As ugly as Harpo Studios is, though, the building housing Western Exhibitions comes off as just the opposite. It’s one of the innumerable, dated brick walk-ups around the neighborhood. And shaded by a stand of trees, most wouldn’t assume that a few galleries are housed on its upper floors. Who knows about zoning codes? And who cares? These artists revel in their live/work spaces. Cheap wine flows as freely as the appetizers at the aforementioned, over-priced luncheons.

It’s odd that in a single block, no less than five galleries cohabitate. But one being set up, no doubt brought the others and eventually that damnable gentrification.

The 3 Walls Gallery and Western Exhibitions are both situated on the second floor of 119 N. Peoria, the latter’s retail store just around the corner on the way to the back stairwell. It’s Western Exhibitions, though, that pulls in some high profile, international artists with Genesis P. Orridge recently displaying work over the summer.

Currently propping up the pristine, white dry-wall are a variety of works from Ben Stone and Joey Fausero. The two artists aren’t tied together by visual aesthetics, but serve to exhibit the cool and ironic nature of just about anyone attempting to make a go of it as an artist – the folks greeting visitors to the gallery suffer the same affliction.

Stone’s work, comprising sculpture, includes an orange bust of Lincoln (“Abe's Song,” 2008) donning a Bears beanie and leaking a tear. Oh hilarity, you are devilish beast capacious of rendering just about any work intended as serious and clever to being an object better suited to spacious alley way dumpsters.

It’d be easy to criticize the lack of technique in all of this. That’d not only be meaningless, but to miss the point. Stone isn’t concerned with traditional modes of creating art. The knit cap adorning Abe’s dome could just as likely been plucked from the floor of the artist’s bedroom as a thrift store or off a bum; its source, no doubt, another feather in Stone’s cap, which more likely than not has a brim of some sort, but not of the baseball variety.

As for Fausero, who plays with gender and puppets in a pair of videos, it’d be nice to say that there was some new take on the roles we all inhabit. But getting all sloppy on a puppet doesn’t pass muster. Assuming “Me Time” was conceived to be brash, weird and challenging all at once, viewers might have a better time goofing off on YouTube for a bit. Punch and Judy were more engaging forty-five years ago.

In another video, Fausero woos a nude, fey gentleman. It’s all kitsch, unwittingly aligning it with Stone’s Lincoln. These works probably succeed at what the artists intended, Fausero clearly being adept at merging disparate modes of art making. And while the understanding of these pieces by the viewer are an ever shifting mass of cultural data, it’s funny to think that something so purposefully and self-consciously tongue-n-cheek as these videos find themselves displayed in a space which fetches rent surpassing what most of its viewers pay bi-monthly.

Making both of these exhibits such an unmitigated mess, though, is the total lack of sincerity. Again, each artist achieved a desired end. Unfortunately, all these works arriving locked in step with the same theoretical backing as ironic mustaches, or cultivated enthusiasm for bad-as-good results in an experience that’s just about forgettable.