BAUBO UNEARTHED: A Trove of Mystery Laughter in the Face of Grief A Conjuring /  by Fionnuala Cook

“you must let your brain melt your heart, & there crouching naked in the fumes is the clown.” 

-Molly Colleen O’Connell 

When Demeter, the Greek goddess of the harvest, roamed the earth in abject despair after her daughter Persephone had been kidnapped, she became inaccessible. Fields went barren, there were no harvests, the people went hungry. Nothing could shake her depression.  

That is, until Baubo appeared, lifted her skirts, and flashed her. JOY! The shock of the moment cracked Demeter open into unexpected hysterical laughter– joy embodied, remembered, released from the depths. Laughter galvanized Demeter out of apathy, into action. She rediscovered the strength inside herself to retrieve her daughter from captivity in the underworld.  

Baubo, unknown to many, nonetheless continues to crack open skulls and plant her seed of wonder. In BAUBO UNEARTHED, a group exhibition curated by Stephany Colunga, artists who have been infected by Baubo’s spirit join in a celebration of raw, powerful primal joy– laughing in the face of the disconnection & disengagement tempting our lives under the overwhelm of a crumbling empire. Baubo – and in turn, Colunga and the artists she has gathered here today– refuse to give into despair.   

Here, Baubo’s seeds sprout into tendrils that reach and tangle with others who have been inoculated with the sacred spores of her mystery. An artist and maker of modern relics and talismans, Stephany herself has been possessed by Baubo’s spirit, ensnared and compelled to seek others around the globe who have been as well.

Keep spiraling out towards transcendence, keep reaching, and you will find one another in the collective conscience. When cynicism feels like the only sensible conclusion, Baubo bursts out of the barren landscape, bringing down laughter like rain to wet the dry dirt that’s been hardened by these oppressive, patriarchal structures.

Come, delight in Alicia McDaid’s (McDazzler) performance– as vibrant, surreal, and hilarious as they are unnerving, a true modern day Baubo. Step closer to KS Brewer’s sound sculpture and eavesdrop on chilling conversations emitting from its toothy orifices. Encounter profound absurdity in Crackhead Barney’s anarchic confrontations with strangers on the street. And aren’t these all depictions of life in the grotesqueries of late-stage capitalism? Where daily we witness atrocities that yesterday we would have thought impossible to tolerate?

In this diverse collection of work, we engage with the horrific and the beautiful side by side, and who’s to say which is which. Be haunted by the intimate oil paintings of Amanda Joy Calobrisi, with their tender neon depictions of anasyrma– the lifting of the skirts– appreciating both introspection and solidarity as we reflect together. And equally energizing the return of Baubo, we are intrigued and enchanted by the mysterious, drawn towards the resilience of Colunga’s relics, in Yolanda McLellan’s and Baylen Levore’s sensual sculptures. We are charmed by Helen Welton’s colorful depictions of the goddess herself: a head and a vulva on legs! 

Infected with Baubo’s esoteric, psychedelic, trickster energy; joyous, untamed divine feminine energy. In a time marked by immense grief, constrictive fear, the immeasurable losses of genocide, extinction, climate chaos, extreme wealth and resource inequality, constant looming dread, loss personal/global and profound, exploitation, war, white/male/human supremacy, the grief is overwhelming, suffocating, neverending, it’s hard to breathe or find the space or words as we’re imprisoned by our despair and daily realities. What new horror will we face today? What global catastrophe? 

Plutocracy: rule by the wealthy; Pluto, Roman name for Hades, god of the underworld and abductor of Persephone, Demeter’s daughter. Looming plutocratic oligarchies strip our bodies of rights: women lose control of their reproductive autonomy; trans and nonbinary people are denied personhood. Any semblance of protection of our earth’s resources are scrapped and she is further mined and exploited, reeling us deeper into climate chaos and destabilization, while new frontiers are proposed on the moon, on mars, through artificial intelligence– our own bodies, our own intelligences, our own creativity, feel powerless and naive in these shadows. 

But Stephany refuses to cow down to this despair. Baubo, still alive in the collective consciousness, reveals herself to her initiates, offering courage in the face of any authority telling us we have no choices; offers succor in the form of return: return to care; return to openness. Return of empathy and connection. Return of belonging to one another in euphoric queer love; return to nature’s deep rhythms; return to generosity and abundance, sharing and depth. A return to trusting intuition, speaking up against injustice, offering a helping hand. A return to what we know to be true.

Stephany digs deep into the soil-made-fertile-again and unearths the goddess, discovering shards of her. She pieces them together like a puzzle. A trunk of artifacts. Inside: fragments of pottery, a stone sculpture of Pan’s head. A collection of antique depictions of Baubo. She digs deeper into research, follows threads, knits together a narrative, asks more questions. Baubo leads the quest. Quest of questions, spawning more. Baubo stokes the fire, keeps it alive.

These shards of pottery, these fragments of memory– where did they come from, what story do they tell? Why is Baubo returning to our collective consciousness right now– what does she ignite in you?  Stephany sought and found the  artists who’ve similarly been ignited by Baubo’s mysteries.

How does Baubo crack open our skulls and plant a seed of mirth? We call her down in our need. How do we tend the sprout that emerges, how do we nurture it so it may thrive and grow? We search for other vines and braid ourselves together with them– we grow the tiny twitch of a smile into a rip roar belly laugh–

Come, open this old dusty trunk and put the pieces of the puzzle together yourself. If you accept the invitation offered in the show to engage with its diverse work, any tendency towards apathy becomes understood as lazy, boring, an obstacle to living. The alternatives– frenzied, feminine rebellion; raw anarchic joy; deep, intriguing mysteries– are much more generative and powerful.

Come explore the Eleusinian mysteries, a secret cult that survived for 2000 years with a nine day journey from Eleusia to Athens and back to the temple of Demeter. See the tablet of Ninnion, the only known depiction of this unspoken goddess cult, long shrouded in mystery. Notebooks are filled with historical research that read as paeans and poems. The initiates descended into the depths of the temple and stayed inside its dark womb-like recesses for days, until they emerged triumphant, minds expanded to the interconnectivity of life, awakened to new awe. The joyful exuberance of life in all its mystery and glory! Lives changed, perspectives changed! Baubo is all around. Can you feel her cackle?

Unnamed caretakers initiated into the mysteries kept the secrets alive, tending their small flame through the ages. Safekeeping the esoteric wisdom of the existence of Baubo. This strange clownish figure. A divine fool. A sacred joke. No shame, no embarrassment. A constant return to our innate humanity. Stoking a small amount of hope alive when the manmade powers do all they can to crush the spirit. Apathy is a useful tool for them, keeping you locked out of your own care, your own humanity. This female trickster tells you no! don’t give in to your despair! Laugh! It’s funny it’s absurd it’s insane! Find the rebellious spirit inside you and FEED IT. Confront the machinations of man. Own your body, flaunt it, be ungovernable. Thumb your nose at authority, or scream in its face. Lift your skirts and show off the thing they want you to hide and be ashamed of. Embody life, say YES. Refuse to obey, refuse to comply, shout NO. Find your voice. FIND YOUR GRIEVING SISTER AND MAKE HER LAUGH WHEN SHE THOUGHT SHE NEVER COULD AGAIN. Take her hand and comfort her. Retell myth. Recreate the story as one of collective care and celebration. Let the lone hero languish in the depths by himself, let him exile himself to mars if that’s the fate he so desires.  Follow the trail Baubo has left, through curiosity and back towards agency

Follow the threads, seek the other ones who’ve been awakened to this intricate blossoming laughter in the face of grief and thaw in awe of the Miracle of Spring's return.

The possibility of an expanse and what interrupts it /  by Christina Nafziger

Living in Chicago, you become both hyper-aware and oblivious to the architecture you move through. The architecture of this city pushes and pulls you in different directions, it forces you down certain paths while deterring you from others. Sidewalks, rows of houses, public parks, fences, and brick walls alter our path and influence our choices. Turn right and take the shady path under a row of trees, or turn left and avoid the uneven and cracked concrete? Through a mixture of planned and unplanned places and paths, our experience moving within this city is inevitably influenced by these structures. Whether we notice them or not, architectural elements are there, affecting our choices.

These are the details that artist Mariel Harari draws out in her exhibition The possibility of an expanse and what interrupts it at Co-Prosperity. Through photography, textiles, video, and mixed media installations, Harari offers us a glimpse of a crack in a sidewalk, a tree that has grown bent to one side to avoid a wall, a column of bricks that was once perhaps a part of a building. Each piece draws attention to the details in the architecture around us that often go unseen yet continuously change and shape the way we engage with the world around us. 

What if architecture wasn’t just the buildings we see on our way to our favorite local haunt? Can our body be an architecture, one that is made up of moments and memories instead of bricks and concrete? This is the thread that Harari is pulling at as she unravels what shapes us. Like the tree that grows at an angle in order to catch the sun, the body acts and reacts based on our surroundings. Do we take the path of least resistance, or do we risk it all and choose to push through the crack in the pavement for a chance to thrive?

In The possibility of an expanse and what interrupts it, Harari leans into this connection between the body and architecture by not only inserting her likeness into the work, but also through the inclusion of small, almost hidden objects ripe with intimacy. In her piece that is the exhibition’s namesake, a wall of hand painted fabric cascades from the ceiling in mostly shades of blue. In the top center, the artist has sewn a self-portrait originally drawn in pencil. Surrounding the portrait are various patches sewn onto the fabric. In the middle of the piece, this patchwork creates the shape of a forearm and thumb. Within The possibility of an expanse and what interrupts it, just as throughout the exhibition, the viewer can find references to the human body: a leg, a limb, a foot, a face. But what is hidden quite literally underneath the surface of this piece are small parts of the artist herself. Locks of Harari’s hair can be found sewn into this large fabric piece, as well as the artist’s baby teeth. The body is fractured, pulled apart, and sewn back together through Harari’s own hand. 

Another materially ambitious piece is Tree, which beautifully blends hand painted cotton, ink, wood, color pencil, wax pastel, inkjet on silk, and more to form an installation that, like The possibility of an expanse and what interrupts it, has a quality of being fractured and mended. Emphasizing our surrounding environment rather than the body, Tree is both familiar and alien. Yes, it is recognizable as a tree, but the tree sports colors that don’t match with our reality. The branches, too, are representational, but a large, slightly opaque photo of a treetop next to a building creates a stand-in for this section of the tree. The artist cleverly plays with different opacities and materials in a way that fuses together fantasy and reality, forming an aesthetic that draws our attention to the tiny details in the environment that holds us—whether that be the architecture of our surroundings or the architecture of our bodies.

This oscillation between physical architecture and the body, between elements like bricks and limbs, comes to a head in Harari’s piece Cocoon Baby 2 (Feral). Hanging from the ceiling, this mixed-media piece has the head of a human (the artist’s self portrait) but with body parts that do not completely match the human-like features. Cocoon Baby’s limbs seem to be somewhat out of place, if they are not missing completely. Her torso seems to be opening up, as if we have caught her mid-transformation: the breaking of the cocoon. Elements of our surroundings can be seen on her body: a drawing of a brick column on her stomach, tree branches that sprout from her arms. Like each person’s identity, elements of the environment have found its way onto and into Cocoon Baby, causing her to bend, mold, and mutate into different shapes. However, there is an element of hope. Even while holding elements of her environment, even while containing her experiences and memories, Cocoon Baby is opening up. She is finding a way to live, to thrive, to transform into something beautiful under the circumstances, despite the systems she lives within. Like the weed that flourishes in the smallest of openings, Cocoon Baby finds a way.

Nearby is Brick Memory Brick; a small, brick-like sculpture made of slightly transparent biomaterial. We can almost see what’s inside, what memory this brick holds. For me, witnessing this piece was a grounding moment in the exhibition. We are all built brick-by-brick from the moments that made us. We are created from memories that influence how we move through the world, just as architecture shapes the way we choose our path. Will you be like this brick, static, unmoving, and unyielding until it crumbles? Or will we be like Cocoon Baby 2 (Feral), and break ourselves open? As the artist puts it, there is “possibility [in] an expanse.” Perhaps this crack in the sidewalk—this moment of rupture, this breaking open—is the chance we need to open up and transform, to flourish in spite of everything.

Eleven Theses on the Photography of History: A conversation of sorts between Ali Feser and Damien Bright /  by Caroline Picard

  • 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.

You can view documentation and read more about the exhibition here.

good morning, moon: An Anchor in Daylight /  by Caroline Picard

To the naked eye, the moon presents like a dot of cream with predictably fluctuating bounds, a constant and gentle observer of terrestrial life. Often associated with female power, menstruation, and fertility, it organizes the tides of our seas, lakes, and bodies, like an intermediary administrator of earthly and celestial movement. Although inherently unphotogenic, the moon nevertheless maintains a presence in human art and allegory. Its earliest known representation, the “Nebra Sky Disk,” dates back to 1600 BC and is believed to reconcile lunar and solar calendars—a challenge that appears fairly often in ancient traditions and astronomical mathematics. According to Aztec legend, for instance, a rivalry between two prospective sun gods, Nanahuatzin and Tēcciztēcatl, wasn’t settled until another god threw a rabbit in Tēcciztēcatl’s face, making him the lesser source of light—the moon. That third party deity saved the Earth, ensuring it wouldn’t burn up from too much light. And while being the moon might seem like a lesser prize, it remains forever encoded in anecdotes of cosmological balance, distant yet bound to Earth and Sun at once. 


Multidisciplinary artist Maddie Vaccaro began photographing the moon during the pandemic. In a practice she refers to as diaristic and meditative, she took digital cameos of the moon to share on social media, instilling a sense of quotidian stability during a time of collective crisis and isolation. “Photographing the moon became a meditative pause and ritual,” Vaccaro says in a recent conversation about her work. “Every time I saw it in the sky, I would stop and try to capture an image of it. The moon reminded me to stop and take a breath.” The impetus for this exercise came  when Vaccaro noticed the moon’s presence in daylight. The moon became omnipresent after that, coloring Vaccaro’s life with its fluctuations and moods. She posted affiliated photos with timestamps and diaristic statements like “Shy moon 9:22 pm,” “Home moon, 4:57pm,” “Golden hour moon, feeling cozy, 4:50pm,” “Full moon on the end of my Saturn Return 7:08 pm,” and so on. These slight observational descriptions reconcile the sun’s hour, the moon’s position, and Vaccaro’s own subjective mood during a period of notorious uncertainty. As she puts it, “I was moving through ‘feeling-knowing’ instead of ‘knowing-knowing.’” With the moon as anchor, the posts capture her personal relationship to the cosmos, triangulating her sense of place-feeling additionally with the virtual presence of friends and followers. 


The vernacular character of these image-time-phrase posts and their mode of dissemination is key. “Capturing a really beautifully composed, clear photo of the moon hasn’t been the point for me,” she says. These are not precious events, in other words. In one image, Vaccaro posted the moon reflected in a puddle on the ground. One sees the cement under the reflection—earth and sky appear simultaneously through the vehicle of water, or residual rain. The puddle makes a metaphor for social media—a disembodied social arrangement of algorithms and marketing cloaked in social camaraderie. This space was especially vital during the pandemic and has since transformed every aspect of human life. In fact both social media and the weather have become exceedingly present in the past few years, both driven by capitalism and consumption with side effects that pressurize social and ecological communities. Yet social media is notoriously devoid of more-than-human presence, except by way of representation. Vaccaro introduces the moon as it would appear in the sky and reciprocally locating a “ground” in the technoverse. Instagram becomes the reflective puddle that, in this case, looks up and elsewhere. 


For her exhibition, good morning, moon, Vaccaro transposed an excerpt of 360 lunar photographs on a fabric mural hanging in Co-Prosperity Sphere’s storefront window. Gridded images in the mural  sometimes include cityscape elements, sometimes just the sky. They pass progressively through different times of day, from dark to light to dark again, like the course of a day.  But unlike the original data event of her posts, faces of the moon are divorced from text in this installation. Excerpted texts are instead reprinted on two separately framed text panels in a second corner window display. Each block of white typeset text stands out against an image of the Chicago shoreline. Both panels hang in cloud-like frames of white curvilinear forms. Divorcing the originally-paired text and image  underscores the translation of the image’s original virtual occasion. Further down in a third window display, Vaccaro has installed twenty-eight ceramic works—referencing the moon’s twenty-eight day cycle, alternately round and square slabs, each with patterned facades that hang in an almost checkerboard fashion, seven by four, or seven days, four weeks. These ceramics are also part of Vaccaro’s meditative practice and coincided with her moon portraiture. “The ceramic works have also been a working anchor/release/therapeutic method of making art that allows me to access a calmer part of my brain.” Vaccaro created a plywood wall to support these ceramics. “I fabricated a cloud-like plywood wall for them to hang on closer to the street.” The cloud again echoes virtual space, reiterating the ways in which Vaccaro makes social technology commensurable with astronomical events by engaging materials—clay, glazes, photography—in a conscious but  habitual practice that grounds her daily awareness in a place of making, despite collective precarity and personal loss. This third and final window of ceramics additionally reinforces Vaccaro’s interrogation of organic forms and straight lines. Ceramic slabs are alternately square and round. The moon is always framed by a screen. The fabric, itself soft, and depicting images of the moon, is divided by multiple rectangles which again echo the screen. The flow of time is gridded out by the Roman calendar.


The moon’s real-life presence inevitably eclipses any photographic representation taken with a terrestrial camera but its charisma inspires us to try. Perhaps in doing so, the earthbound among us might better conceive a long lunar view, an aspiration invariably conflated with wisdom and serenity. And while social media platforms seem to simulate a space of non-placeness—free from geography, time, and planetary occasion, we cannot avoid the ways in which those material factors govern our lives. No matter the tycoons who want their own tourist space programs, or twice-indicted former presidents who blithely encourage systemic social injustice, or the catastrophic rise of climate-induced migration, good morning moon, is a welcome reminder to pause, take a breath for a minute, and be in a world with the moon.

The Nowness of Deep Needle Reminds Us We’re Alive /  by Aricka Foreman

The Nowness of Deep Needle Reminds Us We’re Alive

by Aricka Foreman

A lavender poster reads “Environment/ Must/ Resist/ This Fascist/ American/ Experiment,” facing West 32nd street on the corner of South Morgan. I ask Angela Davis Fegan about a phrase in her artist statement, how this location sits on a racial fault line. 

The late afternoon light bends on the corner of her sunglasses, and stretches across the glass of the building where the letterpress posters—some of them sunbleached as we move closer to the Spring equinox— call out the persistent violence we know too well and keep having to survive through.

“There was a time Black folks couldn’t walk past Halsted without being harassed,” she said, and went on to point out some of the origin of the dried flora scattered just below the mixed media paintings. 

By the mid-60s, my grandparents—having migrated from Mississippi—made their way North again, to a Black suburb just outside of Detroit called Inkster. While my grandmother's siblings, extended cousins and the like still live on the West Side, most of what I came to learn about Chicago came from someone I loved who already left. 

The letterpress display comprised of handmade paper and book making material stacked with slogans that interrogate and make urgent calls the public can respond to: DEFEND/ BLACK/ LIVES/ DEFUND/ CPD; ACCESS TO TREATMENT IS/ FREEDOM/ DENIAL/ OF CARE IS/ VIOLENCE; RIOT/ MOBILITY/ SPECTRUM/ INTERSECTION; MY BODY IS/ UNGOVERNABLE/ AND ITS AGENCY/ CAN’T BE/ LEGI/SLATED. Yet in order for these demands to take root, they must be accepted as truisms in relation to our immediate experiences, knowing that more than one thing can be true at the same time.

But fixed just to this display’s left is an altar: apothecary jars of different shapes and sizes, filled with alchemy; dried eucalyptus and rose petals, splatters of fried and faded menstrual blood. All manner of preserved natural matter inside tequila, rum and whiskey bottles. This space is interior, tender and powerful: and kept uninterrupted behind the glass of the gallery. 

Above it sits “Pilsen Window”, a 48’’ x 60’’portrait of the artist and a lover who reappears and pivots us between this move from slogan to activation and conjure, to these intimate pieces that face a street privy to neighborhood folks and visitors alike. And the portrait does the “swing-door” work of inviting those who pass through and those coming home to cross-paths where the fault line doesn’t have to exist if folks don’t want it to.

At night, the exhibition is lit in such a way, you get pulled into the text, into the texture and materiality you might miss, distracted by the glare and reflection of the day. Honestly, it’s at this hour where the work feels its most alive and urgent. 

The eucalyptus branches on “Maya Fog: (2023) 24’’ x 36’’, rendered from a photo shot from the rooftop of the artist's print studio, seem to reach out like a hand while the figure in the piece is observed and preserved in time amongst the tall Summer grass. In an industrial-scape, this pause mimics a tender moment of fugivity. 

“Gynecology” (2022) 30’’ x 15’’ absorbs and reflects so much texture and variance beneath the light, where its warmth forbids you to ignore how your desire to reach toward: vibrant paint, vegan leather, menstrual blood, paper prints on reclaimed wood. I found myself, tracing my fingers along the window though I knew I couldn’t reach it. The piece's composition does its subversion: a G-spot expansive through the gradient tonal hues in acrylic paint in flesh tones and left to dry in its suspended gravity, incorporating ephemera.

And that’s the tension. As evidenced in this nasty political race for Mayor, and this deeply persistent, communal struggle for liberation that folks forget about until they’re reminded of their desires for resistance; encountering “Deep Needle” requires us to apprehend a clear vision of freedom for everyone until we face what’s exclusionary in ourselves. And root out what does not work in a committed, everyday practice. It’s crossing paths and making room for one another. Dedicating ourselves to a rigorous “paying attention” in the advent of a hypervigilant surveillance state barreling down the tracks with fascists not only conducting the train but choosing alignment with the architects of the tracks.

We need a moment  to sit with “Uterine” (2023) 24’’ x 36’’ and ask ourselves how we’re divinely connected, and how we show up to prove that old, multi-ancestral design we’re all tapped into if we listen and we don’t run. A possibility rooted in justice that prioritizes care, of seeing those who’ve we historically and consistently ignored and erased. And so I stood and soaked it in: this vulnerable and urgent, interconnected archive amidst small emblems of grief and healing. And the discipline that a better world exists so close we can touch it, if we tell it like it is and fight to make it clear.

And that this space for co-conspiracy is rooted in making a plan together. A constant in Angela Davis Fegan’s practice is accessibility, that art ownership doesn’t exist to merely serve the wealthy set on building their acquisitional portfolios. The public can take away letterpress calls for rebellion they can place in their homes from inside the Co-Prosperity space and share these objects with their communities. Leave their utterances and questions in lavender chalk on the bathroom wall.  As Fegan notes “It creates a sense of precariousness that my experience can be erased at any time. My work is made to ensure that it will not be.”

And in doing so, the artist reminds us that we too are temporary. And we can make the most of our lives by pushing the silence at bay, by keeping it from forgetting ours and one anothers names.