♖✍ Accessory Dwelling Unit cordially invites you to ‘O Truant Muse,’ an inaugural exhibition and bonafide “gesamtkunstwerk” on Shakespeare Ave.

Featuring works by Chicago-based artists Steven Husby, Noah Rorem, Andrew Pace, and JB Fry. Co-kept by Andrew Pace and Elise Schierbeek. Accessory Dwelling Unit takes Shakespeare’s sonnets as their guidepost.

2538 W Shakespeare Ave. An open house, October 12 & 13. Knock on arrival or call 773-575-8755.

O truant Muse, what shall be thy amends
For thy neglect of truth in beauty dyed?
Both truth and beauty on my love depends;
So dost thou too, and therein dignified.
Make answer, Muse: wilt thou not haply say
‘Truth needs no colour, with his colour fix’d;
Beauty no pencil, beauty’s truth to lay;
But best is best, if never intermix’d?
Because he needs no praise, wilt thou be dumb?
Excuse not silence so; for ’t lies in thee
To make him much outlive a gilded tomb,
And to be praised of ages yet to be.
Then do thy office, Muse; I teach thee how
To make him seem long hence as he shows now.
Shakespeare, Sonnet 101

Artist bios:

STEVEN HUSBY

Is a Virgo whose paintings enact illusion as the conventionally employed figure for transcendence: what is knowable and what is.

Light and dark are what we have for guidance. Programatic value scales that remind us of our own programatic value scales. A specific something seems to be occurring. Umbras. A loud promise to be silent. Stripes terminate against expectation or adhere absolutely to it. Something watches back through a fence. An ouroboros in a kaleidoscope, the burnt sienna version. A second millennium murk tints an otherwise pervading Florentine light. Half-risen suns forever surround Leda as French curve, a swan as a calla lily as a belly shielding something too inculpable for the primeval forest in the last minutes of an eclipse. Is a thing with a shape a thing with a purpose? What was that thing? What will it do?

“In any case it is difficult to stand outside of one’s desires and see things of their own volition.”
“I think you just see whatever’s in front of you.”
“Yes. I don’t think that.”
– Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain p.269 (Two characters discuss a map of a dream.)

NOAH ROREM

Is an Aquarian whose paintings start as one thing and end up another; but overall are not paintings of something, they are something of painting. Sometimes they seem to show not so much things becoming as things that have almost finished being, like stills from a glacially longer, goopier-by-orders-of-magnitude pre-Precambrian montage. Geologic time; smoky temples of the unconscious, that stuff.

These fires are to be respected — but not worshipped. Carbon, heat and pressure are worth the awe. A diamond would only be incidental. The picture is the limiting condition. Whatever we see is evenly microcosmic and macrocosmic, comedic & anti-comedic. Color is substance in garb.
There’s a spongy, ethereal immensity that could vanish in a blink to another unseen immensity not yet shown. It’s what goes on out there, after all. So when there is darkness, it is the dark of night driving. Things are out there beyond where the headlights reach.

Trees sprout birds, leaves fall upwards. Sometimes silhouettes. Lost continents, scraggles. Rembrandt doused in battery acid. No use in scrying. A headless armless bust meets the animating life-force. Look. We are lucky that little needs saying.

ANDREW PACE

Is a Gemini whose images are like hallucinations of archetypal fragments scattered on the steps of the Academy by the winds of a barreling train, swept in or swept out––who cares, let’s frame it, and frame it just right. Today we’re dusting off the B-sides of late 19th century Romanticism, giving the last of the loyal students a dram and a slap on the back, and performing chest compressions on the ladies of the spread. Marker, pen, and decorative paper, a light, earnest touch.

We pull the strings and she coos, or is it the other way around? The old mill town is gone. They rerouted the train and left us pin-up artifacts. Research and reproduction, then. These are truck stop assemblages, carefully wrought. Yellowing antique paper already falling to bits and value enduring. Silken tresses in the breeze. Great hair, from one it-girl to another. Lilith, Pandora, favorite concubines, Shakespeare’s Miranda on quotidian substrate. Our eyes meander to the golden chalice, that esoteric vessel, this worship time. Buttoned up, yet we are all animals. I’m sure Circe is responsible.

What’s the next closest thing to an angel?

JB FRY

Is a Gemini whose ceramic sculptures circle the void and unfurl the viscera, draining down and welling up in equal measure. Follow the curve, and you’ll find yourself wedged in the purgatory of desire’s asymptote. Flesh stings flesh, electrical. Phase change in a vacuum, prolapse as craft.

Official Website

More events on this date

Tags: ♖✍ Accessory Dwelling Unit, Andrew Pace, Elise Schierbeek, JB Fry, Noah Rorem, O Truant Muse, Steven Husby