A group exhibition of six artists who explore appropriations of popular self-help and healing techniques. Neither entirely mocking new age and self-help trends nor blindly subscribing to their alluring promises, each artist approaches their subject in an exploratory manner.

Gregg Louis’s Home Made Self Help series offers simple solutions to complex problems. Louis was inspired to create this series after stumbling upon letters by different psychic mediums offering solutions to debt and unhappiness. By reconstructing age-old wisdoms in digitally fabricated book jackets, Louis investigates how self-help formulas—the language they use, the promises they make, and the type of audience they attract—contribute to the economics of healing.

Habby Osk, a film and performance artist originally from Iceland, strenuously, and at times painfully, portrays the struggles of maintaining a happy face in her endurance video GREAT. Her non-stop grin at the camera slowly becomes a grimace as her face contorts as she attempts to hold a smile for 70 minutes, emphasizing the complicated relationship between criticality and sincerity that exists throughout the exhibition. Jill Pangallo, a persona-based film, installation and performance artist creates an earnest but fumbling character in the creative healer Natia. Natia states: “I would like to lead you into the presence of your own healing. Join me in building a river of hope where all your fears are washed away. Dance with me as you find meaning in a confused world.” Natia has the best of intentions, but one can’t help but feel underwhelmed by the futility of her actions.

Chicago-based multimedia artist Jacob C. Hammes has been practicing as a hypnotist for a number of years. His audio installation records a session with a subject suffering from writer’s block, who describes a fictional meeting between Sigmund Freud, Ana Mendieta, and Jack London while under hypnosis. Jaimie Henthorn and Faith La Rocque’s collaborative works focus on themes of ritual, health, belief, and commodity. In the seemingly spare installation Massage Portal, the gallery visitor is invited to lie on a portable massage bed and, by peering into the face-rest, experience an otherworldly view.

In this exhibition the art of self-improvement takes a multitude of forms, reminding us of the struggles and triumphs, nonsense and breakthroughs that constitute psychic and physical growth.

Re-arranging pre-arranged non-arrangements. Formal, temporary and permanent situations. New work by Carson Fisk-Vittori and Michael Hunter.

Alejandro Borsani uses video, computation, sound and physical phenomena to create spaces for rational reflection, bodily experimentation and emotional contemplation.

In her interdisciplinary exploration of violence, sexuality and female criminality Maria Jönsson approaches serious subject matter with deadpan humor and poetic matter-of-factness.

Orson Panetti works with new and found footage to craft video pieces that approach the cinematic environment as a meditative space, utilizing imagery that suggests an alternate collective unconscious of re-contextualized pop culture experiences.

Raychael Stine’s paintings often depict dogs and a kind of implied violence in a highly literate painterly language. However, the works are not necessarily about dogs, violence or even painting.

Stephanie Syjuco’s recent work uses the tactics of bootlegging, reappropriation, and fictional fabrications to address issues of cultural biography, labor, and economic globalization. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, her objects mistranslate and misappropriate iconic symbols, creating frictions between high ideals and everyday materials. This has included re-creating several 1950s Modernist furniture pieces by French designer Charlotte Perriand using cast-off material and rubbish in Beijing, China; starting a global collaborative project with crochet crafters to counterfeit high-end consumer goods; and searching for fragments of the Berlin Wall in her immediate surroundings in an attempt to revisit the moment of capitalism’s supposed global triumph.

Mican Morgan manipulates relationship clichés like her sculptural materials. She pulls them apart and sticks different bits together with results that continue to be familiar yet slightly off. Nuggets of base wisdom and metaphors to love by become objects and vignettes. Getting “hitched” and braiding are scrutinized as actions of affection, but things aren’t always rosy. Expect a few bombs to drop. Cue Pat Benatar’s “Love is a Battlefield.”

Porous Walker’s artwork depicts the parts of life and relationships that make us uncomfortable or exists only in fantasy. He makes them accessible like bathroom graffiti or a note secretly passed amongst schoolboys. Indecent and hilarious, his distinct style invokes psychedelic imagery from the 70s and exists somewhere between Dr. Seuss and R. Crumb. Porous’ drawings seem like they haven’t matured past adolescence, and that is a good thing. They never should. They have a fresh wisdom to impart. Sometimes as simple as, “Don’t do this.”

Strictly defined, alla prima is a painting technique in which the work is completed in one session without time for the paint to dry, but the term is also more loosely applied to any painting done in a direct, expressive style, with minimal preparation. For our inaugural exhibition Paul Cowan will be applying this technique to canvas, cotton and confections.

Work by Ali Bailey.

The exhibition (non)Sense: Physicality, Perspective and the Consciousness of Relating will feature artwork by Joe Grimm and Erica Moore. These artists focus on the body and how and what it senses in space and time through installation artworks. Both Grimm and Moore use installation as a method of investigating the sense-able, the visible/invisible and the audible/inaudible. They question where we are, how we are, what exists and how we know it.

In Joe Grimm’s installation work he uses modified 16mm projectors, sans film and domestic standing fans to play with light, space, time, what one perceives and what actually exists. In two featured site-specific installations, Erica Moore, activates the preexisting architectural details using reflective materials. By using non-traditional hanging and installation methods, Moore plays with what happens when the viewer has to physically move their body to look at an artwork. Both artists play with physical presence, perspective, consciousness, and the relation we have to our surroundings.