Biodata

            Dates of birth: 1967

Place of Birth: Philadelphia. PA

            Current residence: Brooklyn, NY

            Education : California College of the Arts (formerly CCAC) San Francisco, CA

MFA Photography and Drawing, 1996.

Harvard University Cambridge, MA

A.B. Visual and Environmental Studies, 1989.

            Employment:

 

Major Shows/Galleries

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

Electric Works Gallery San Francisco, CA

Drawing show, January 2011.

Second Street Gallery Charlottesville, VA

Jam, Outing, Retreat. April 2010.

Jack Shainman Gallery New York, NY

You and Other Unknowing Subjects, November 2008.

The Contemporary Museum Honolulu, HI

Boys In The Band, Drawings 1998-2006, December 2006- March 2007. Full color catalog.

GROUP EXHBITIONS:

Maureen Paley Gallery London, UK

Male, curated by Vince Aletti. October 2010.

John Kincaid Gallery Los Angeles, CA

Fuckheads. March 2010.

Tacoma Art Museum Tacoma, WA

Secret Language of Animals, January – June, 2010.

Boston University Sherman Gallery Boston, MA

Casual Male, October 2009.

Residencies                    

2009: Teaching Artist in Residency, University of Tennessee                     

2007: Artist-in-Residence, Hui Press, Honolulu, HI

 

represented by:
Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, NY
and James Harris Gallery, Seattle, WA. Other

Media: watercolor pencil on mylar

Technique: Geoffrey Chadsey appropriates images from art history textbooks, magazines, the Internet, and snapshots of family and friends.  Carefully selecting disparate elements, Chadsey combines them into seamless constructions that seem “real” but are in fact cleverly devised fictions.  Drawing with watercolor pencil on vellum and Mylar, he puts recognizable faces–from George Washington to the rapper Juvenile–on figures in scenes of building sexual tension.  The Drawings are powerfully disconcerting and humorous.  Chadsey describes his works as, “Hip-hop meets Google meets family album meets Internet chat-room.”  His works are off-puttingly familiar; yet circumvent an identifiable personal narrative.  See: http://www.artknowledgenews.com/Geoffrey_Chadsey.html

Contextual information

Influences (historical/personal/political): Geoffrey Chadsey’s characters are hybrids between stereotypically incongruent worlds: drunken college dudes, preening boys, parents, gay men, the anonymous morphed with celebrity culture, the cartoonish, the prurient and the vulnerable… “It’s a drunk miscegenating queer world, filled with hostile effeminacy, macho posturing and preening, celebration, pleasure, and alienation– a world that is born from a break in belonging.”

(excerpt taken from the Jack Shainman Gallery website)

.Other:

http://geoffreychadsey.com/home.html

            “Chadsey’s source images seem to be harvested from random Flickr pages or hook-up websites––the imperfect bodies, ordinary furniture, and flat lighting are all the stuff of private worlds made public online. It is with a deft hand and a peculiar vision that the artist manages to construct works imbued with such memorably freakish integrity.”
Glen Helfand, artforum.com (Critic’s Picks 1.11)

“Resolutely unglamorous, Chadsey's young men, no hunks, preen and pose, sometimes grotesquely transformed by superimpositions that seem to be materialized projections of their fantasies…. These drawings in water-soluble colored pencil on mylar are skillfully delineated, visually powerful, and, even these days, disturbing and provocative.”
DeWitt Chang, Huffington Post “This Month’s Top Exhibitions” (1.11)         

2007: Morse, Marcia, “Geoffrey Chadsey at the Contemporary Museum”, Art in America November, page 230

     

2006: Dyke, Timothy, “(Un)reality”, The Honolulu Advertiser, December 24

Ohnuma, Keiko, “I’m Interested in How People Get Read”, Honolulu Star Bulletin, December 24

Morse, Marcia, “It’s Altogether Unsettling”, Honolulu Weekly, December 20-26

Hackett, Regina, Seattle pi.com, Friday October 13^th

Harrison, Sue, “When you Can’t Look Away”, Banner Online, Provincetown, April 13^th