Sungho Bae reinterprets the visual domain, strategically engaging consumption through images of latent or explicit violence sourced from the physical perceptions embedded in everyday life, mass media, and consumer products. Considering humans as mutants continually adapting within these visual territories, his practice navigates the mechanisms of image-making and the processing of superficial consumption data. By collecting and repurposing imagery and forms, Bae employs strategies of physical and contextual reduction, exaggeration, repetition, and deliberate recontextualization. His work displaces accumulated visual information from its intended contexts, scrutinizing traces of fragmentation revealed on material surfaces. Through reconstructive fragmentation, Bae exposes hidden instabilities within visual narratives, suggesting new modes of relation between human and non-human entities.

Ohad Meromi’s practice is optimistic, reimagining public monuments as potential sites for historical reckoning. Meromi’s sculptures engage the zeitgeist and an expanded understanding of the monument as a site of contention, transition, and liberation. By playing with artifice, creating seemingly ceramic sculptures out of polyurethane foam and resin, Meromi invites viewers to decipher what lies beneath the polished exteriors of his work.

Engaging abstraction as a notational procedure, Bronson Smillie intervenes on predetermined design elements as presented in bygone industrial stationaries, physical media storage units, typesets, and other materials out of step with digital time. Inflecting simple lines, circles, colored swaths, stuffed pulp, buttons, and textiles, he crafts ebullient imagery into and atop his desired containers, uncoupling these decommissioned sources from their origin use, toward new life. In this way, the work has a unique aesthetic register that, through an ecological ethic, activates object aura and empathy from nostalgia. In a world of material excess, Smillie triages the “waste” that trails technological “progress."

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Sad at Sports converges athletic fervor with artistic inquiry, presenting a nuanced discourse on the intersectionality of sports, society, and personal identity. The project, through a multi-faceted lens of sculpture, interactive installation, and live performance, deconstructs and celebrates the cultural fabric woven by sports traditions. It scrutinizes the glorification and critique within athletics, highlighting the inherent dualities of competition — unity versus division, triumph versus despair. This work not only venerates the aesthetic and communal aspects of sports but also challenges the viewer to contemplate the underlying narratives of power, resistance, and identity that shape our collective and individual ethos.

At the core of "sad at sports" lies a deep engagement with themes of embodiment, and the mythologies that underpin our understanding of sports. Our exhibition champions collaboration as a fundamental ethos, mirroring the collective spirit inherent in athletic endeavors. This collaborative approach not only enriches each exhibition's narrative complexity but also serves as a poignant reminder of sports' unifying power amidst diverse experiences and perspectives.

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Corbett vs. Dempsey is pleased to present a solo booth by Omar Velázquez for Barely Fair 2025. Taking the concept of miniaturization literally, Velázquez has scaled the entire painting process to booth size, working with a compact studio including all its accoutrements – relax-time amp and guitar, buckets for propping the paintings – as he created a suite of immaculate paintings and a tabletop sculpture for the fair. The finished paintings echo the artist’s full-scale works – totems built of stacked objects with ghostly facial manifestations, a kind of HO-scale pareidolia.

The simple representational style of Kasprzyk’s paintings draws more on the Italian Quattrocento than on current contemporary realism, and any resemblance to surrealism – he assures us – is purely coincidental and superficial. As well as being an ironic observer of daily life and interpersonal relationships, he is the author of some of the most poetic paintings created today. He paints his characters based on the photographic images he takes of himself. He places these characters in imagined landscapes performing roles in make believe scenarios as dueling couples, dancers, musicians, or jugglers. The characters are often repeated across an image and shown in consecutive stages of movement.

Mary Tooley Parker makes textile art using a time-intensive, historic rug making technique. There are no electric tools, and no rush to get it done. Parker is a true fiber artist having been enthralled with every fiber related format since the age of 8 and is mostly self-taught. She has no visual art education, rather trained as a dancer and studied music for many years. Her basic process includes hand dyeing wool yardage, cutting it into strips, and pulling strips up through a linen foundation using a primitive, wood handled hook. She also spins yarn to be used in the work. This slow making allows her time to adjust, revise, and enjoy the making. Her use of additional non-traditional materials creates a densely textured but still 2-dimensional work that draws the viewer in to both examine the fiber materials and engage with the innate warmth and familiarity of them. Her work offers a clear evocation of people, places and things that resonate deeply with others' experiences. Though using a traditional, folk art medium, Parker's tableaus, vivid colors, humor, detail, and wide use of new and exotic fibers give rug hooking a contemporary aesthetic and lifts her rugs off the floor to be viewed as art.

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According to the National Cemetery Administration (a subset of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs), a columbarium is an above-grade structure designed for the interment of cremated remains and mementos. A columbarium unit is generally two-sided for efficiency, with numbered rows identifying each individual niche. The average commemorative niche is approximately 20” x 20” x 12”, and the size of the overall structure depends on cremation rates in the area. Because family and visitors may choose to leave flowers and other tokens of remembrance, slots for vases and drainage strips may be incorporated into the architecture itself.
You are being granted an opportunity to look inside these units from 23 April - 11 May 2025. The gallery declines to comment on the location of the remains intended for the Gay Uncles Day niche.

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Lauren Seiden recasts graphite, a traditional drawing medium, into unexpected, sculptural forms to bring the act of drawing into the foreground and redefine its terms and possibilities. By obscuring the definability of material or object, Seiden aims to upend the hierarchy of art materials, diversifying the male-dominated canon of sculpture and its associated discussions on form and materials. Her autonomous sculptures are often surrogates or artifacts of domestic labor performed by women to keep their house, and self, maintained. These mundane rituals are essential to maintain order, but invisible. The tasks themselves and the people who perform them are often unrecognized. These works are making a statement on the concept of labor, about what kind of labor is valued and what is invisible.

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An artist interested in the here and there of things, Devin T. Mays uses sculpture, installation, performance and pictures for pleasure. His work is an attempt to locate the in-between-ness of everything and nothing. He often refers to his practice as a place for things to become Things.

Maryam Taghavi's interdisciplinary practice spans painting, sculpture, installation, and performance, rooted in a deep fascination with how language shapes perception and cultural memory. As a bilingual artist and native Persian speaker, she abstracts written text to convey meaning beyond legibility, disentangling linguistic forms from their intended function. Her work employs scale, color, and material to facilitate optical experiences that resist linguistic categorization. Central to her exploration is the Persian concept of Tamsha, an embodied form of seeing rooted in movement and spatial awareness, which transforms perception into an experience of inhabiting language and space. This focus on embodied vision bridges physical and metaphysical worlds, prompting reflections on the intersections of language, perception, and cultural memory.

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I work with sculpture and animation to explore the cognitive dissonance that occurs when we consume the horrors of the external world from the (dis)comfort of our living room sofas and how the states of our minds and bodies are reflected in the spaces we occupy. Using stop-motion, miniature sets, found furniture and other household materials, I build worlds that exist between interior and exterior, reality and superstition, architecture and the body - psychological spaces in the midst of transformation, being overtaken by supernatural forces that represent the anxiety that world events bring into our personal lives and private spaces.

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Harry Moritz uses sculptural objects and performance to reflect the body politic that has engulfed society since the dawn of the industrial revolution. As a Machinist, Moritz uses his background in Advanced Manufacturing to reflect on the constructed environment. Drawing inspiration from Futurist and Fluxus work in the 20th century, he inserts contemporary nuance around technology and sexuality. His studio practice mimics that of a modern factory, ruminating on this key component that drives the global economy. Through the factory and into the supply chain, Moritz reflects on the end result, but also considers an intangible beginning.

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"What is a quilt? What is a painting?" is a series of textile-based paintings where McDaniel aims to collapse distinctions between categories like fine art and functional craft, male and female, and digital and analog. The work is evasive of the limitations of human created categories in order to carve space for nuanced contemplation. Materially, McDaniel dissolves distinct categories by repetitively scanning, digitally altering, and reprinting fabric until a new textile design is created and little semblance of the original textile remains. A visual vocabulary is built upon prioritizing the imperfect, in-between, and entropic results that appear unexpectedly while making the work.

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Surabhi Ghosh is an artist and educator based in Montreal. She exploits the tensions and imperfections in handmade patterns to give material and spatial form to cyclical narratives of pride and shame. Her visual strategies for prompting active viewership involve inverting the central and the peripheral, interrupting architectural edges, and disrupting the functionality and familiarity of everyday materials. Mapping points of intersection between abstraction, minimalism, and ornamentation, Ghosh speculates on ways to “trouble” these and other(ed) imbricated histories. She develops this discursive position using repetitive processes, textiles, and site-responsive installations.

My work takes on questions of desire and design. As Lyn Hejinian delineates in The Language of Inquiry, “a conflict between a desire to satisfy a demand for boundedness, for containment and coherence, and a simultaneous desire for free, unhampered access to the world,” I take on form and abstraction as inquiries toward (mis)understanding aesthetics and its overlap with identity. I'm often asking: What could occur if we give up our illusions of understanding and control and give in to our ineffable feelings and desires? What stakes does abstraction hold concerning identity and representation? By succumbing to the unknown, or in this case, working through form improvisationally, I wonder if we can begin to think in ways that reorder our supposed ontological determinations, or perhaps as Nahum Dimitri Chandler puts it, to think with paraontology. My interest is to use repetition as a device that gives way to the refusal that my objects of desire will adequately fill in the gaps of understanding—following Fred Moten when he states “We Aim. We Miss. We live in the gaps between our intentions and the shit that doesn’t work out.”

Leslie Baum’s painting practice includes installation, animation, ceramics, and painting. Equally inspired by the giants of art history as she is by work made by non-artist friends, she frequently revisits work to gain new perspectives. Her practice is invitational in nature and informed by her long tenure as museum educator at the Art Institute of Chicago and at Thresholds, a progressive arts studio in Chicago. Baum states “Like a migratory bird and its nesting ground, I repeatedly return to the same paintings - my own, art historical, and now within my ongoing Plein Air Project, watercolors painted by friends, peers, and colleagues. This process pushes me to gain a deeper understanding of what might otherwise become familiar, stale, and even invisible.”

A collaboration between artists David Sprecher and Jeff Prokash, Essay presents a selection of their iterative sculpture project, "Rhyming Jars." Essay 009 Rhyming Jars are slip-cast porcelain vessels made from a "syllabary" of modular mold parts. Utilizing 15 different shapes, or "syllables," the Rhyming Jars are made by combining the molds into different configurations. As molds become worn or damaged, the once concrete bounds of a project based on known parameters evolves into one that embraces points of failure, and defects become evidence of escape from the predetermined. The rhyming jars embrace the seams, evidence of chipped molds, and other interruptions in language as signs of the unique potential of made form.