Sarah Kabot & Katie Butler
April 11th–14th, 2024
Abattoir Gallery presents work by two artists who explore the recent fractured state of American civil society in narrative paintings and works on paper. Sarah Kabot and Katie Butler apply collage, drawing, and painting to treat pressing issues—the geopolitical results of climate change to kitchen table topics of inequalities and the inherently fallible nature of print journalism to accurately report on social and political systems.
Eleanor Anderson & Michelle Grabner
February 8th–11th, 2024
Abattoir will show a two-artist booth with fabric works by Detroit based Eleanor Anderson and sculptures by Milwaukee/Chicago based Michelle Grabner. Textiles are the common denominator of this presentation. Not just the use of fabric and materials, but the intellectual understanding of textiles' importance in the domestic sphere (Grabner), the understanding of textile as labor--both individual craft and machine-produced (Anderson and Grabner)--and the ways in which textiles may transcend the workaday to other realms.
Dominic Palarchio, Lauren Yeager and Palli Davis
December 5th–9th, 2023
Abattoir presents a booth of 3 midwestern artists who use found materials from their local landscapes. Dominic Palarchio, Lauren Yeager and Palli Davene Davis are sculptors foremost, with different approaches in their practices. However, they maintain an intentional use of undisguised found materials. The grouping of work in this booth underscores the ongoing richness of the Midwest urban and rural space, while examining the relationship of contemporary practices on a broader scale.
Audra Skuodas and Michelle Grabner
April 14th–16th, 2023
Both artists, working in the Midwest, have forged distinctive oeuvres encompassing abstraction and domestic craft. The presentation focuses on how each employs sewing and textiles as material, gesture, and pattern in painting, sculpture, and artist’s books. Though representing different backgrounds and generations, Grabner and Skuodas hold in common the urge to find depth and permanence in the humble languages of household materials and activities.
Shawn Powell and Caitlin MacBride
December 2nd–4th, 2021
Shawn Powell and Caitlin MacBride each explore objecthood in their paintings. In this moment of socially-charged art, these artists mine figuration along singular paths towards raising the familiar into the philosophical. American imagery is central to both artists, who each configure carefully wrought objects into unusual environments, suggesting a conscious nod to second wave Surrealism, American still life, and Pop art traditions.