S t il l L i fe

October 16, 2021 to March 12, 2022
Opening: Saturday, October 16 from 5-8pm

Marzena Abrahamik
Regina Agu
Alberto Aguilar
Kyle Bellucci Johanson
Lionel Cruet
Keeley Haftner
Salvador Jiménez-Flores
Devin T Mays
Elsa Muñoz
Caroline Robe
Kellie Romany
Onajide Shabaka
Marcela Torres
Rodrigo Valenzuela
Norma Vila Rivero
Amy Vogel
KC Weldon

Having a relationship with my surroundings is linked to my sense of being consciously present in one place.
The natural world and all its life force nourishes and enables out planet to survive. We should welcome the embrace as it fosters life on our planet.
I am navigating new surroundings while thinking through a familiar set of old concerns: geography, transience, shifts, slippage, belonging, community, identity, home.

I notice the subtle changes and movements in my surroundings. I respond to the environment, the spaces, the places and the objects around me. I try to create new meaning and logic by rearranging them.
If I’m thinking about the cosmos, my relationship is entangled and really really old.
If I’m thinking about DNA my relationship is my grandmother, my great grandparents, and their journeys across seas, an ocean, and colonized land to a place called the ‘middle-west.’
If I think about the cosmos I know that there is no upside-down, or north, or ‘western’ and that is useful. And if I look around myself I think about people I love who love me as well.

Not only do psychedelics re-connect us with nature but that connectedness also makes us feel better.
When I see, my eye is the material for the reception of the image. My toes touch soil of the same chemical cocktail as my foot. When I go, I’ll return what I’ve borrowed.

Constantly exploring new surroundings as sensory knowledge building through the structures, people and cultures I’m surrounded by.
When I think of my surroundings, I find myself thinking most deeply about our metaphysical landscapes. I think about what it does to our health to carry so much psychic weight in the form of personal, collective and ecological grief.
Is like being a stranger in a strange land. The limitations of knowing no one, lacking English skills, and having extremely restricted resources became my new possibilities.

Watching them continue to die is a transformation that takes on beautiful and unexpected turns. They help me pay attention to my surroundings, and all the things that come and go from our lives. They remind me beauty is difficult.

Inspired by two themes, landscape and absence, she conveys a wake-up call about the effects of economic growth on environmental sustainability and the island’s inhabitants.
I see a lot going on or nothing much at all and I try to make something beautiful of it either way. At my best I see the best in what is close.

Today on the train a black woman three seats away offered me a seat next to her.
Smiled.
Nodded.
Mouthing words of understanding.
Kindred spirits.
Pleasing and appeasing the needs of others
with less of an ancestral weight of womaness of blackness.
The seat was left empty for stops.
Emptiness filled with fear of black skin and kindness for her likeness.

The natural world and all its life force nourishes and enables out planet to survive. We should welcome the embrace as it fosters life on our planet.
Grass, the cicada, and corn adorn the boot and skull, touching on each artist’s personal history as well as the rhythms and patterns of life, culture, politics, and death. We, like the cicadas and the corn continue our lives in cycles as we adapt to today’s ever-changing climate.

— This statement is a composition of fragments and sentences submitted by the artists in response to the prompt: What is your relationship with your surroundings?.

Satellite event:
Tesselescence (Green Space)
by Keeley Haftner

In partnership with Garden Apartment Gallery @gagchicago
Location: 3530 W. Fulton Blvd, Chicago
For information: @thefranklinoutdoor and https://thefranklinoutdoor.tumblr.com/

“Tesselescence (Green Space)” is a series of installations on neglected green spaces in and around Humboldt Park and Garfield Park, Chicago. They will be created using a tessellated cube pattern called “tumbling blocks” in three tones: the tone of ungroomed grass, the tone of trimmed grass painted with biodegradable lawn paint, and the tone of open soil embedded with bee and butterfly-attracting seeds. When first installed, the geometric pattern will appear clean and sharp, but over time it will ‘rewild’ into an ecologically active and natural space, one which “keeps in touch” with the local entomological needs in Chicago’s urban environment. The black and white binary of nature and culture will literally and metaphorically blur as the anthropocentric language of landscaping is overtaken by nature’s (eco)logic.

Keeley Haftner is a Saskatchewanian-Canadian artist based in the Netherlands whose artwork deals with garbage as a material and as a philosophical construct. Haftner’s work has been exhibited internationally in the US, Canada, and Europe at venues including MOCA (Toronto), Schering Stiftung (Berlin), and the Art Institute of Chicago. She received her BFA in 2011 from Mount Allison University and her MFA in 2016 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Fiber and Material Studies. She is a current recipient of the Canada Council for the Arts Research and Creation Grant, and a Haagse Kunstenaar with Stroom Den Haag.

THE FRANKLIN is a Cultural and Organizations partner for the Chicago Architecture Biennial.
Satellite partners for this exhibition and events include Garden Apartment Gallery @gagchicago and Compound Yellow @compoundyellow.
Please visit https://thefranklinoutdoor.tumblr.com/ for more information.
IG: @thefranklinoutdoor
Location: THE FRANKLIN: 3522 W Franklin Blvd, Chicago, IL 60624
Contact: (312)823-3632 (text only) or thefranklinoutdoor@gmail.com

Official Website

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Tags: Alberto Aguilar, Amy Vogel, Caroline Robe, Chicago, Devin T. Mays, East Garfield Park, Elsa Muñoz, KC Weldon, Keeley Haftner, Kellie Romany, Kyle Bellucci Johanson, Lionel Cruet, Marcela Torres, Marzena Abrahamik, Norma Vila Rivero, Onajide Shabaka, Regina Agu, Rodrigo Valenzuela, Salvador Jiménez-Flores, still life, The Franklin