Here Is Our Hole In The Ground
Curated by Jess Bass & Yue Xu
October 16 - November 26, 2026
Opening Reception: October 16th, 2026, 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM
The exhibition premieres new work by:
Jess Bass, Camille Casemier, Maurício Chades, Corey Smith, Odette Stout, and Yue Xu, who use the metaphor of the rabbit — its body, social structures, habitat, and ecosystem — to playfully explore the dynamics of power within global, complex networks of ecology, economics, government, and politics. Through the image, biology and lore of the rabbit, the artists weave personal stories with larger socio-political narratives, examining how power is distributed, expressed, concealed, and resisted.
Each artwork spanning painting, sculpture, performance, video installation, and augmented reality, invites audiences to consider their role within systems and cycles where objects, bodies, and identities are continually exchanged, transformed, and renewed.
The opening will feature four interconnected performances, each leaving behind traces that will remain on view for the duration of the exhibition.
Artwork Descriptions:
Jess Bass unveils a large-scale performative sculpture: an oversized rabbit which she performs within. Using the rabbit's digestive system and lucky bunny trope as a metaphor to explore exchange value, reciprocity, and gift-giving within a capitalist economy, audiences feed objects through the rabbit's mouth, and Bass decides what object should be given in return, released through the rabbit's rear.
Camille Casemier borrows the logic of the childhood prank of bunny ears to create a new interactive performance. Performed with Mo Hayden, the two follow the rabbit through its many cultural lives, devising tricks and inhabiting shifting characters to explore what we become in relation to another before we can recognize it ourselves. Casemier will also display a collection of rabbit-themed objects found and collected while working at a Resale Shop. Additional public programming, led by Camille Casemier with Mo Hayden will include a movement workshop on November 16th, 12:00 - 2:00 PM.
Mauricio Chades presents The Human Humus Fertilizer Tutorial, an experimental educational video and the latest iteration of The Keratinophilia Cycle, an ongoing series of sculptures and living installations. At Co-Prosperity, Chades creates a site-specific, olfactory installation with projection mapping onto a cascading fountain of worm tea. The video, starring Celeste, an earthworm drag queen, invites audiences to imagine themselves not as separate from the soil, but as participants in a symbiotic chain with bacteria and fungi, part of a continuous cycle of decomposition, transformation, and renewal, as future soil. This project was supported, in part, by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant
Yue Xu presents a new series of works made with semi-cooked rice paper. Cast over air-duct molds and blind-embossed using etched plates, the works take the form of connected sculptural structures and large hanging sheets that suggest continuous loops and systems of circulation. Their impressions, folds, and surface textures evoke rabbit skin while these systems of circulation serve as metaphors for bodily cycles of transformation and renewal across memory, matter, and death.
Corey Smith presents a new performance piece that speaks to trans identity through music and essay, examining trans identity as a site where the body performs power within oppressive systems. Drawing on the rabbit as both symbol and enactment of fertility, the work unfolds as a live musical score responsive to a moving spotlight, folding back on itself, multiplying, echoing its own reproduction. Following the opening night performance, Smith's music remains in the gallery, embedded in bunny-shaped RFID tags placed across the gallery walls.
Odette Stout closes out the evening with an inter-media drag performance, pairing augmented reality with a new fashion collection built around rabbit imagery. Connecting queer nightlife with the rabbit's nocturnality, Stout presents eight new wearable pieces on the runway alongside a dramaturgic poetry reading.
Workshop:
Bunny Maker
November 16th, 12:00 - 2:00 PM
Led by: Camille Casemier and Mo Hayden
This two hour play session opens our performance making process. Using exercises in character play, object manipulation, and improvisation, participants will explore the rabbit as a social and cultural character; from the Playboy bunny, witch's hare, child’s pet, twitching prey, and Alice’s rushing white rabbit. Expect pop culture, media and objects to inspire shifting and remixing characters and associations. Together we will see what happens when we return those projections to ourselves.
Jess Bass has been exhibited at the Arts Club of Chicago, Hyde Park Art Center, The Franklin, Roman Susan, National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago Humanities Festival, Chicago Public Library, Mayfield, Comfort Station, SPRING/BREAK Art Show, PLAY/GROUND, Terrain Biennial, SITE Gallery, and Detroit Art Week; and her work has been featured in The New York Times, Hyperallergic, ArtNews, PASTE, Fader and MTV. Bass holds an MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. @partly_spring
Camille Casemier (b. 1995, Vermont) is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist, educator, and content creator for a resale shop who conspires with and against legacies. Her works occur across pages, stages, and screens, often given form by cameras and audiences, pursued as an ongoing experiment with the film essay. Her artistic roots began in puppetry and experimental theater with Bread and Puppet Theater, where she developed a sensitivity to the liveness and agency of objects and the political capacities of gesture. This embodied awareness deepened through studies in dance at The New School in New York City, further grounding her practice in movement and performative presence, often exploring the social choreographies embedded in everyday spaces and objects. Since 2020, Camille has worked at Mt. Sinai Resale Shop in Chicago, where her role as content creator doubles as artistic research into the cultural dramaturgies of discarded objects, producing short form videos for social media and the organization’s historical archive. She holds a BFA in Art and Theater from the University of Michigan and an MFA in Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she currently teaches in both the Painting and Drawing and Performance departments. @camillecasemier
Mauricio Chades is an artist and filmmaker from Brazil. His works, in film, installation, sculpture, and performance, speculate about anticolonial symbiotic futures and queer ecologies. Envisioning syntropic environments and multispecies alliances, his art practice combines storytelling with restorative agriculture, composting, and fungiculture. He holds a BA in Cinema Studies, an MA in Art and Technology from the University of Brasilia, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He participated in collective groups such as Espaço AVI, Kinofogo Cineclube, and NINHO - Collective for Research in Art, Interactivity, and Agroecology. His works were shown worldwide, like at Queer Lisbon, Curitiba International Film Festival, and FILE – Electronic Language International Festival. In 2019, he presented his first solo show, Pyramid, Urubu, at The Brasilia Digital TV Tower, receiving the Frankenthaler Climate Art Awards in 2022. In 2023, Chades was featured at the Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil. His most recent accomplishment was the first prize of the e-flux Film Award for Green Cemetery. He is currently working of his first feature film, Cogum. m.chades
Corey Smith is a composer, writer, and performer from Chicago, Illinois. Their work explores critical regionalism, sensuality in performance, and queer sonic ecologies. Sometimes, their performance and sound work appears in more traditional venues—Steppenwolf Theater, Hyde Park Art Center, the Mattress Factory. Other times, in more unexpected places: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Emil Bach House, a prairie at dawn, or international festivals like Rotterdam Film Festival and Bath Fringe. They’ve held residencies at High Concept Labs, Light Box Detroit, the Iowa Lakeside Lab, the Tallgrass Prairire National Preserve, Grin City, and the University of Illinois Springfield. Their work has been featured by Hyperallergic, Architectural Digest, and the Chicago Reader. Smith is a proud midwesterner, collaborator, and friend. @ennui2
Odette Stout can be found twirling in drag and fine arts spaces in Chicago and beyond. Notable exhibitions and performances include The Sculpture Center, Currents New Media, Roots and Culture, Co-Prosperity, Pacific Northwest College of Art, Ars Electronica, Kinsey Institute, and Hyde Park Art Center. Partners in support include 3Arts, Chicago Artists Coalition, ACRE, Southern Graphics Council International and Center for Concrete and Abstract Machines. Their project Local Legend, a mixed-reality runway performance dramatizing their queer family’s last year in Indiana, was featured in the Reader’s annual Best of Chicago issue as the “art show that flexed on Chicago’s place in the new media landscape.” They have organized intermedia workshops at MOCA Cleveland, The Rock Hall of Fame, Ps1 Close House, and Transilience Festival. Stout’s writing has been published in WUSSY magazine and featured at Poetry Foundation. They teach digital media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Maurício Chades is an artist and filmmaker from Brazil. His works, in film, installation, sculpture, and performance, speculate about anticolonial symbiotic futures and queer ecologies. Envisioning syntropic environments and multispecies alliances, his art practice combines storytelling with restorative agriculture, composting, and fungiculture. He holds a BA in Cinema Studies, an MA in Art and Technology from the University of Brasilia, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He participated in collective groups such as Espaço AVI, Kinofogo Cineclube, and NINHO - Collective for Research in Art, Interactivity, and Agroecology. His works were shown worldwide, like at Queer Lisbon, Curitiba International Film Festival, and FILE – Electronic Language International Festival. In 2019, he presented his first solo show, Pyramid, Urubu, at The Brasilia Digital TV Tower, receiving the Frankenthaler Climate Art Awards in 2022. In 2023, Chades was featured at the Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil. His most recent accomplishment was the first prize of the e-flux Film Award for Green Cemetery. He is currently working of his first feature film, Cogum. @000.dette
Yue Xu b. 1995, Guangzhou) is a Chicago-based artist. Xu earned her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2021 and her BFA from Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 2018. Working across sculpture, installation, drawing, print-based processes, and artists’ books, Xu’s practice draws attention to the overlooked materials, quiet systems, and spatial conditions that shape everyday life. Through shifts in scale, context, and material condition, her works transform fragments—paper, domestic objects, architectural traces, and ordinary encounters—into sites of emotional and spatial inquiry. Combining fragile materials, repetitive gestures, and site-responsive installation, Xu’s practice traces how visibility, belonging, and survival are negotiated through the built environment and daily experience. Her work has been exhibited at Compound Yellow, by bye Pilsen, the National Museum of Mexican Art, the Chinese American Museum of Chicago, RUSCHMAN Gallery, 6018|North, The Plan, Chicago Art Department, Terrain Biennial, Mana Contemporary, 062, and Comfort Station in Chicago. @laaamaluna