HyperReal: The Body As Fantasy, The Club As Dreamscape, and Self Invention As Living Art
@ Evoke Gallery
3040 N Central Ave, Chicago, IL 60634
Opening Saturday, April 19th, from 6PM - 10PM
On view through Saturday, May 10th
Surrealism has always been a movement of transformation, a refusal to accept reality as fixed, an insistence on constructing new worlds through fragmentation, exaggeration, and dream logic. HYPERREAL presents a contemporary surrealist landscape, where the club kid movement is a central force in expanding the boundaries of selfhood, materiality, and embodied expression.
Through multi-media works including sculpture, painting, photography, film, and performance, this exhibition explores surrealism’s evolution beyond the canvas and into lived experience. In the club, the self is sculpted, remixed, and multiplied. Identity becomes an assemblage of mask and persona, the grotesque and the divine, the synthetic and the ephemeral. Club kids materialize surrealism onto their bodies, using fashion, found objects, and movement to construct hyper-exaggerated figures that exist outside conventional reality.
This exhibition also pays tribute to JoJo Baby, a Chicago icon whose presence in the underground scene embodied the surrealist ethos of self-invention. Their work, like that of so many club kids before and after, transformed the body into an artwork, dissolving the line between the real and the imagined, the ordinary and the otherworldly.
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Tags: Ále Campos, Bernard Colbert, Chicago, Evoke Gallery, Gabriel Chalfin-Piney- Gonzales, HyperReal: The Body As Fantasy The Club As Dreamscape and Self Invention As Living Art, Javi Gutierrez, Jeremy Plotkin Wong, Kerosene, LaNia Sproles, Lechedevirgen, Victor Edwards
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