Maisons Fragiles

Caroline Chun | Jenny Halpern | Fatemeh Kazemi
J Kent | John Neff | Eia Radosavljevic | Bun Stout

September 29 — November 17, 2024
Opening Reception: Sunday, September 29th, from 3–6PM

RUSCHWOMAN
2100 S. Marshall Blvd., Suite 105
Chicago, IL 60623

Following the opening, gallery hours are available by appointment only.

Please contact thewaves@ruschwoman.blue to make arrangements to visit RUSCHWOMAN during the run of the exhibition.

Frigid roses to live
all for one will interrupt
your breath becomes frost
with a prompt white calyx

but if my strokes set the tuft
free by a profound shock
this frigidity will merge with
the laughter of drunken flowering

–Stephane Mallarmé. “Fan of Méry Laurent.”
Translated by Peter Manson.

Transparency interests me. I want to be transparent. If people could see through me, they could not help loving me, forgive me.

–Louise Bourgeois. Diary note, 8 August, 1987.

And under the boughs unbowed
All clothed in a snowy shroud
She had no heart, so hardened
All under the boughs unbowed
Each feather it fell from skin
‘Til threadbare, as she grew thin
How were my eyes so blinded?
Each feather it fell from skin

–The Decemberists. “The Crane Wife 3,” 2006.

We prefer a hush to settle rather than suffer through your bloated brags about your father’s house and the many mansions it contains, apparently eternally. Of course there is a temple at the nexus of class divides, religious ideology, and the supposed rights and entitlements inherent to the [right kind in the eyes of hegemonic systems of power] individual, but for better or worse our lot has been let go (laid off? dismissed? fired? All of these fragments of corporate nomenclature exceed themselves with razzling sparks of psychopoetic drama). We’ve gone somewhere else where chief among our criteria that security and shelter (not to mention décor and domestic activity) would not be Your Father’s, or anybody’s.

Here at Maisons Fragiles, we wouldn’t say we have daddy issues—it’s not an issue for us that paternalistic symbolic orders have failed, drifted, disappeared, or floated away on the wind. After Louise Bourgeois’ Destruction of Father / Reconstruction of Father, the third unmentioned Act was another destruction of father, pretty much at his own hands, if not also the disrepair and collapse of an overextended patriarchy that flubbed and stammered back to our radiance, our self possession, our high femme feminism, our secrets, and our open secrets.

Maisons Fragiles is a dead dads club in at least conceptual ways. Several years before mine passed, I was wearing a draped duster jacket cardigan made from black lace and he saw it and he grabbed my elbow dragging me like I was still a kid and threw me toward my open suitcase and told me to change.

I did change. Each of my fucking feathers fell from skin, and what remained was transparent in its queerness, its willful mirthful deviance, in its freedom to dance, to dress up in black lace and white lace and grey lace and grey taffeta and grey silk and white feathers and red purses and black dresses and pearlescent breastplates and antique tutus and fascinating fascinators and glittering grape jelly bedsheet raiments.

Here at Maisons Fragiles, we clothe ourselves in our radical visions for future ideas of home and belonging.

This endeavor is structured around grand swings between the impoverished and the glamorous, the combination of which represents a burgeoning value system that rejects the exclusions etched into being by massive differentials in wealth, instead redefining glamour and luxury with whatever tools, leftovers, mementos, sob stories, and lightest touches are most readily accessible.

Here at Maisons Fragiles, we’ve set up shop in this cunning little midwestern timeshare vacation home jointly owned by prima ballerina Janet Collins (1917–2003), Princess Fatemeh Khanum Esmat al-Dowleh (1855/6–1905), Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), Gladys Bentley (1907–1960), Stéphane Mallarmé and his fashion critic nom de plume Marguerite de Ponty (1842–1898), and Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010). Because here at Maisons Fragiles, the dead are our teachers, our lovers, and the closest thing we need to a father. Their’s is a matriarchal commy-infused anarchy building from within our dresses, under our hats, and running up and down the halls of our place.

Many rooms is a fancy way of saying elaborate yet closed systems. But what of a plume? An escape route? A pirouette into shadow? The color that rises in a blush, then settles back into draining away, keeping time with exhalation? The political efficacy of fragility: ephemeral, gentle, accountability for damage, preference for safety over showers of bombings, hard and soft femmes who are learning to m/other ourselves, whispers, sighs, snores, feather down.

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Tags: Bun Stout, Caroline Chun, Chicago, Eia Radosavljevic, Fatemeh Kazemi J Kent, Jenny Halpern, John Neff, Maisons Fragiles, RUSCHWOMAN, South Lawndale