SULK CHICAGO
September 2 - September 29
AFTER WORLD PLAY
Alberto Aguilar, Alex Bradley Cohen, & Jesse Malmed
AFAFTFTETERERWRWOWORORLRLDLDPDPLPLALAYAYY. Slick city reprobates and simile faced muralists Alex Bradley Cohen, Alberto Aguilar and Rev. Jesse Malmed bring their collaborative mode* to Sulk Chicago for an exhibition of unseen sights in a new site. Guided by the ecstasy and risk of improvisation, the artists provoke and evoke the other, like a game of playground ball where the rules keep changing and the points are actually people pointing at things.
* previously on display at Produce Model and the Musuem of Contempoary Art Chicago.
AFTER WORLD PLAY (The Act of Play with the Everyday Is the Highest Form of Art)
“World Play” is collaborative: it is a self-reflexive statement that is, at its core, about how language produces the world. After World Play reveals opportunities for play within the resulting systems, a motivation shared across three disparate but overlapping practices.
Important to Jesse, Alberto, and Alex is the riff. Like a volleyed ball avoiding the sand, ideas are floated, punched, and kept alive by a shared responsibility. Appeals are made, treasures flaunted, but in the end, it seems they just want to make each other laugh. Objects brought in from the artists’ homes and studios mingle with those borrowed from mine, and when assembled together under their careful direction, the objects—some made, some found, most a continual conversation of those categories—take on new meaning. I never noticed the shape of the sconces in my entry until Alberto caged them in with fresh flowers under an Ikea storage bin used like a shadowbox. Neither had I considered the view from the sidewalk until gestures were made toward the outside. The importance of using everydayness as a material foundation is found in the manipulations, amendments, and subversions made. Such tweaks turn familiarity on its head to challenge our gazing over the banal. With wide eyes, we see things we may be missing.
It’s a show and tell as much as a show. Varied modes of making highlight the complexity that it is to navigate the world, but in every instance, the relationship to medium is one of play. Alberto probes the specifics of site and its adjacent materials, finding moments of reflection within gridded structures. Alex toys with the language of painting—the regressive and the generative—to spin cardboard palettes into fast portraits, turning fully inward in his drawings. Meanwhile, Jesse conducts the Peanut Gallery through a series of interruptions, swimming in that sweet fluidity between comedy and poetry. Our usual human passivity is shaken awake in this shared co-presence. Through close looking, we understand what it is like to be seen. Like peering through a glass, there exists a heightened awareness of our participation in the game. It’s a game where the rules keep changing and no one seems particularly concerned about winning or losing, like if freestyle swimming or eggs any style meant what they said.
Alberto Aguilar (b. 1974, Chicago) is a Chicago based artist that uses whatever material is at hand in an attempt to make a meaningful connection with the viewer. He does not distinguish his art practice from his other various life roles which allows him to make work wherever he is. He has shown and presented his work at various museums, galleries, storefronts, homes and street corners around the world. Some of these include the Queens Museum, El Torito Supermercado, The Minneapolis Institute of Art, the corner of Cesar Chavez Ave and North Broadway in Los Angeles, CA, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit, Chicago City Hall, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Museo Del Jamon in Madrid, Spain, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Chicago River Jackson Bridge, The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, El Cosmico Trailer Park, Marfa, TX, El Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales, Havana, Cuba, Iowa rest stop I-80. His work is in the collection of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, The Jorge Lucero Study Collection, Soho House, Meta - Facebook, The National Museum of Mexican Art, The Office of Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot. Along with some members of his family he collectively organizes Mayfield, a multi-use space which operates on the grounds of his home.
Alex Bradley Cohen (b. 1989, Chicago) lives and works in Chicago, IL. Recent group exhibitions include in In Relation to Power: Politically Engaged Works from the Collection, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC; State of the Art 2020, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AK; and Triple: Alex Bradley Cohen, Louis Fratino, and Tschabalala Self, University Art Museum at the University of Albany, NY. Other exhibitions include The Luggage Store, San Francisco, CA; Mana Contemporary, Chicago, IL; Carrie Secrist Gallery, Chicago, IL, The Studio Museum of Harlem, New York, NY; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst, IL; Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City, NY; and The Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles, CA, among others. He is an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture and was an artist-in-residence at the Ox-Bow School of Art.
Jesse Malmed (b. 1983, Santa Fe) is an artist, curator and educator working in video, performance, text, installation, events, occasional objects, their gaps, overlaps and Chicago. His works play in sub- and counter-cultural histories, like a joke that’s a poem that’s a song covering itself, a shadow puppet interfering in the broadcast beam, having déjà vu for the first time, or watching a time travel sequence in reverse. His work has found temporary home in museums, cinemas, galleries, bars and barns, including solo presentations at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Roots and Culture, the DePaul Art Museum, Flatland, the Chicago Cultural Center, D Gallery, Syntax Season, Cinema Contra, Microlights, Echo Park Film Center, Lease Agreement and the University of Chicago Film Studies Center. His platformist and curatorial projects include the Live to Tape Artist Television Festival, programming at the Nightingale Cinema, instigating Western Pole, the mobile exhibition space and artist bumper sticker project Trunk Show (with Raven Falquez Munsell), programming through ACRE TV and organizing exhibitions, screenings and performance events both independently and institutionally. His writing has appeared on and in Bad at Sports (where he is a permanent guest host), Wicked Art Assignments, Cine-File, The Quarantine Times, Incite Journal of Experimental Media, The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature, Temporary Art Review, Big Big Wednesday and YA5. Raised in Santa Fe, he earned his BA from Bard College and his MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He was named a Breakout Artist by Newcity and has attended residencies at ACRE, Ox-Bow, Summer Forum, the Chicago Cultural Center and Links Hall. He is an Associate Adjunct Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and teaches in the Chicago Public Schools through CAPE. He is the lead singer of The Fucs (a Fugs cover band) and was profiled recently in Newcity’s Film 50 and the Chicago Tribune.
After World Play opens Friday, September 2nd from 6 - 9 pm. All are welcome, and masks are optional.
525 South Dearborn | Chicago, IL 60605