Nov
19
to Dec 18

Neighborhood, Watch

Neighborhood, Watch is a solo window installation by Chris Collins opening on Saturday, November 12th until December 18th. Join us at Co-Prosperity for the opening reception along with Let it Grow: Hoofprints 10th Year Anniversary Exhibition on Saturday, November 12th from 6-10PM.

“I think you let me stare
so you can turn against yourself with greater violence…
until I see you correctly, 
as a man bleeding, not
the reflection I desire.”

-Louise Gluck, “The Mirror”

“Eyes on the street” refers to communing publicly amongst neighbors—when we play and socialize in the public realm, we grow our collective bonds. We become safer, together. With the proliferation of home security devices like the video doorbell, ‘eyes on the street’ now refers to disembodied globes, illuminating with each ‘hello’; constantly watching, collecting neighbors and strangers within iron mountains. Passers-by are reduced to unwitting, involuntary subjects to be surveilled, while homeowners become de-facto police operatives, wary and suspicious. At what point does continual surveillance erode community connection, wearing away the threads that bind? Can we imagine networks of support that don’t perpetuate existing models of oppression, isolation, and mistrust?

In this public installation, Chris Collins envisions an alternate ‘security theater,’ one in which surveillance technology inverts to become a site of social connection and play. “Neighborhood, Watch.” imagines a space in which we can opt into the camera’s gaze: Anyone walking by can knock to receive a video message from their neighbor, then record a response for the next person (who sees your message and responds with theirs, and so on). See something, say something, repeat. It’s a chain, a wave, a community-wide game of telephone. It’s an informal network of “eyes on the street,” all choosing to focus their gaze with curiosity instead of suspicion—seeing one another, not watching.

About the Artist:

Chris Collins is an artist and educator based in Chicago. Collins is concerned with digital labor, and fascinated with the boundless, messy contradictions of the internet. They utilize the tools and vernacular of networked culture to critique, explore vulnerabilities, and create new temporary spaces of engagement.

Collins has exhibited and organized events extensively in Chicago, the US, and abroad, most notably at The Museum of Contemporary Art, The Museum of The Moving Image, Musieums Quartier, and The Goethe Institut. Their projects have been written about in the New York Times, SFMOMA, Rhizome, and others. Chris teaches at Northwestern, SAIC, UIC, and has spoken at various workshops, talks, and conferences.

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Nov
19
to Dec 17

Let It Grow: Hoofprint's ten year anniversary show

Let it Grow is an exhibition organized by Hoofprint and features works by over 60 artists. The show will stay up at Co-Prosperity until December 17th. Open hours are Saturdays 12-5pm. The opening reception on Saturday, November 19th featured music, refreshments, and live printing, and will coincide with Grabadolandia, a printmaking festival organized by Instituto Gráfico de Chicago.

Lumpen Special:

10 Years of Collaborative Printmaking at Hoofprint

with Gabe Hoare and Liz Born (39 minutes)

Listen to this special conversation about the ten-year anniversary celebration of Hoofprint, a printmaking studio formed in 2012. Artist, Nicole Marroquin and print-partners Gabe Hoare and Liz Born talked about “Let It Grow”, an exhibition that includes a selection of lithographs, woodcuts, monotypes, screenprints, and etchings—work by over 60 artists, published collaboratively in Chicago.

Join us in celebrating the ten-year anniversary of Hoofprint, a printmaking studio formed in 2012 by print-partners Gabe Hoare and Liz Born. Let It Grow includes a selection of lithographs, woodcuts, monotypes, screenprints, and etchings—work by over 60 artists, published collaboratively in Chicago.

Featured artists include: Atlan Arceo-Witzl, Ivan Bautista, Carlos Barberena, Liz Born, Doug Bosley, Matt Bozik, Claü, Danielle Chenette, Mimi Czarnowski, Lisa Czech, Hector Duarte, Jason Dunda, Lya Finston, Eric J. Garcia, Emily Harter, Anna Hasseltine, Eric Von Haynes, John Himmelfarb, Keith Herzik, Gabe Hoare, Putas Kolektivo, Moní Pisano Luna, Ocho Manos, Nicole Marroquin, Antonio Martinez, S.V. Medaris, Talya Modlin, Max Morris, Bob Mueller, David Nasca, Mony Nuñez, Alicia Obermeyer, Teresa Pankratz, Zeke Peña, Frank Peralta, Sandra Perlow, Chloe Perkis, Kate Perryman, George Porteus, Ryan Quigley, Michael Ridge, Brad Rohloff, Nancy Lu Rosenheim, Nicolette Ross, Ricardo Santos-Hernandez, Ricardo X. Serment, Angela Scalisi, Jenny Schmid, Matt Silva, Chema Skandal, Diana Solis, Oli Watt, Matthew Owen Wead, and Gabriel Villa.

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Sep
30
to Oct 22

...And The Pursuit of

This group exhibition exploring the feminine expanse is a collaboration between Co-Prosperity and the Research House for Asian Art.

The exhibition brings together Lise Haller Baggesen, Larissa Borteh, Amanda Calobrisi, Ava Carney, Xiaowei Chen, Susanne Doremus, Zhen Guo, Hana Jiang, Duk Ju L Kim, XinMo Li, Bobbi Meier, Zelene J. Schlosberg, Mary Lou Zelazny et al whose works juxtapose the bucolics of form with sharp social criticism of the valuation of women through public negotiation and the historic dominion of fertility, and explorations of the cavernous mystique of MOTHER.

...And the Pursuit of is curated by Shannon Lin and Paula Volpato. The exhibition will be on view from September 30th through October 19th. Join us for the opening at Co-Prosperity and at The Research House for Asian Art on September 30th at 6:00pm.*

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Sep
24
6:00 PM18:00

MODERN/ART/PUNK

MODERN/ART/PUNK is a special temporary exhibition by Jack Walls. Open September 24th from 6 to 11pm. Join us for the opening reception at Co-Prosperity. The Artist will be present from 6 to 8 pm.

Along with MODERN/ART/PUNK, The Night We Broke a Vase by Javier Jasso opens the same night in the windows of Co-Prosperity.

Jack Walls’ Art Exhibitions, are usually shown in outlaw galleries in downtown New York. His first one-man-show, ‘ADA’, A Series of Collages’, was presented at FUSE GALLERY, 2008. In 2010, his second one-man-show, ’The Ebony Prick of the White Rose’s Thorn’, (TEPWRT), an epic prose piece laboriously writ on fine paper, was also presented there. Erik Foss, had the foresight and the vision to make these two landmark events, happen for Walls. FUSE GALLERY, was located on Second Avenue in the rear of a bar called ‘LIT’. LIT, and FUSE GALLERY, co-owned by Foss, was the intellectual hub of the burgeoning outlaw downtown art scene in the 2000s.

In 2015, Walls exhibited his first collection of paintings at ’BACK GALLERY, BASILICA HUDSON’, Hudson, New York. In 2016, he presented a show of paintings at CARRIE HADDAD GALLERY, Hudson, NY. Through the largesse of Basilica Hudson co-founder Melissa Auf der Maur. Walls, would briefly become a part of Basilica Hudson’s thriving hive of local artists. Before departing back to his hometown of Chicago, in 2019. Where, over the past three years, throughout the pandemic, Jack Walls created much of this body of work for his upcoming show at CO-PROSPERITY, Saturday, September 24, at 6pm.

Jack Walls’s storied existence began in Chicago, Illinois in 1957. He was born in Cook County Hospital. He attended Ambrose Plamondon Elementary School. While growing up in Chicago, Walls spent his early teens in Pilsen. Specifically, as a member of the Morgan Deuces, a street fraternity of delinquent youths. He attended Tilden High School. After a stint in the Navy, he arrived in New York in 1981. Where he met photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Jack Walls has lived a colorful life.

“I realize that in my artwork I am carrying on a running conversation with other artists. Basquiat, Mapplethorpe, Patti Smith, and Andy Warhol. My work is informed by this quadrangle of inspiration. They are ingrained in the marrow of my day-to-day existence. My subconscious, in my bones.

Through this dialogue, my work, becomes something wholly my own. Whether it be in my paintings, drawings, or writing’s.”

“Generally, if not in the act of physically making art, I am thinking about making art. The physical part of making art is only ten percent of my process. The other ninety percent is the hardest part. That’s where the real work lies, the work that sometimes keeps me up late at night. Spinning the running thread through my work. Connecting my past with the here and now.”

jackwalls.com

@hifibangalore on Instagram

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Sep
24
to Oct 29

The Night We Broke A Vase

The Night We Broke a Vase is a Solo Window Installation by Javier Jasso, opening on September 24th. The show will be in the windows of Co-Prospeerity until October 16th.

Jois us for the opening of The Night We Broke a Vase along with the opening of MODERN/ART/PUNK by Jack Walls inside the gallery on Saturday 24th of September at 6pm.

Turning memory into sculpture, Javier uses materials as associations to his surroundings. Wood, bricks, and ceramic, both collected and handmade, represent what his family experienced during his childhood, when they used to live in Guadalajara, MX.

The work tries to locate ideas of memorialization and architecture within real. In an effort to engage the notion of “domestic” and the paradox of stability, Javier brings three co-existing realities he has experienced in his childhood; domestic (home) environment, the instability of displacement, and homelessness, events he still witnesses year after year in Chicago.

The Night We Broke the Vase tries to depict an event Javier and his family experience when he was only 13 years old. During his childhood, his family moved a lot. On one occasion, they had to move to an apartment that functioned as a storage for the landlord. In this dark and crowded apartment-storage there was a room. The only rule was not to enter it, the landlord was still occupying this room with furniture and personal stuff. Javier and his two older brothers decided to enter the room without permission. When they entered the room, they broke a giant ceramic vase that was placed in front of the door by the landlord. When the landlord found out that the tenants had entered the room and broken the vase, he immediately kicked everyone out of the apartment. One of the most vivid memories Javier has about this experience is changing all their belongings on a dolly. His mom and him spent all night carrying their goods to a new apartment they found the same day the eviction took place.

About the artist:
Javier Jasso is an artist born in Chicago and raised in Guadalajara, Mexico. He lives and
works on the Southside of Chicago, Back of the Yards neighborhood. Javier is a metaphorical and literal builder. Many of the materials he use come from recycled sources such as metal, plaster, plastic concrete and wood, Through sculptures and installations, he challenges, and doubts our assumptions of space, and place. He use these materials because they produce an entry point into questions around foundation for protective structures in global society, nomadism, ideas of selfhood, origin, home and displacement. He received his BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his MFA from The University of Illinois of Chicago. He was a fellow at the DFI where he was awarded $12,000. Javier’s shows include Evanston Art Center, Humboldt Park Vocational Center, McLean County Art Center, Gallery 400, University Club Chicago, and Sullivan Gallery. He is currently teaching Ceramics at University of St. Francis, Joliet and SAIC, Chicago.

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Aug
21
to Sep 11

“We Put The Clouds in the Sky, We Can Take Them Away” (On Capitalism, Chemistry, and Kodak Film)c

We Put The Clouds in the Sky, We Can Take Them Away is a solo window installation by Ali Feser, opening on August 20th and closing on September 11th.

Join us at Co-Prosperity for the opening reception on August 27th.

Read the exhibition text here.

Ali Feser’s metatheoretical practice of text, image, and installation making presses upon these questions by revisiting industrial photochemocapital and its singular source: Kodak. Feser delaminates the many-layered history of photographic reproduction that saturates the present. In the process, she stages an unexpected invitation: to reinhabit photography, not as a fixed image, to have and to hold, but a total surround to tease apart. “

How would Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History respond if a Kodak Instamatic were thrust in their hands? Better yet, what if, mouth open, wings spread, eyes staring, the Angel wore a pair of Ray-Ban Stories (in partnership with Meta)? Blown ever onward by that fantastical force called “progress,” how would the Angel image the wreckage piling up at their feet?

 The question seems almost absurd. Whatever the magic of photography, surely it can’t squeeze history into the frame to show it at work. Even caught in motion, can history ever break through the film's surface? The image of the imaging Angel might, then, point elsewhere —towards how and why image-making draws us in, despite and even because of the frustration it brings. What happens if we pull focus not on the image-ruins of history but the imaging-apparatus itself?

Ali Feser’s metatheoretical practice of text, image, and installation making presses upon these questions by revisiting industrial photochemocapital and its singular source: Kodak. Feser delaminates the many-layered history of photographic reproduction that saturates the present. In the process, she stages an unexpected invitation: to reinhabit photography, not as a fixed image, to have and to hold, but as a total surround to tease apart. The following is an edited transcript of a conversation between Ali Feser and Damien Bright about this work.

Eleven Theses on the Photography of History:

A conversation of sorts between Ali Feser and Damien Bright

  • Push the image away, pull imaging apart. Just as the mass production of photographic film wound down in the late 2000s, film as an aesthetic took off in digital form. Film became filter, chemicals became obsolete thanks to the immortalizing play of pixels, even as solvents and dyes and reagents continue to course through bodies and landscapes out of frame in Rochester, New York. “All that is solid melts into air” (Marx). As if film had withdrawn from the everyday, as if to use it henceforth would only ever be nostalgic or twee or precious and maybe a bit reactionary. Use it or not, we remain inside the dreamscape and Urform of photochemical capital after Kodak: the snapshot. This form saturates the historical present such that we, too, rehearse its reproduction–instinctively, automatically, instamatically. One becomes two becomes five becomes twenty-eight layers of emulsion coated on the film base. Delaminated and stretched out so that we can get between them, if never quite beneath them. The surface multiplies when you peel it off.

  • To make a snapshot is to call up the history of seeing, to call into being the camera as an apparatus and total situation: mirror, shutter, lens, emulsion, light, shadow, figure, ground, subject, photographer, dust, fog, glare, glance, gaze, every photo ever made. It is an open question how the elements relate, live factors that can only be accounted for in the moment. “The photographer's command, ‘Watch the birdie!’ is essentially a stage direction” (Cavell). Reception is not only baked into the technology but called into being by it. The snapshot is already performance and installation.

  • What makes flypaper flypaper: the paper or the fly? And newspaper? And photopaper? “You press the button, we do the rest” (Kodak). Behold a sculpture and it styles you as an observer. Behold an installation and it styles you as a participant. Installation works through you and works you through. It is a theater whose fourth wall is always more or less open, more or less inviting, more or less sticky. You are inside the camera. The camera is inside you. Light hits the gallery windows. It turns out they were a mirror, the reflection from the street outside was a backdrop, the streetlights in the streetscape were the lighting overhead, and you were the photographic subject (photographed or photographing, who's to say?). A snapshot comes together before your eyes as if it were already there, as if you just realized you’ve been living in an emulsified world. To open up the black box of the camera after Kodak is to discover you were inside of it all along.

  • No instant is an image, no image is an instant. When the two are laminated onto one another, sequential time opens up. You might find you have already fallen in. For the snapshot to exist, we have to be already caught in the camera’s embrace: capture or rapture? Inversion is a signature move of the filmic. There is the opening, there is the mirror, there is cctv. “Paranoids are not paranoids because they’re paranoid but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, into paranoid situations” (Pynchon). You hide, they seek. Reflection turns the windows into all surfaces, and the street lights become stage lights for a selfie. Pynchon’s missing proverb: there can be play inside here, beyond even the pleasures of the secret.

    To pose for or use a camera and participate in imaging calls up performances of the photographic space and photographic relation. The photographic relation is not self-transparent. “The audience takes the position of the camera; its approach is that of testing” (Benjamin). The good life imagineered after Kodak takes the white nuclear family as its vanishing point, reproduced when the affordances of photochemistry and technical instruction combine to channel desire this way and not that, to posit and style modes of self-fashioning and intimacy with others one shot at a time. To make a snapshot is to call into being a future subject who will take pleasure in the memory that is being made. It’s a wish for continuity.

  • In 1895, Bertha Pappenheim (aka Freud’s patient Anna O) took daydreaming up a notch. She developed the art of self-hypnosis. The name she gave to her lapses into unconsciousness: clouds. In 1904, panchromatic film split blue from red and lit up the sky to image a new photographic reality: clouds. Cinema’s inside joke: all the world’s still a stage. Kodak’s inversion: all the world’s a stage still. Who gets the last laugh? To wear away a fantasy when attachment oversteps: stock up on lightbulbs. Leave the slide in the projector for 21 days. There is no up or down here; don't worry if it won't advance. Like sky-clouds, image-clouds fade: put a slide in a window, watch the light come in, see the image appear, fade, and degrade the emulsion. The image-cloud decays and returns to thin air. Stay in the clouds until they lose their referent and heat wears away the emulsion.

  • All of the materiality, the blood, sinews, muscles and so on, all of the workers who put the clouds in the sky at Kodak, who could have stopped the machine from moving forward were, also, caught up in the clouds. Where would a cloud dweller dwell if the clouds burnt off? “The thing about revolution is that it changes things” (Romer).

  • How could a single corporation craft a singular visual habitat that becomes the archival structure that will format how our memories and attachments endure and degrade? “Once again we stand in awe of gigantic entities massively distributed in time and space, in such a way that we can only point to tiny slices of them at a time. Once again we find our faith shaken.” (Morton) The corporation waxes immortal in its monumentality. The grandeur, grandiosity, of the corporate form whose magic tricks push us into a world stylized after its imaging powers. Magical thinking: a human habit of drawing nourishment from thin air by desiring that reality conform to fantasy. Born unstable, it holds the possibility for play, laughter, tragicomedy, diversion. The magical thinking of the corporation: grotesque ideas from wooden brains, the world upside down, the despotism of the means of production, fantasy distorted into machinery. The corporation manufactured the dream, crystallized a world in which the creep creep creep of extraction into imagination standardizes capacities for dreaming. The inverse of magical thinking: burning off the clouds.

  • Burn off the clouds the way clouds burn themselves off, degrading in the blazing light of the sun. It is possible to remontage an image, tease open the process of getting attached and letting go, and refuse the snapshot’s loud because unspoken messaging about “the way we were.” The historical, shareable scales of injury: what cannot be repaired can sometimes be remediated. “All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears” (Sontag). Film, for all of its wreckage, remains an incredibly flexible medium; you can push it, pull it, and it can be induced to materialize that which it's not supposed to materialize. The chemical decay of and in film is a form of historical commentary all of its own: it is an opening resistance of material to the forms imposed on it. Decay is in some ways a refusal of the infinite extension of one future audience over another, the audience fashioned after Kodak, the white nuclear post-war American family. If decay is not inevitable, if decay is intentional, then can it be occupied strategically, the no longer cared for? The inverse of abandonment is letting go.

  • Take another one just in case; use up the last shots on the roll; get a disposable camera for the kids to take with them; take another one just in case; put the best pictures in the album; get a second set of prints for free; it’s digital, no need to save film, take a dozen just in case; tag your friend in the shot, tag your friends who weren’t there. The content is real. The form is everything. The Kodak moment never stands still. 

  • It is difficult to get rid of something that is no longer there. That ultimate paranoid, the sovereign, will happily lose their head in the immortalizing form of currency. Minted and put into circulation, jangling in pocket and rubbed between fingers, the image-sovereign goes on and on about how the machinery of commercial society, no matter how virtual its tokens and would-be departures from mercantilism aka big government, cannot do without the stamp of political authority, whose reach capital promises to extend and yet proportionately devalues. Lender of last resort; bank bailout; tax cuts; industrial subsidy. The corporate form eats at the table of state, and then slowly begins gnawing at its legs. 

  • “Nothing to see here” puts everything on display.

Text by Damien Bright

Ali Feser is a cultural anthropologist and antidisciplinary artist from Upstate New York. Her work figures the chemical processes of photography—manufacturing, image formation, developing, and decay—as a metonymic language to theorize industrial capitalism and its capacity to transform our senses, our subjectivity, and the material constitution of the earth itself. Across text, installation, image, and performance, she proposes that film is the molecular “cell-form” of industrial capital, endlessly reiterated through new modes of extraction and new forms of desire. Feser is currently a Harper Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago and is finishing up a book manuscript entitled, Reproducing Photochemical Life in the Imaging Capital of the World.

Documentation by Colectivo Multipolar

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Aug
13
to Sep 3

Untouched, Un-

Untouched, Un- is a show by Eseosa Edebiri and Marie Baldwin, featuring Bobby T Luck’s film “More Things Change”. The exhibition is up at Co-Prosperity from August 13th to September 3rd, open to the public every Saturday from 12 to 5 pm.

Join us for the opening reception at 5pm on Saturday, the 13th.

“Fan culture: like fanatic, like fantastic. Stretching, cropping, stacking, zooming, bobbing and weaving, the works of Marie Baldwin, Eseosa Edebiri and Bob Luck constitute and constellate a sumptuous hall of mirrors in which our cultish desires are refracted more than reflected. In Untouched, Un-, culled, screen-shotted, slayer-layered and dissected pop culture detritus is transformed, both materially and affectively, into tactile textile and theatrical installation. 

The internet gave us the illusion of everything. Everything as a -ness, as an impossible object to which all others were tied. It’s a fantasy of completion: like a library made with rubber walls, each new self on its each new shelf. And besides, that’s a fantasy based on everything as one infinite thing instead of infinite one things and their iterative shadow selves. And, more apropos in this moment, is how it begs the fantasy of longing to be and to belong. The fan brings objects of their affection so close that their meanings shift and their agencies are confounded.

Like a new joke you ask an AI, here Rick James and Sailor Moon walk into a quilt. Angelic cartoons flex and flaunt the real, this time as awed rorschach. Sixties girl group regalia gets bigger and bigger until we almost break. The image becomes textual then contextual and then recontextualized and retconned, but not in a way that feels more familiar than precious.“

-Jesse Malmed

About the Artists

  • Marie Baldwin (b. 1994) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago. She graduated with a BFA from The School of The Art institute in 2017, and has shown work at The Chicago Artists Coalition, Comfort Station, LVL3 Gallery, The Sullivan Galleries, ACRE Projects, Hyde Park Art Center and dfbrl8r Gallery. Her work most often takes shape as large-scale sewn fabric collages and explores themes of intimacy, sexuality and the body. By manipulating found photographs taken from the lexicon of mid-century pop culture through drawing, sculpture and sewing, she seeks to create new context for seemingly antiquated images. Utilizing dramatic shifts in scale and seductive materials, she investigates how desire is expressed and understood both romantically and platonically.

    mariebaldwin.net

  • Eseosa Edebiri is an interdisciplinary artist from The Bay Area, based in Chicago where she received her BFA from The School of the Art Institute. Her work reflects an interest in autonomy, afro-futurism, and thoughts on intergenerational trauma while having a slight cheeky playfulness to it. She has a very tactile side to her practice exploring touch and accessibility, aiming to create worlds and build settings as well. Giving representation to BIPOC is often present as well as those who are chronically ill and disabled, all too often these stories are told after they've passed. We continue to see instances of police brutality and she aims to touch on these losses without desensitizing us to the trauma of it all, sharing sparks of joy and fleeting happiness that we do experience while we're alive.

    eseosaedebiri.com

  • Bob Luck is a visual artist and education activist based in Chicago, IL who works with film, multimedia collage, sculpture, and installation. After relocating to the midwest from Philadelphia he jump-started the Free Skool for Humans initiative, co-founded MINT Collective, and taught collage and film theory workshops across the country, working closely with ACRE Residency, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus Museum of Art, and many other organizations and education centers. Luck relocated to Chicago to become Program Director for Roots & Culture Contemporary Art Center. His work focuses on decolonizing flawed cultural representation in modern imagery and pop media, and re-imagining globalization and the self by breaking down diplomatic and emotional borders through collage and contextual reassemblage.

    www.bobbytluck.com

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Jul
15
to Aug 14

Local Legend

Local Legend is a solo show by Bun Stout in the windows of Co-Prosperity until August 14th.

Opening Friday 7/15 at 8pm with a live runway show of the collection with the augments projected on a screen for group viewing, live music by FETTER, and livestreaming of the event via LumpenTV.

Bun Stout’s fashion collection Local Legend is an ode to a chosen family of twentysomething trans punks who found themselves shuffling back and forth between rural Indiana and Chicago for work and community. From race jackets to billboards to mothwings, the vivid regional specificity of these ethereal otherworldly outfits pays tribute to hard yet insistent days and nights of queer subsistence and creative DIY world-making. Each of the five wearables in the window, which will be featured in a one-night-only drag show, also features an augmented reality trigger that will activate an immersive digital poem by the artist. The assemblage of looks, imagery and poetry leaves behind a map that testifies to trans survival: “I kiss my last honeysuckle, and last wild onion / Dry year, corn so thin it makes a blue space / and I can see the way through.”

  • To be a legend is to be an icon, larger than life. Relatedly, a legend is also a story that outgrows itself to mythical proportions. Being fabulous requires fabulation, self-mythologizing—as nightlife scholar madison moore observes, “fabulousnessness turns out to be very much about storytelling, a poetics of the self.” There is yet another meaning of legend: a key or visual aid for how to read a map.

    Queer geography is a story of reclaimed public spaces and private intimacies. For proof of this, look no further than the community generated digital project Queering the Map, a map full of pins and annotations all over the world with anonymous coming out and first kiss stories, sexual exploits, and other local legends. This mapping is crucial: queer-specific spaces in-person and online can be sacred congregational sites for us to find ourselves and each other. Even when they are ephemeral, queer spaces are portals to access intimacy and acceptance denied elsewhere in everyday life. We are here and we are not alone. Queer world-making is a crucial pathway for us to find one another and seek out other ways of living beyond heteronormativity.

    So let’s ride I-65 and get out of here. Why not talk back to the conservative billboards and short-circuit the message with a vengeance poem of our own? For one look, Stout appropriates the infamous “HELL IS REAL / JESUS IS REAL” billboard staked on Indiana farmland along the highway, one among many similar evangelical roadside signs throughout the country. The hell we’re put through. Recontextualized in bubble text on a black vinyl princess dress, the billboard’s proselytizing now animates a more radical scenario: the defiance of queer and trans existence, and not in need of redemption. You can almost hear an echo of Sylvia Rivera cackling, “Hell hath no fury like a drag queen scorned.” Save your own soul.

    Opulently adorned blue racing jackets comprise another ensemble for a drag duo. Derby and sports pageantry are inherently campy in their gendered hyperperformativity and nostalgia for americana. By mixing high femme and hard butch details like satin and camoflauge for an androgynous look, Stout bends the rules and blends the roles, mapping out other possibilites for genderqueer self-expression beyond a gender binary.

    A runway holds space for escape, for our imaginations to run ahead and summon another way of feeling. Surprise and astonishment are essential to its logic. The DJ (Fetter) and the models from Chicago’s queer nightlife circuit (Hedilio, Celeste, Gigi, Riley, and Jojo) were essential collaborators in bringing the pieces to life, supplying subversive charm and playful elegance as they embarked on curved lines of flight across the room, then settled into a pose—extending an embroidered purse, or exposing a floral patch on the back of a jacket before the designer’s iPad to trigger the augmented poem to appear.

    Stillness might be surprising in such an energetic and multisensory environment, but it made room to read more deeply into the looks and the poetry projected on its seams. Flashing on a projector across the room, Stout’s poem gives voice and context to the looks. Visions of angels on long car rides back and forth between day and night shifts that can’t be missed. Pre-dawn delivery shift. Fists of queen anne’s lace. GET OFF MY LAWN. We don’t need your permission to emerge as ourselves.

    The hybrid futureform of augment imagery and digital poem throughout the fashion collection is otherworldly. The shifting technology of mixed reality remixes the present to make space for a different time and place, an imaginary elsewhere blooming with potentiality. To “augment” is to improve, and the virtual elements, abound with fantastical landscapes of florals and reminisces of anarchic camaraderie, feed dreams of a better and safer world of care. This digital manifestation of queer world-making “cruises utopia,” opening us up to experience what José Muñoz insisted is “not yet here”: “Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing.”

    Worldmaking is a collective enterprise, and it is important to credit the shared participation of all the cultural workers involved, from fashion designers to drag performers to friends who helped edit the text, by name and with payment. The integrity of this process and how it provides material support for trans and nonbinary artists from Chicago’s nightlife scene is integral to this exhibit’s ambitions. It is not enough to imagine another world; the practices of trans care we instantiate in the present—like mutual aid, gig-sharing, or emotional support—are how we lift each other up and rise together.

    - Noa Michaela Fields

The collection will be displayed in the windows of Co-Prosperity with QR codes for access to the augments until August 14th.

Following, the collection will move to Indiana University for exhibition in “Identity/Identify.”

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Jul
7
to Aug 3

The Space Between Us

The Space Between Us is a group show by Kir, Michael Cuadrado, and Bradley Marshall opening on Thursday, July 7th from 6-9PM.

The Space Between Us is a wrangling. A limp shadow that traipses to a periphery of our created environment. Its presence defines what is out of bounds, but not what is in play. It is a field of scattered semiotics, composed of historical reclamations, hydrocarbon accretions, and the voids of prefab signifiers. 

Cuadrado’s paintings and collage befuddle the serialized narratives of modernist painting. Beneath the organizing principles of grids, mosaics, and arrows lies an uneasy aphroditic tension. Marshall’s works are assembled from dumbified joinery, highlighting tropes of DIY goods and the homes surrounding them. Made from cheap composite materials, more concerned with logistics than longevity - the forms are wedged between consumptive identities and fabricated experiences of labor. Kir’s work depicts inorganic and organic waste on colliding vectors of abjection. Forms teeter, dance, and wither as they are discarded from one host to the next, tumbling into disfiguration and burnt out afterlives. 

The Space Between Us is as much a question for counterparts as it is to the self. Whether reflected in a discarded mold, felt through the limits of our topology, or elucidated in the serialized desires of our own taste - Cuadrado, Kir, and Marshall’s exhibition seeks to present the uneasy distance between our objects, identities, histories, and trajectories.

-Matt Ryan

About the Artists

  • Kir is an artist based in NYC and Chicago. They grew up in Brooklyn and Long Island and received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2019.


  • Michael Cuadrado (he/him) is a visual artist born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He received a BFA in Drawing from Pratt Institute in 2018 and is currently an MFA candidate in Painting and Printmaking at the Yale school of Art.


  • Bradley Marshall received his MFA in studio art from East Tennessee State University in 2018. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in 2018 and has completed Stove Works and NARS Foundation residencies. He has exhibited at Atlanta Contemporary, the Houston Center for Photography, SF Camerawork, Stove Works, Ox-Bow School of Art, and NARS Foundation. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

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May
7
to Jun 3

Sanctified

Sanctified is a window show by Rainn Thomas, opened on Saturday, May 7th along with Neo-Tang by Paul Nudd and Max Morris. The window show will be on view until June 3rd in the windows of Co-Prosperity.

Thomas hosted an open-mic during last week's opening reception, and hosts them monthly through Fruit Salad: a queer, monthly open mic that centers LGBTQ community in Chicago. You can find more information about them on their instagram here.

Documentation by COLECTIVO MULTIPOLAR.

Sanctified is a physical embodiment of an exploration into various sides of Christianity told through a Black lens. The installation features three main components that represent a physical exploration of religious trauma hidden behind pleasing aesthetics, and its infantilizing effects on Black people. Religion is addressed in pastel and jewel tones throughout the piece, using the muted, and sometimes sickly sweet color palette to call forth a feeling of having eaten too much candy, or a sheep in wolves clothing. 

A “flock” of church hats, represents both the mark that Black women have made in contemporary religion and the undertones of misplaced whimsy. 

In addition is a hand-built, small-scale pew, an easily recognizable religious artifact, its occupants stuffed animals instead of churchgoers. 

Scattered about are thick, white bibles. A centerpiece of many Christian homes, with yet another nod to the presence of Blackness in modern Christianity. 

Among the bibles are various kitschy religious items, referring once again to the innocence of young religious goers, who are either not yet or have not experienced trauma. 

Finally, a simple looping video showing the artist’s feet encased in adult “church shoes” and socks, a reminder that religious trauma, despite its kitchy wrapping paper, remains. 

“Sanctified” invites viewers to take a trip through religious nostalgia, and to ponder hidden harbingers of trauma.

About Rainn Thomas

Rainn (She/They) is a Black, queer writer and artist living in Chicago. Her writing explores the intersections of Black pop culture and religion, as well as Black sexuality. Her work has been published in various publications online.Rainn also hosts a queer, monthly open mic called, “Fruit Salad”. Rainn’s artistic work focuses on found-object installation and photography. Her installation, “Sanctified”, is her debut work as an artist.

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May
7
to May 21

Neo-Tang

Neo-Tang is a group show curated by Paul Nudd and Max Morris. The exhibition opened on Saturday, May 7th along with Sanctified by Rainn Thomas in the windows.

Documentation by COLECTIVO MULTIPOLAR.

Neo-Tang is about artificiality, fakeness, and the unnatural order of things.  Artificial flavors, false culture, plastics everywhere, anti-caking agents, Polydimethylsiloxane, anti-info, cheese dust, monounsaturated fats and oils, black mayonnaise, the unchecked and unfettered. Neo-Tang is an homage to the pre-adolescent Adderall spiked KOOL-AID Ritalin laced sugar tweeker universe. Our collective ADHD.  KOOL-AID (Tang, Flavor-AID, etc.) as a cultural phenomenon and quintessentially American emblem.  Revelry in dystopian consumerism. 

We look at the theme of Kool-Aid and fake Tang as a cultural phenomenon, as a vehicle for cyanide and LSD, as a low-brow consumable and post-war chemical wonder.  The larger themes, we suppose, are artificiality and fakeness, the current unnatural order of things, cultishness and chemical mind expansion, the endgame, the invasion of plastics in our minds and environment, processed culture and the deliberate policy-driven framing of information.

“After Acid” by Sarah Leitten

All participating artists, including the publication and the exhibition:

Tom Torluemke, Jimbo Easter, Bumbo Krawczyk, Bailey Scieszka, Chris Riddell, John Maggie, Molly Colleen O'Connell, Mac Blackout, Keith Herzik, Sarah Leitten, Thelonius Bone, David Leggett, Bruce Conkle, Anonymous Alcoholics, Emma Akins, Onsmith & Nudd, Public Collectors, Gina Herzik, Ruby T, Charles Roberts III, Haylie Jimenez, Amanda Joy Calobrisi, Andy Douglas Day, Chris Cajero Cilla, Emma Punch, David Alvarado, Sam Hensley, Eddy Rivera, Earwig H Hairplug, Sam Szabo, Max Morris, Math-You Land-Vote, Allie Trigoso, Amy Lockhart, Nayef Nebhan, Mony Nunez.

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Apr
8
to Apr 30

I Wanna Be You Anywhere

I Wanna Be You Anywhere will be on view from April 8th through April 30th. Join us for the opening at Co-Prosperity, on April 8th from 8 to 11 pm. Sugar Coating will also be opening that night in the gallery.

Documentation by COLECTIVO MULTIPOLAR

I Wanna Be You Anywhere is an installation featuring work by Chicago-based artists Juan Arango Palacios and Nicholas Zepeda produced during a shared residency at the Macedonia Institute in Chatham, NY, and shown last month at Co-Prosperity Catskill as a previous iteration of this project. 

Both drawing inspiration from their favorite music, these artists unapologetically indulge in their vulnerabilities by referencing emotional lyrics and their own childhood memories.

Although distinct in their own playlists, the two share a clear dedication to drawing. Zepeda’s attention to domestic spaces paired with Arango Palacios’ fantastical world-building set the stage for a tale of queer becoming, told through a set of collaborative drawings and individual projects.

In the fantasy of Arango Palacios’ work, characters from Latin American folklore are brought to life through the lens of contemporary queer culture. Make-up wearing tattooed characters yield swords, and are guided by the magical lyrics of Cumbia and Reggaeton music. 

Zepeda presents a new series of text-based yearning and installation from a practice interested in the performance of sharing autobiographical work, and not leaving your apartment.

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Apr
8
to Apr 30

Sugar Coating

Sugar Coating will be on view from April 8th through April 30th. Join us for the opening at Co-Prosperity, on April 8th from 8 to 11 pm. I Wanna Be You Anywhere will also be opening that night in the windows.

Documentation by COLECTIVO MULTIPOLAR

Sugar Coating brings together the work of five artists who conceal or reveal something below the surface. Visitors will experience a collection of lush textures and vivid colors – woven, knotted, and printed textile works, paintings, shimmering two-dimensional text-based studies, and sculpture, both hard and soft. This collaboration includes artists from Chicago, North Carolina, and Connecticut whose work centers around the subtlety of subtext and the allure of bright colors and shiny surfaces. Beyond their surfaces, works ask deeper questions about the utility and varied functions of accumulation, beauty, color, decoration, and nuanced language.

Looking to undercut the perceived seriousness of nonobjective abstraction, Degges’s work deploys the visual language of gestural abstraction at a modest scale and with humor, an eye for the everyday, and appreciation for small moments of formal awkwardness. In the case of Vail’s work, her woven and looped assemblages of pre-owned objects speak to her ongoing interest in the stylistically obsolete and habits of consumption. Ekinci, similarly, collages together embroidery, found textiles, and images from family archives to explore the phases of acculturation, immigrant identity, and ideas about gendered labor and materials. Her fringes are inspired by the Turkish tradition of oya (lace edgings on headdresses) and its use of symbolic patterns that serve as a secret language between women. On the other hand, Cloud creates work that connects with the viewer through text-based explorations on mirrored glass and other reflective substrates to intertwine her personal narrative, commentary on the Black experience, and the power of the written word. The text used in her work provides only a fraction of the narrative, leaving the viewer to imagine the rest. Conversely, Nie offers the answer more directly. Her sculptures and paintings empower those who step into a fantasy world of anthropomorphised fruit and vibrant imagery layered over unsettling vignettes. Conversations about gender inequity and female liberation are prompted by the slick, candy-like sheens and relatable imagery.


About the Artists


  • Renee Cloud is a Charlotte native and received her BFA in Studio Art from Appalachian State University in 2015. Using a combination of text art and mixed media, Cloud creates work that focuses on the personal narrative, the black experience, and the power of the written word. The text incorporated into her work provides only a fraction of the narrative, leaving the viewer to create the rest. Cloud resides in Charlotte, North Carolina and is currently working as a freelance creative within her community.


  • Hale Ekinci is a multidisciplinary Turkish artist based in Chicago. She received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts & Media at Columbia College Chicago and is currently an Associate Professor of Art & Design at North Central College. Focusing on personal history, hybrid identity, gender politics, and craft traditions, her works vary from videos to embroidery paintings embellished with vibrant colors, patterns, and cultural relics.

    She was recently a Facebook Chicago Artist in Resident. Her work has been exhibited nationally at EXPO Chicago, Studio Gang, One After 909, Woman Made Gallery, South Bend Museum of Art, Koehnline Museum of Art, St. Louis Artists’ Guild, and Queens College Art Center. Her videos have screened internationally including New York City, Berlin, Warsaw, and Jerusalem. She has been awarded the “Figure and Fiber Award” by Surface Design Association and completed residencies at ACRE, Jiwar Barcelona, Momentum Worldwide Berlin, Elsewhere Museum, and Chicago Artist Coalition.


  • Andrea Vail is an interdisciplinary artist based in Western North Carolina, who makes connections between objects, people, or their collective communities. Her practice materializes as woven and knotted sculpture, installation, and collaborative exchange. Vail’s work has been exhibited nationally including Oregon College of Art and Craft, Portland, OR; Form & Concept, Santa Fe, NM; Cameron Art Museum, Wilmington, NC; ­­­Meramec Contemporary Art Gallery, St. Louis, MO; Wiregrass Museum of Art, Dothan, AL, CAM Raleigh, Raleigh, NC; Tiger Strikes Asteroid GVL, Greenville, SC; Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC; Praxis Fiber Workshop, Cleveland, OH. Her work has been supported with awards from Arts and Science Council; North Carolina Arts Council; HappeningsCLT Visual Artist Grant; CultureWORKS; and residencies with Goodyear Arts, McColl Center for Art + Innovation, and Elsewhere Museum.

    Vail received an MFA in Craft/Material Studies from Virginia Commonwealth University and BFA in Visual Art from UNC-Charlotte.


  • HNin Nie is a multidisciplinary artist in Charlotte, North Carolina. Nie creates stories through painting, sculpture, or film of her experiences as an Asian woman in America. Nie dissects her feminine experiences by layering vibrant imagery over unsettling narratives. The Cherry Gaze is an ongoing series that embodies fruitful women, unknowing of a disquieting gaze. Nie aims to humanize a fruit that is usually objectified, to reclaim its existence, showing the mundane and the magical.


  • Douglas Degges (b. Shreveport, LA) is an artist and educator currently based in Mansfield Center, CT where he is an Assistant Professor of Art in Painting and Drawing at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, CT. Douglas received his MFA from the University of Iowa and a BA in Studio Art from Rhodes College in Memphis, TN. His work has been exhibited in various group and solo exhibitions throughout the United States and abroad. Most recently his work was exhibited at Side Room Gallery in Brooklyn, NY, the PrattMWP Gallery at Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, NY, Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design in Milwaukee, WI, Cleaner Gallery + Projects in Chicago, IL, Stove Works in Chattanooga, TN, and the Meadows Museum of Art at Centenary College in Shreveport, LA. His work has been supported by several artist residencies including the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation, Stove Works, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Millay Colony.

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Apr
2
6:00 PM18:00

Flatland's Final Publication Release: An Atlas

On Saturday April 2nd, 6-10PM at Co-Prosperity in Bridgeport: Flatland (Chris Reeves and Curtis Miller) will release its third and final publication, "An Atlas," a 140 page compendium of 55 artists considering space and place moonlighting as an oversized book. Copies of "An Atlas" will be on sale at a recession buster price of $35.

Vaccination cards will be checked upon entrance and masks will be required.

Contributors to "An Atlas" include: Aaron Walker, Alan Smart, Alberto Aguilar, Alden Burke, Alex Bradley Cohen, Alexis Brocchi, Alison Cekala, Amanda Cervantes, Andre Alves, Asha Iman Veal, Ashley M. Freeby, Avril Thurman, Ayesha Singh, Barbarita Polster, Benjamin Creech, Breanne Trammell, Chris Reeves, Claire Fleming Staples, Colleen Keihm, Curtis Miller, Danny Floyd, Deborah Stratman, Erin Hayden, Falak Vasa, Hyung Jung Jun, Isaac Hand, Isaac Vazquez, Ishita Dharap, Jacob Riddle, Jen Delos Reyes, Jenn Smith, Jesse Malmed, Joshi Radin Flores, Judith Brotman, Julia Klein, Juliette Walker, Keaton Fox, Kushala Vora, Kyle Bellucci Johanson, Kyle Schlie, Lauren Sudbrink, Lindsey French, Loraine Wible, Mairead Grace Delaney, Maggie Wong, Matt Morris, Matthias Monogyios, misael soto, Nick Jirasek, Owen Smith, Ricardo Vilas, Rohan Ayinde, Shir Ende, Simon Anderson, Simone Whiteley-Allen, Titus Wonsey, Willa Smart

This event doubles as Flatland's final event, so on view will be ephemera and artwork from previous Flatland exhibitions from Kristin Abhalter Smith, Jesse Malmed and Nellie Kluz, Mike Lopez, By Way of Today, Tamara Becerra Valdez, Jane Carver, Josh Rios, Lauren Sudbrink, and Jenn Smith. Other things on view include: one of Dick Higgins' original map paintings ca. 1980-90; Simon Anderson on hand to stamp custom passport stamps on copies of "An Atlas"; a print of encouragement from Breanne Trammell; directions to Co-Pro from Chris Collins; LIVE performances from Albert Aguliar, Anna Johnson, Jesse Malmed, and Madeleine Aguilar.

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Apr
1
6:00 PM18:00

Relay Freedom: A night of screenings and performances

The Closing Celebration of Relay Freedom features pre-recorded and live performances from SAIC Alumni, presented by the Goethe Institut.

What happens when nine artists meditate on the topic of freedom?

How to they relay freedom? Can it be passed to the next person like a baton?

Can freedom be communal? Must it be individual?

 

In November and December of last year the Goethe-Institut presented short video works by nine SAIC alumni that explored their understanding of freedom: Relay Freedom.

Closing the series of videos and performances, we will gather on April 1 at Co-Prosperity Sphere with a screening of all works and some live performances.

Join us from 6:00pm to 8:00pm in-person or online.

https://www.goethe.de/ins/us/en/sta/chi/ver.cfm?event_id=22789600

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Mar
11
to Mar 26

TYPEFORCE 12

The annual typeface exhibition that gathers designers from all over Chicago is back in person this year at Co-Prosperity! Typeforce 12 is a collaboration between Will Miller, Nermin Moufti and Co-Prosperity, showcasing over 25 designers and artists.

Typeforce 12 opens on March 11 at 6pm.
Vaccination cards will be checked and masks will be mandatory.


Eventbrite

Instagram: @typeforce

Viewing hours are Saturdays 12 to 5 pm or by appointment at paula@publicmediainstitute.com

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Nov
23
to Mar 4

COVID_19: Labor Camp Report Project

Public Media Institute and Co-Prosperity are honored to present Piotr Szyhalski’s COVID_19: Labor Camp Report Project, which will be wheat pasted and installed on the Co-Prosperity exterior mural wall and on the walls of Maria’s Packaged Goods & Community Bar and Pizza Fried Chicken Ice Cream.

On March 24, 2020, in direct response to the global coronavirus pandemic, artist Piotr Szyhalski created his first COVID-19: Labor Camp Report. What started as a single drawing slowly morphed into a daily practice, a way to reconcile and record the thoughts, feelings, and change being wrought in the world. These ink drawings and hand-lettered texts were shared daily by Szyhalski on Instagram, poignantly capturing our politically fraught and painful landscape over the course of 225 days. Accom-panied by powerful captions by the artist, the series operates as both a witness to the current crisis and a container of time, time that is both labored and lost.

These daily dispatches, shared with thousands via social media platforms, serve as a way of witnessing, processing, and recording the complexities of life during the first eight months of the global COVID-19 pandemic. At times harsh and confrontational, other times quiet and contemplative, the Reports map multiple layers of interwoven historical phenomena: from the global health crisis, economic inequities, and the uprising following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police to environmental catastrophes and the waning days of the autocratic regime in the United States.

The series COVID-19: Labor Camp Reports comprises 225 posters, hand drawn by Szyhalski daily from March 24 to November 3, 2020.

Co-Prosperity is located at 3219 S. Morgan Street,

Maria’s Packaged Goods & Community Bar is located at 960 W 31st St

Pizza Fried Chicken Ice Cream is located next door at 964 W 31st St.

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Nov
20
to Jan 17

SLAYSIAN 2.0

SLAYSIAN 2.0 is a multi-artist group exhibition curated by Jenny Lam

SLAYSIAN 2.0 is a group exhibition whose journey began in the summer of 2019, when Lam proposed an art show that would function as a celebration—a celebrAsian, if you will—of local Asian American artists. In January 2020, Lam put out an open call for SLAYSIAN, emphasizing the absence of theme and that the artists did not necessarily have to make art about being Asian; simply being and creating were enough. The ensuing exhibition was scheduled to open on March 20, 2020; this later happened to become the first day of Illinois’ stay at home order. As the opening approached, the pandemic became a reality. Lam postponed the exhibition “until things get better (have hope; they will),” as she wrote at Artists on the Lam, and spent the beginning of shelter in place moving the exhibition online, where it served as welcome respite and garnered acclaim from local, national, and international outlets. An excerpt from South Side Weekly’s article about the virtual show:

 

“Spanning neighborhoods, ethnicities, and mediums, SLAYSIAN showcases a subset of artists that have always been part of the city’s art scene, but rarely acknowledged as a collective. […] SLAYSIAN also examines how artists can value their identity while refusing to be pigeonholed by it. […] Their work raises questions of what it means to inhabit spaces designed specifically for artists to grow, but where the Asian American experience may still be sidelined. […] In addition to its role in educating and engaging with the broader Chicago community, much of SLAYSIAN reflects an inward-looking conversation among Asian Americans. […] SLAYSIAN embodies the aspiration that those at the outskirts of a society can redefine what success means for ourselves. […] By allowing for a multitude of stories, […] Instead of being locked into one narrative as victim or immigrant, their art is allowed to grow with the times. […] The exhibition showcases the determination of individuals to find their own answers to what the role of the Asian American artist is.” -Eileen Li, South Side Weekly, June 2020.

 

Now, two years later, you are invited to enjoy this exhibition in person. The show itself has evolved; many of the artists have created brand new pieces for this iteration. At long last, we proudly present to you SLAYSIAN 2.0.

 

Hailing from all over Chicago and the surrounding Midwest area, SLAYSIAN 2.0’s participating artists include:

Aimy Tien, Alex Kostiw, Caroline Liu, Charlene Moy, Chris Gallevo, Dao Nguyen, James Gu, Julius Dizon-Cruz Bautista, Justin Suico, Kaitlyn Hwang, Kristin Anahit Cass, Muriel Christensen, Nini Hawes, Priscilla Huang, Richard Gessert, Robert Apolinar, Sam Riesmeyer, Sophie Pokorny, Stafford Smith, Susie Xiong (InsomniaBird), Vivian Le, and Yuqing Zhu.

 

SLAYSIAN 2.0 opens on November 20th and will be on view through January 15th. Viewing hours are Fridays from 4 to 7pm and Saturdays from 2 to 5 pm. Join us for the opening party for SLAYSIAN 2.0 along with PLAYFIELDS, the window show by the Chicago duo ZoiZoi at Co-Prosperity on November 20th from 6 to 9 pm.*

*You must wear a mask and you must be fully vaccinated. Let’s continue to keep each other and our communities safe. Proof of vaccination will be required. 

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Nov
20
to Jan 24

Playfields

THE WINDOW SHOW PLAYFIELDS BY CHICAGO DUO ZOIZOI IS OPENING ON NOVEMBER 20TH

Playfields is a whimsical homage to spaces that fostered Chicago’s socio-sonic history. This exhibition features five distinctly significant venues of the city’s past as they might be commemorated on the playfield of a pinball machine, an entertainment icon in itself that enjoyed its heyday when Chicago was the machine’s manufacturing capital. View this arcade of panels as windows into moments of Chicago’s cultural history; playfields depicting spaces of play from our city’s vibrant past. 

In the context of a pandemic that gave way to an onslaught of beloved establishment closures, making a point to celebrate the memory of long-lost venues is beyond nostalgia — it’s a necessity.

Playfields is a part of the Co-Pro Peers series and will be on view from November 20th through January 15th. Join us for the opening party for Playfields and SLAYSIAN 2.0 - the 20+ artists group show inside Co-Pro - on November 20th from 6 to 9 pm.*

 

*You must wear a mask and be fully vaccinated. Let’s continue to keep each other and our communities safe. Proof of vaccination will be required. 



About ZoiZoi

Zoi Zoi is the interdisciplinary creative duo of Joanie Faletto and Myles Emmons. Pairing a painting and fiber arts practice with design/fabrication, Joanie and Myles meld their backgrounds to set off on design adventures that celebrate their shared joys, like dancing, bright colors, house music, and borzois.

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