Fixed brings together artists who each previously exhibited at STNDRD, a program in Granite City, Illinois, that centers on the flagpole as a site for contemporary art. At STNDRD, artists explore the power of flags to symbolize, abstract, and canonize, working within the fixed structure of a single pole. Now, united in a new setting, their works carry that history forward. Fixed is in part a conversation with those earlier projects while broadening the frame: what does it mean for something to be fixed–not just on a pole, but in material, in memory, or in place?

At STNDRD, the flagpole is a literal fixed object. This exhibition begins from that anchor and moves beyond it, expanding on what it means for something to be fixed. The word carries multiple and sometimes contradictory meanings: to repair, to stabilize, to fasten in place, to determine an outcome, or even to rig a system. It can signal permanence or constraint, resilience or control. The works gathered here take up this range of meanings, exploring how fixity is never absolute. It remains contingent, changing across time, material, and context.

Sarah and Joseph Belknap’s collaged lumen prints hold traces of solar activity, fixing the fleeting intensity of light into permanent images while pointing to forces that cannot themselves be contained. Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo returns to the flag form, a symbol of fixed allegiance, to test its limits through language and color that resist quick legibility. Bruce Burton transforms everyday recycled materials into human-scaled forms that appear like vessels but refuse to hold; their fixity is provisional, caught between containment and contradiction.

Belleau & Churchill bring the question of cultivation and control into play through a mobile referencing Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire. Constantly shifting in space, it complicates the idea that nature can be fixed or improved through human intervention. Sage Dawson works with pulp and printmaking, processes that both preserve and erode, stressing the tension between impressions fixed in material and forms that remain vulnerable to change.

Mark Joshua Epstein’s shaped canvases fix surface and edge into forms that resist the rectangle, while layering references from Art Deco to Jewish papercutting. These works hold personal and cultural histories in ornament and pattern, while refusing to be confined to a single reading. Sarita Garcia reimagines vessels as sites of cultural memory, fixing the vibrancy of vernacular markets into symbolic form that empowers and remixes reality.

José Guadalupe Garza turns to lo-fi photographic practices that fix memory and nostalgia into image, while exposing the instability of American myths. Erin Hayden’s ceramic butterflies capture the fleeting image of flight, fixing transformation into fragile permanence.

These works suggest that to fix is never neutral. Fixity can mean repair, capture, stability or suppression. In this exhibition, the fixed object is less a resolution than a site of questioning, where permanence and instability, freedom and constraint, brokenness and repair exist side by side.

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Tags: Belleau & Churchill, Bruce Burton, Chicago, Erin Hayden, Fixed, José Guadalupe Garza, Joseph Belknap, Lower West Side, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Mark Joshua Epstein, Purple Window Gallery, Sage Dawson, Sarah Belknap, Sarita Garcia