THE LONGEST PISS         A somewhat premature retrospective of the paintings of Renee Gory and EC Brown, 1990's - 2000's     at Butcher Shop Dogmatic

Butcher Shop Dogmatic brings EC Brown and Renee Gory back together for an dual, premature retrospective. Brown and Gory exhibited at Dogmatic in 2003 with Tune In Turn On Get Out and Stay Out (an exhibition shared with Chuck Jones) and collaborated for Joymore's Thrill III: The Party, and they have shown together at a number of exhibits Brown has curated in Chicago. When collaborating Brown and Gory generally produce whimsical, dilapidated sculptural installations. For The Longest Piss, however, they will drop overt collaboration tactics and hang the painting series they have respectively been working on throughout almost the entirety of their friendship (they met in 1995), as well as numerous artworks they have exchanged as holiday gifts. The two have not had the opportunity to hang so many years worth of work together en masse, and the scale of the BSD space will afford them

the opportunity to investigate existing yet previously unnoticed threads between their works, not to mention new threads enforced by the premise and situation of the exhibit.

Brown and Gory have each been involved with painting series that are thematically and formally consistent (Gory's series began in 1994; Brown's in 2001), both involving an iconic cast of characters – epic amplifications of their day-to-day preoccupations. Gory floats vintage toys, pets and food products in a celestial and formalistic space, evoking both West Coast pop and questionable decorative arts. Brown's tableau illustrations of social guilds (female bodybuilders, Swinging Londoners, etc.) stem from his fascination with Japanese art cinema.