a creature who is aware of joy and despair and everything in between
Katharine Joy Houpt
August 14 - September 25 , 2026
Opening Reception: August 14th 2026, 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM
Photos Credits: Sandra Oviedo
"Katharine Joy Houpt’s solo show: 30-foot quilted anthropomorphic creature and dreams"
Katharine Joy Houpt conjures Chicago Imagists in the anthropomorphic form of a 30 foot quilted creature in the windows of Co-Propsperity Sphere, in a creature who is aware of joy and despair and everything in between, opening August 14th. Houpt’s first solo show sprawls the windows of the gallery, involving the building itself in the body of work’s cosmic darkness and delight.
In this solo show, artist Katharine Joy Houpt engages in a slow, expressive fiber arts process to create an absurdly large anthropomorphic creature and its dreams and memories, split into ten quilted panels. The work examines embodiment of subjectivity within an environment, a peek into a creature’s inner world within outer world constraints. The artist created the site-specific work for this show with the form of the building in mind, and allowed the materials including found and reused fabrics to intuitively inform who the creature has become. Katharine draws on the aesthetic tradition of Chicago Imagists, combined with fiber arts techniques including improvised quilting, free-motion quilting, appliqué, trapunto, and embroidery, to mirror the joy and the struggle of creating in a world that can hold incredible awe, humor, delight, disappointment, sadness, and rage all at once. This work is about attempting to curiously pay attention to all of it, and the imaginative impact of that awareness and unawareness on a body.
Artist Biography:
Katharine Joy Houpt is a Chicago mixed media artist working in fiber arts, collage, and drawing to create uncanny and absurd imagery. She engages in slow, process oriented techniques that allow for improvisation and emergence of the unexpected, aiming for a balance between delight and darkness. She has a BA from the Evergreen State College and an MA in Art Therapy from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Katharine taught as part-time faculty at SAIC for ten years. This is her first solo show.
a creature who is aware of joy and despair and everything in between
Katharine Joy Houpt
August 14 - September 25 , 2026
Review by Annette LePique
“In a surreal interlude within David Lynch’s 2006 film Inland Empire, the action turns to a hallucinatory sitcom starring three humanlike rabbits. One of the rabbits, Jack, is said to have a secret. Jane, another rabbit, swears she’ll one day find out what Jack is hiding.
Do you know?
What’s the secret then?
Shhhhhhhhhh.
Creature 1 and 2: Photo credit Charles Bouril, photo courtesy of Co-Prosperity
This secret, the heart of Lynch’s rabbits, lies too at the core of Katharine Joy Houpt’s fiber work in the artist’s exhibition a creature who is aware of joy and despair and everything in between. With ten quilts installed throughout Co-Pro’s gallery, and a visual vocabulary informed by the Chicago Imagists, Houpt has created pieces of the titular creature’s body, mind, and memories. Mirrors are situated behind each quilt for practical reasons—so that one can see the embroidery and stitching that otherwise would be hidden—but also serve to implicate the viewer in each interaction with the work, you now see yourself within each glance, each fragment of the creature.
Fragment here is a claw, a tail, an eye, a memory, a dream, the glimpses of the creature Houpt allows us to see. Making use of the gallery itself, fashioning it as an illusory negative space, Houpt has positioned her quilts so that most of the creature is absent. The body of the creature can only be imagined, a cohesive whole exists only in your mind. Though you’re privy to the creature’s dreams and memories, shown through embroidered circles, a mix of fabrics and thread, they’re only dreams and memories because you understand them as such. For who’s to say what a creature can dream, that the image of a tiny, hairy being sitting alone on a hill is the creature’s own memory? Perhaps the best word for something so private and inscrutable, somewhat unknowable even to its maker, is a secret.
Here we return to secrets and find ourselves standing over the cracked-heart ur-secret, the one that lives within Houpt’s creature, Lynch’s rabbits, and us alike. Do you know what it is? Have you gotten it yet? If not, I’ll give you a clue. For a secret to live, for a secret to illuminate what of us is visible, knowable, Jack needs Jane, and we in turn need our creature.”
Creature 6: Photo credit Sandra Oviedo, photo courtesy of Co-Prosperity