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.
-
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.
-
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.