rebelling- writing about men when it would be more natural to write about women. It was a conscious faux-intellectual premise I could indulge in…” These are all feelings that Gurl Don’t be Dumb, a curatorial and collaborative project started in Chicago in 2011, directly identifies with. In 2013, as two women, GDBD decided to curate an all male identifying show. We asked ourselves ‘how do we curate a show focused on the gestures and materials of our favorite dude artists without relying on the poetics of feminism to legitimize such an exclusive move? Can we make a show that people heartily enjoy while keeping our feminist mode as a latent inner-cog rather than a flag alerting our audience to our position? Five years later we are still interested in these questions. Camayuhs and Gurl Don’t be Dumb are excited to present ‘Thunderfoxes’, a group exhibition featuring the work of 10 male identifying dudes. The show is centered around our fascination and curiosity of a male energy that strikes a balance between restraint and total release, sincerity and comedy, elegance and trash.
GURL DON’T BE DUMB was founded by Eileen Mueller and Jamie Steele in 2011 as a curatorial project. Trafficking in artists that reclaim the rejected with irreverence and total genius. GDBD’s aim was to build playful exhibitions in an effort to free the works from the academy and facilitate empowered viewership. Their wish to expand the discourse between works and to make exhibitions a celebration of interpretation rather than an exercise in divination led to exhibitions designed for MDW Fair, Iceberg Projects, and Heaven Gallery all based in Chicago, IL. GDBD were artists in residence at ACRE (Steuben, WI) in 2013 and Wassaic Projects (Wassaic, NY) in 2015. GDBD has exhibited a solo show of their collaborative work at The Pitch Project, Milwaukee WI, in 2015. In 2016 they were part of the Wassaic Project’s summer show titled “Appetite for Destruction” and in 2017 exhibited work at the Satellite Art Fair in Miami, FL.
Josh Dihle (B. 1984) received his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012 and his BA at Middlebury College in 2007. Recent solo exhibitions include the McAninch Arts Center in Chicago, Valerie Carberry Gallery, Chicago, and Pleasant Plains, Washington D.C. Group exhibitions include Unisex Salon in New York, Annarumma Gallery, Naples, Italy, Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, Elmhurst Art Museum in Elmhurst, the University of Maine Museum of Art in Bangor, and DUTTON in New York. Dihle teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and co-directs the project space Julius Caesar.
Mike Calway-Fagen is an artist, writer, curator, and educator based in Chattanooga,
TN. His work explores vital materialism and enmeshment, affect, queerness, impermanence, empathy, and the humility of the unhinged body. He received his BFA from the University of Tennessee and an MFA from the University of California, San Diego, and also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Recently Calway-Fagen held solo exhibitions at the University of Arkansas, the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, Ditch Projects in Oregon, and the Soo Visual Arts Center in Minneapolis. Recent group exhibitions include those at HORSE AND PONY in Berlin, MASS Gallery in Austin, TX, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, LAXArt in Los Angeles, and NurtureArt in Brooklyn. Calway-Fagen has attended residencies at The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, and Sculpture Space in Utica, NY. Mike recently left his position as Head of Sculpture at the University of Georgia in Athens to become the Curator at Stove Works, a developing nonprofit art center in Chattanooga. Currently he is an artist in residence at Crosstown Arts in Memphis, TN.
Dana Haugaard received his MFA from the University of Iowa and is a graduate of Emory University. He regularly exhibits his work nationally as well as in Atlanta. Dana is currently a resident in the Atlanta Contemporary’s Studio Artist Program and is a Hambidge Fellow. As an artist working with sound and sensation, Dana investigates how our self-awareness in any given moment functions in relationship to our presence in space, place, and time. He works with sensation and perception to create environments that provoke a heightened sense of awareness of one’s self. Dana uses and manipulates sound, reflective surfaces, and vibrations to construct experiences that draw attention to and call into question our relationship to our surroundings. These situations play with physical, spatial, and temporal reference points to take what is often a minimal presentation and make it an overwhelming experience. Dana currently teaches Visual Art at Emory University as part of the Department of Art History.
Alex C. Kerr is originally from Norfolk, VA, and lives and works in Atlanta, GA. He received his BFA from Georgia State University in 2015. His work examines notions surrounding status, vanity and excess in popular culture. He has participated in exhibitions at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (Atlanta, GA) and The Mason Scharfenstein Museum of Art (Demorest, GA). Kerr is a 2018 MINT Leap Year Resident.
Erick Medel (Mexico, b.1992) hails from Los Angeles and is currently based in Providence, RI after receiving his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. His interdisciplinary practice combines sculpture, photography, and ceramics with available consumer objects and iconography. Through transformations in materials and form, Medel opens up a dialogue about the customization of identity and the power of consumer culture, habits, and symbolism in the promotion of ideologies.
Married artist collaborators Miller & Shellabarger explore physicality, duality, time and romantic ideal in their multidisciplinary work – performance, photography, artists books, sculpture and cut paper silhouettes – that documents the rhythms of human relationships, speaking both to common experiences of intimacy as well as the specifics of queer identities. Miller & Shellabarger have had solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Chicago Cultural Center, INOVA in Milwaukee, the University Galleries at Illinois State University and Gallery Diet in Miami. They have performed and/or been exhibited in group shows across the North America. Miller & Shellabarger are a recipient of an Artadia Chicago award and a recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award. Their work in is the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, the Newark Public Library, Indiana University Art Museum and the National Gallery of Canada. Their work has been written about in Artforum.com, Art & Auction, Frieze, Artnet, The Art Newspaper, Flash Art, Chicago Tribune, and the Chicago SunTimes. They are represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago.
Jaymerson Payton recently received his BA in studio arts from Georgia State University and is an MFA candidate at California College of the Arts. Payton’s paintings, drawings, and sculpture question the duality of man and the contemporary human experience. Recent solo exhibitions include Eyedrum Gallery and Mammal in Atlanta, GA. Group exhibitions include Murmur Media (Atlanta, GA), Hathaway Gallery (Atlanta, GA), and Greenpoint Gallery (Brooklyn, NY).
Jeff Whetstone was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee and has been photographing and writing about the relationship between humans and their environment since he received a Zoology degree from Duke University in 1990. Whetstone received his MFA in photography from Yale University in 2001, and since then his work has been exhibited internationally. In 2007, Whetstone was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for a body of photographs entitled New Wilderness. The following year he received the first Factor Prize for Southern Art. Since 2008, his work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New Yorker Magazine, Time Out New York, Village Voice, and Art News, just to name a few. He is represented by Julie Saul Gallery, New York. Whetstone first exhibited his video work in 2011 when his experimental narrative short, On the Use of a Syrinx, premiered at the Moving Image Festival in New York. Whetstone is a 2012 recipient of a North Carolina Arts Fellowship in film and is Professor and Head of Photography at Princeton University. His work is in many public collections, including the Whitney Museum, the New York Public Library Collection, the North Carolina Museum, Nelson Adkins Museum, Nasher Museum, and the Yale University Art Gallery.
Derrick Woods-Morrow (b.1990. Brown Summit, NC) is a multidisciplinary Chicago-based artist working in photography, sculpture, installation, and performance. His practice navigates and negotiates sexual identity by fragmenting notions of representation, exploring personhood, memories & reimagining ways to understand power dynamics as they pertain to consent and self preservation. A recipient of the 2015 Fellowship in the Visual Arts by the College Association of Art, Carol Becker Dean's Merit Scholarship & the Graduate Dean Professional Development Award, Woods-Morrow received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago 16’. He is an Alum of the Fire Island Artist Residency 2016, Terry Plumming Scholar & Acre Residency Alum 15’, Latitude Chicago Artist in Residence 2017, and is currently a Chicago Artists Coalition 2017-2018 BOLT Resident. He is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Photography and Teaching Artist at the University of Illinois Chicago. His exhibition highlights include: Solo Exhibitions: Keeping Record, Chicago Artist Coalition, Chicago,IL, The Sand is Ours at Lesley University’s Vandernoot Gallery & Rhode Island University’s Chazan Family Gallery; Selected Two & Three Person Exhibitions: Flat Rate Shipping - Derrick Woods-Morrow & Jesse Malmed, Roots & Culture, Chicago, IL & Love the Giver |Dutes Miller, Elijah Burgher & Derrick Woods-Morrow | The Franklin | Chicago, IL | curated by Kristin Korolowitz | tarot card reading & workshop by Alia Watson; Selected Group Exhibitions: Ground Floor: A Biennial Exhibition of New Art from Chicago, Hyde Park Art Center; STEADY MESS, Bureau of General Services – Queer Division in Manhattan (in collaboration with the Fire Island Artist Residency); Blindspots, Xpace Cultural Centre in Toronto [in collaboration with Toronto Pride]; 50 x 50 Invitational, Chicago Cultural Center; and New Work: New Art at SAIC, Sullivan Galleries, School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
TEGUCIGALPAN - Clark Albert Blomquist (b.1972) was born in Durham, North Carolina and grew up in the Tampa Bay area of Florida. As an artist, composer and performer, he has been an active participant in the vital underground Punk and Metal scenes in that region of Florida in the late 80s, as well as the Indie and Experimental Music communities that developed there in the 1990s. In 1998 Blomquist moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he has continued to undertake artistic projects including studio recording, live performance, experimental home recording, poster making, and video production. He is/has been a member of bands of note Crankshaft (No Idea Records), The Kinsgbury Manx (Yep Roc Records, Overcoat Records), WAUMISS (collaborations with Wilco keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen and Brooklyn based production company/art collective/electronic rock band PFFR) Spider Bags (Merge Records), and TEGUCIGALPAN, with whom he has done extensive touring across the US, Canada and abroad for the past fifteen years. A collection containing posters, objets d'art, and audio recordings that document Clark Blomquist's involvement in the independent music scene in Florida and North Carolina is maintained at the Southern Folklife Collection archive at The University of North Carolina.
