SEPARATIONS
Eli Show + Angela Zonunpari
Saturday, Jan. 31 – Saturday, Mar 14, 2026
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 31st 6 - 10pm
In SEPARATIONS, artists Eli Show and Angela Zonunpari explore the arbitrary boundaries between art and life, and how they intertwine if given space and time. As “incidental collaborators,” they navigate the mysticisms of creation and the everyday utility of objects. By easily transitioning between these “separations,” they show connections between their art practices and their lives. The artists are based in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
Artist Bios
Eli Show (he/him) is an artist living and working in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He attended the University of South Dakota and went on to receive his masters in fine art from Syracuse University in New York where he lived for a number of years. Show is the preparator (“the builder of exhibits”) at the Old Courthouse Museum; a member of Hooks (formerly We All Have Hooks For Hands) for over 15 years, touring the country multiple times and releasing records worldwide; and recently served as the Art Director for Headlights Theater, a local nonprofit bringing professional dance and music performances to parking lots.
http://elishow.com
https://elishow.studio
https://weallhavehooksforhands.com
Angela Zonunpari (she/her) is an artist and editor living in Sioux Falls, South Dakota; with roots in north and northeast India. Her interdisciplinary practice includes texts and textiles. She received her masters in arts journalism from Syracuse University, New York, and before that pursued her education, lived, and worked in New Delhi and other parts of India. Currently, Zonunpari is the managing editor of Arts Midwest’s storytelling program. She has worked at Fresh Produce and Ipso Gallery in Sioux Falls, and with nonprofits and newsrooms in the U.S. and in India.
http://angelazonunpari.com/
https://nobusinessmagazine.com
Photo Credits: Sandra Oviedo
SEPARATIONS
Eli Show + Angela Zonunpari
Saturday, Jan. 31 – Saturday, Mar 14, 2026
Review by Gretchen Hasse
“I write this at a small, mass produced desk on the tenth floor of the Techno Zone. A sign declares the name in free standing letters over the entry to the building, half apartment complex and half warehouse, in an industrial neighborhood of South Korea. Just fifteen years ago this area was rice fields; now it’s factories and techno zones and various degrees of smoggy air.
I’m actually having a wonderful time at a residency in a local art museum; but while I am here, I live in the Techno Zone. A couple days ago I bought some candles and fairy lights and picture frames at the local Daiso. To my right, a tall purple candle stands on a moderately ornate glass dish. Next to it roars a small dinosaur figurine. Around the candle I have draped a necklace made of barbed wire chain and a pendant containing one of my own bones. It is a small altar of homages to my artistic practice, and it brings peace up to the tenth floor.
During close to a year of wandering through residencies and workshops and conferences outside of the United States, I have felt an increasingly physical yearning for the deliberate placement of objects. Artists need to see a reason for things, or maybe just potential, and the opportunity to speculate. Our built, chosen, and accidental surroundings influence and reflect our selves. As I travel between cultures with a speed beyond my own human comprehension, placing objects means I am claiming a space as my own, even temporarily. There is no time for these arrangements to relax into domesticity. They are curated installations that I live in and with.
The window montages at Co Prosperity turn SEPARATIONS into a literal intersection of art and everyday life. Viewers don’t even have to be inside the gallery to experience this show in the way it is intended. Reflections of surrounding buildings crowd into the storefront windows, mingle with the curated objects, and create new scapes through all phases of daylight and evening. Passerby move in and out of the tableaux, constantly updating mood and meaning.
My recent, extended experience in foreign environments has me looking closely at the angles and shadows of unfamiliar spaces, wondering how they might look like home to someone, maybe how they remind them of their first love. What does my presence do to that memory? How am I an object in someone else’s narrative?
I am intrigued that SEPARATIONS co-curator Eli Show has helped to present theater in parking lots, those permanently liminal spaces where machines, and not humans, are meant to linger. Drama in a parking lot activates the concrete, the inelegant angles, and threatens to leave the audience incapable of seeing it as a non-place ever again. As the “builder of exhibits” at Sioux Falls'nOld Courthouse Museum, Show regularly encounters the daily lives of the dead, the objects they used and cherished, now deliberately placed to describe an era in a concrete, quotidian way. Still, these objects actively inhabit and shape the present, and impact the living.
Co-curator Angela Zonunpari says, “Making art makes me sad. It brings up a loss of some kind—a sense of missing something, grieving the distance from “home.” And yet, it’s the closest I feel to the spaces that nurture/d me.”
This makes me weep. Chicago has been my home for over thirty years; it is where I became almost everything I am, and it is full of ghosts. Being gone for this long makes me wonder whether I don’t miss the ghosts. The altar on my desk is a sort of ghost.
When I left Chicago I knew that I was stepping off from an active turning point in the city, the country, probably the world. It is an enormous privilege to wander the planet largely untouched, though that might change soon as well. My altar, a cluster of suitcases, the clear glass goblet from Daiso; all of these objects both ground me and tether me. My transience emotionally activates all of my surroundings. The landscape of my life and I are in a constant, heated discussion about who is in control of the daily narrative. Where am I? How can I tell? Who gets to answer that question? Moving a thing, or an object, from here to there, can change the entire story.”