Reconstructing, pineapple leaves, deconstruction, bench press, destruction, matadors, mischief, fire, whatever, OK!

Laugh Seriously
Reconstructing, pineapple leaves, deconstruction, bench press, destruction, matadors, mischief, fire, whatever, OK!
Performance by Meg Duguid, Catie Olson,
and The Butcher Shop Dogmatic Gallery
July 29, 2006

This exhibition ran from June 24-July 15, 2006. Although the exhibition has closed, it’s not over yet.

During the run of this exhibition multiple works were purposely damaged by unknown parties. Since July 1st, their zeal in rallying against Meg and Catie and their work, with its casual appearance and mercurial substance has resulted in the vandalizing of 6 pieces, on separate occasions, over the course of 2 and a half weeks time. As the Butcher Shop mostly houses studios in it’s two-floor space, it is most likely that this was an artist on artist crime. After much conversation as to what created such offense in another artists mind, Duguid, Olsen, and the Butcher Shop Dogmatic gallery could only come up with one response:

Reconstructing, pineapple leaves, deconstruction, bench press, destruction, matadors, mischief, fire, what ever, OK!

This descriptive word association was uttered by Duguid and Olsen, in conjunction with the Butcher Shop Dogmatic gallery, as title for a performance to directly deal with these impish and quizzical actions.

Unable to document the exhibition before the pieces were damaged, the artists will reconstruct the exhibition and shoot slides. After the exhibition has been reconstructed they will then reinstall the show to highlight the damaged works, as well as recreate the Map of what it all means in the image of the new space. The gallery will then be reopened for one evening on the 29th of August. That evening you are invited to bring to the Butcher Shop a piece of artwork to be destroyed, as a physical response to the questions raised when so much work is damaged.

A Note about the exhibition:
Laugh Seriously was a collaborative exhibition based on a weird tracking of subject and object within a fictional world of serious laughter. Characterized by an iterative structure and favoring modulating events to idol speculation, Meg Duguid and Catie Olson’s program navigated a space wherein process was investigated as an experiential device. At its core, Serious Laughter employed humor and absurdity as mediums with which contemporary aesthetic could be analyzed and its fraying bits snipped at the pleasure of a passerby’s joke

Included in the exhibition were:
• Abstract sad clown drawings
• Shoe drawings
• Sideshow cigar box dioramas
• High-heeled clown shoes
• A laughing-gas chamber and an oxygen chamber
• A homemade clown car that fills an entire room
• A joke wall where the audience could add their own joke
• A chess game
• (catie add the cans)
• Potential Energy Barbie
• C World
• a book of two’s communications during the process of this exhibition
• a map of what it all means


Dogmatic maintains and upholds its belief that art is not something accessible only to the few. It is instead a potential for all people everywhere to engage the notion of sensation and challenge the experience of history with anything they choose to make a tool of in any space they so choose. Dogmatic in short, will continue to provide leadership for these endeavors as more and more duck, duck, goose becomes a reasonable way to ring around the rosy. We will continue providing Art in any way possible to a world of grown ups that realize the importance of such experiences and we will do this from Chicago where Art happens in real time daily.