Apparatus Projects is pleased to announce a two-person exhibition with Kate O’Neill and Neal Vandenbergh opening July 11, at Apparatus Projects.

A tepid refusal. Within a system we cannot split, unable to cause a break, a fissure, a revolution, a separation, a cut, a removal, a pin prick even. So instead, we choose to refuse where possible, to skip naming. They ditch their wayfaring tools and decide to stray, following a loxodrome whose chart is coursed not by sight, but sung by a chorus of Bartlebys, each choosing to be a quarter of a step off key from their adjacent, but sharing a rhythm. We squeal in our new immediacy, the sensation of which is often unfamiliar.

This new touch is stupid, in that it’s impossible to understand it and it offends the senses upon embrace. Like a bad smell or dreams of red-green forests, their immediacy repulses us but in time are neutralized through reoccurrence. Pop culture has given way to a new kind of pulp-culture, where everything is fibrous and compressible, printing the hits and variations on the same at eye-blink speed. It’s all easily interwoven and flattened into the same kind of plane before being mashed back up and recycled again when something hotter comes along.

The silk-woven spider’s threads that run between bunkers – between the trenches of thought – those fragile, lonely, constellations are constantly coming out of focus… and then my eyes reveal a plethora of floaters. Will anyone share the same ones that I see? How to make a connection with another person over a waveform, a chromatic aberration?

Imagine all those who were inspired by Goethe’s Theory of Colours. They began to examine the apparatus of the eyeball, how it took in light, how it refracted, where it failed, when things began to blur and smear, and colors ran. Looking for the out, looking for the new, looking for the thing that could somehow tether us here and now in this space and this moment, something to make the loneliness stop or at least to offer some modicum of control. There were many who began to look directly at the sun in an effort to understand afterimages. Many lost their sight in this exaggerated effort to produce knowledge.

Apparatus is located at 2501 N Spaulding Ave, Apt. 2, Chicago, IL 60647. We are open Sundays, 12pm – 4pm, appointments are preferred, but we do accept walk ins.

Kate O’Neill (b.1982) is an artist and educator who lives and works in Chicago, IL. Her work has been featured in solo and two-person exhibitions at M.Leblanc, Roots and Culture, Rainbo Club, Noble and Superior Projects, Chicago. Group exhibitions include Bensheim Museum, Bensheim, DE; Kunsthalle Osnabrück, DE; Lease Agreement, Baltimore, MD; Goethe Institut, Chicago, Carr Chapel at Illinois Institute of Technology, M. LeBlanc, Soccer Club Club, and Johalla Projects, Chicago

Neal Vandenbergh (b.1986) lives and works in Chicago, IL. Recent solo exhibitions include Western Pole and Adler & Floyd, Chicago. His work has been included in group shows at Massimo De Carlo Gallery, Milan, IT; Interference Archive, Brooklyn, NY; Threewalls, Nightingale Cinema and Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago.

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Tags: Apparatus Projects, Chicago, kate o'neill, Logan Square, Neal Vandenbergh