Bobby Gonzales | Lauren Steinberg

Possible time, unending liminality, an anxious lisp, potent moments, a retired self, former angst, age appropriate, weakened knees, a hanging gasp.

There is a moment where we begin to know time in a bodily sense. It is not an immediate shift, but a slow drip that leaks in. This plodding corporeal change sets off an awareness of our mortality and the slipperiness of permanence–we begin to know youth only as it has left us. While youth may have come and gone, there is always unfinished business. Our attempts to close the loop on unrequited love, endeavors incomplete, or trials never to be passed, pull us back to “what-ifs” and questions of potential time spent elsewhere, no matter the limits of our bodily capacity.

Famished Youth is a reverb; a crooked glance that returns to the pleasures and tropes of naive dreams. Through the reorientation time, distance, and age allow, Bobby Gonzales and Lauren Steinberg grapple with their younger efforts at forming identities. Attempts at capturing a self are tilted and focused. Somatic archives saturated with affect, desire, and longing are revisited, often with the same feelings that incited their creation. Fragments of earlier projects from their practices are reconsidered and expanded, either by tangent, reversal, or re-performance. These works provide a temporal fulcrum for understanding past selves, their residual presence, and how feelings often linger past youth’s supple bodily contours.

– Jameson Paige, Curator

Bobby Gonzales (b. Delran, NJ) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Chicago, IL, whose work explores the intersection of painting, performance, and photography. He received his BFA in painting from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and recently completed his MFA in photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Most recent exhibitions and performances include participation in Merce Cunningham’s “Field Dances” at the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN), group exhibitions at Das Institut für Alles Mögliche (Berlin, Germany), The Milwaukee Institute for Art and Design (Milwaukee, WI), The Galleries at Columbia University (New York, NY), Zurcher Studios (New York, NY) and solo exhibitions at Vox Populi artist collective, where he was an artist member from 2012-2014 (Philadelphia, PA). Bobby is currently a HATCH resident at the Chicago Artist Coalition.

Lauren Steinberg (b. New York, NY) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago who graduated with an MFA in Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She creates queer uncanny spaces by borrowing from her vocabulary of: endurance performance, clowning, stunt work, muscle memory, drag-king routines, inflation and deflation to question our set environments and expectations. She has performed at multiple locations including HEREarts Center New York, Mimosa House London and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

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Tags: Bobby Gonzales, Chicago, Famished Youth, Lauren Steinberg, Lithium, Lower West Side