Earthly Delights Ft. Assaf Evron, Devin T. Mays, Jeff Prokash and David Sprecher

I remember lying on the beach with face resting on hands buried in the sand. Face so close, eyes focused on tiny grains sticking to once-damp skin. Awareness of a single sandy shore ceases to exist, exploding into a constellation of tiny shell and fossil fragments. Children play not far away, building castles of sand to be washed away with the rising tide. I drift into daydreams, watching thousands of years of the human desire to push against gravity. Ancient peoples carving blocks of stone from the earth, piling them into buildings to stand against others. Under siege, a fire rages, heating stone until it pops and cracks and turns to powder. They collect the lime and bury their dead in caves with masks of plaster and shells. Bodies shaped by buildings, now returned to the earth. Later they’ll discovered by those digging through sand, searching for the voids under our feet.

Earthly Delights marks a hiatus from the nomadic program we adopted while searching for empty space to share. The exhibition indulges in 4 artists whose work contemplates the life cycle of rocks, trespasses into voids, carves them into architecture, and documents the alchemy of the earth. The works gives presence to negative space, questions the boundaries of a whole, and what makes up a part. Time and gravity become central subjects to the group’s contemplations. The literal stretching and collapse of time through video; the exploration and documentation of caverns formed over hundreds of millions of years; the impermanence of sand against indefatigable gravity; the persistent and ancient urge to preserve our dead. Earthly Delights embraces the impermanence of form and the persistent desire to capture it.

Assaf Evron is an artist and a photographer based in Chicago. His work investigates the nature of vision and the ways in which it is reflected in socially constructed structures, where he applies photographic thinking in various two and three-dimensional media. Through the collapsed relationship between culture and nature, his work opens a conversation around language, experience, and geology in the face of the loss and melancholy inherent to the Anthropocene. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums internationally. Evron holds an MA from The Cohn Institute and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where he currently teaches.

Devin T. Mays (b. Detroit, MI) uses sculpture, installation, performance and pictures for pleasure. His literal use of the temperamental and temporary is an attempt to work with the materiality of everything and nothingness. The materials being used in his practice do not always present themselves as anything more than what they appear to be. There is not always a physical transformation at the hands of his facilitation. He often refers to his interdisciplinary practice as a practice-in-practice, a place for things to become Things. He has exhibited and performed nationally and internationally, and is currently an Assistant Professor in The Department of Art at Rice University. He currently lives and works between Galveston, TX and Houston, TX.

Jeff Prokash is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator in Chicago, IL. He received his MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and his BFA in Art and Art History from University of Wisconsin Madison. Jeff Prokash attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2015 and has received awards and fellowships including the Eldon Danhausen and Edward L. Ryerson Fellowships and the International Sculpture Center Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award. He currently teaches in the Sculpture department at SAIC. His work navigates the territories of architecture, design, archival practices, materiality, and contextual histories through the lens of sculpture. As a collector and orchestrator of material-based information, his work draws upon the conventions of preservation, appropriation, and the historical archive to produce sculptural installations and interventions that embody the connectivity between people, places, objects, and events. Jeff Prokash embraces the freedom of reinterpretation in order to suggest new relationships and potentialities within the built environment.

David Sprecher is an artist and writer based in Chicago. He teaches sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Chicago Academy for the Arts and integrates art education into public primary schools through The Chicago Arts Partnership in Education. Recent exhibitions include Organs of Little Importance at Kobo Chika Gallery, Tokyo; Roaming Stone for the 2022 4Ground Sculpture Biennial, Minneapolis; and Social, a two-person exhibition with Justine Chance at Apparatus Projects. He’s published writing in the Brooklyn Rail, Columbia Journal and Chicago Artist Writers and is a cofounder of the design collective ESSAY.

Opening Thursday, October 3rd, from 6-10PM
Saturday, October 5th from 12 – 5PM
Sunday, October 6th, from 12 – 5 PM
Sunday October 13th 1 – 4 PM
Sunday October 20th 1 – 4 PM
Sunday October 27th 1 – 4 PM
Closing: Sunday October 3rd 1 – 4 PM

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Tags: Assaf Evron, Chicago, David Sprecher, Devin Mays, Earthly Delights, Jeff Prokash, Julius Cæsar