Bucket Rider Gallery Is Now the Andrew Rafacz Gallery

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This was the website for the Bucket Rider Gallery. It is now known as the Andrew Rafacz Gallery, a contemporary art gallery located Chicago's West Loop. The gallery founded in 2004 as the Bucket Rider Gallery is still at its original location: 835 W Washington Blvd, Chicago, IL 60607. The website for the new iteration of the Bucket Rider Gallery is: andrewrafacz.com

Below is Archived Content from the Bucket Rider Gallery Circa 2007

ARTISTS
Jon Beasley
Anna Bjerger
Jay Davis
Andrew Guenther
Cody Hudson
Gisela Insuaste
Sarah Anne Johnson
Adam Janes
Dan Kopp
Nicola Kuperus
New Catalogue : CV : Image
Jason Lazarus
Karina Nimmerfall
Michael Schmelling
Joe Sola
James Everett Stanley
Greg Stimac
Chris Uphues
Hilary Wilder
Michael Vahrenwald

2007 Show Announcements

 

 

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Joe Sola

The Buck Stops Here

Opening Reception:
Friday, October 26, 2007 5-8pm
continues through November 24, 2007

BUCKET RIDER GALLERY announces The Buck Stops Here, our first solo show of new video and watercolors by Los Angeles based artist Joe Sola.

Sauna, 2007
Watercolor and pencil on paper
18.5“x15”

Chicago, IL, October 26, 2007 – Bucket Rider continues the fall season with an exhibition of new works by Joe Sola. The show opens Friday, October 26sth with an artist’s reception from 5 to 8pm, and continues through November 24th.

Captivated by ideas of masculinity, celebrity, comedy, and by default, as a white male in America, identity politics, Joe Sola has created a new body of watercolors that address the beauty and absurdity of being in the world today. Employing the mundane and the surreal in equal measure, Sola utilizes visual sight gags, puns, and clichés that are one once tied to contemporary idiom and entirely his own. In his In a Church, an image of a very different kind of stained glass window abrogates traditional religious notions. Instead of experiencing a typically reverent image, the viewer is immediately drawn to the dancing telephones and the pizza deliveryman dropping off the ideal pie. The obligated witness at church on Sunday is dreaming of other things, waiting for the big game and its corresponding feast. Sola’s work is about diversion and the humor that spills out from it. In his world, nothing is the way that it seems, and one’s entire ontology and experience can be redirected at any time.

In By the Way he continues his experimentation and obsession with the differing textures of paper, in this case, bulk toilet tissue. Not intended to be provocative, but rather an homage to Jon Wittaker - the school custodian who became a father figure - the depiction includes references to other household cleaning products that Jon would have used on a daily basis. A magnificent broom, a stoic dustbin, expansive trash bags litter the landscape while officials appear to keep score on paper towels. The bubbles in the sink are all coming from one small bottle of dish detergent, while the dishwasher is eating lunch.

In Watercolor, the video that we present in Gallery Two, Sola plays himself playing a seemingly mediocre academic painter in a PBS-inflected video on how to paint the perfect watercolor. From the beginning, he looks tired and almost washed up, and his motivations are at once benevolent and strangely distracted. We walk with him through a field itself reminiscent of a Van Gogh painting to find the perfect spot and watch him calculate his first tincture of the perfect color. As he his about to apply the first brush stroke, he is plowed down by an errant delivery truck hat we have seen earlier swerving out of control. The central character’s gracious intent to show how to paint the sublime moment is thwarted by the most final of diversions. Again, the absurdity of calculated categories of identity and desire is met with the inevitably of mortality. This is nailed at the end of the piece when, in a last moment of unabashed humor, an employee walks into to the funeral home and punches a clock. For Sola, the end is the ultimate punch line, a thousand jokes skirting the issue brought properly and finally into focus.

Joe Sola was born in Chicago in 1966 and received his MFA from Otis College of Art and Design. He has had solo exhibitions at Atlanta College of Art, GA, and the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, OH. He has had screenings throughout the world, including the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Centrum Beelende Kunst, in Rotterdam, and the Havana Biennial in Cuba. He participated in the California Biennial in 2002 and Rogue Wave 05 at LA Louver Gallery in 2005. A catalogue accompanied his exhibition at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in 2005. His work can be currently seen in Dark Mirrors: Artist’s Videos at SFMOMA and Night of the Living Dolls at the Hammer Museum in LA.

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Joe Sola CV

Solo Shows

2007
Bucket Rider Gallery, Chicago, IL
Lemonsky Projects, Miami, FL
P/M Gallery, Toronto, Canada

2006
Let’s go do some watercolor painting, Bespoke Gallery, New York, NY
Grin and bear it, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH
Taking a Bullet, Atlanta College of Art, Atlanta, GA*

2005
Taking a Bullet, Los Angeles Cotemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA*

Group Shows

2006
Reckless Behavior J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA
Signs of LIfe, Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center, Atlanta, GA
Humor Me, Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, KS
Run for your lives!, DiverseWorks, Houston, TX
Cavaties, University Art Gallery, Cal State Fullerton, Fullerton, CA*
Delusionorium 3, Granc Central Arts, Fullerton, CA*

2005
Rogue Wave 05, LA LOUVER Gallery, Los Angeles, CA*
Landmarks, Portland Institute for Conemporary Art, Portland, OR*
Still, Things Falll from the Sky, UCR/California Museum of Photography, Riverside, CA*
Dreaming of a More Better Future, Cleveland Institute of Arts, Clevelend, OH

2004
Ritalin, Art2102, Los Angeles, CA, curated by Renaud Proch
Pop, Play, Replay, Contemporary Artists Center, North Adams, MA

2003
17 Reasons, Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco, CA
Recon/Decon, Pacific Film Archives, Berkley Museum of Art, Berkley, CA
Corporeal Punishment: The Body of Evidence Lies Naked and Bruised, Video Mundi, Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL

2002
California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA*
Brand Spanking New, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH
Gimme Shelter, Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico
WORDSinDEEDS, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, OR
Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now, LOW Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
How Do We Know the Sky Isn’t Really Green and We’re not Just Colorblind?, Johan Grimonprez Video Lounge, Project Room, Santa Monica Museum of Art, CA

2001
City Game, Centrum Beeldende Kunst, Rotterdam, Netherlands
Forever Infinite, Black Dragon Society, Los Angeles, CA
Alone Again, (Naturally), The Standard Hotel, Los Angeles, CA, curated by Yvonne Force
Fluxus Revisited, Art in General, New York, NY