Join us for an artist to artist conversation with artist and musician, Madeleine Aguilar and artist and gallery worker, Joseph Josué Mora.

Join us for an artist to artist conversation with artist and musician, Madeleine Aguilar and artist and gallery worker, Joseph Josué Mora. Inspired by the themes of our ETERNALRETURN exhibition, they will discuss the ways in which process, play, and practice can inform an artistic practice. In response to Sofia’s work and experimentation, they will respond to the work on view and exhibition artist, Sofia Clausse’s use of artist tools within her work. The talk will take place during the exhibition’s Finissage.

About Madeleine Aguilar:

Madeleine is an artist and musician from Chicago. Her work is often mobile / modular / interactive and can be found in backyards, libraries, storefronts, homes, galleries, book store, and street fairs. Using the archive as form, she acknowledges the passing of time by cataloging lived spaces, collected objects, familial histories, personal relationships, natural phenomena, mundane routines, and ephemeral moments.

She currently runs bench press, a small risograph press, the Print Lab in the School of Design at the University of Illinois Chicago, and she co-teaches a bookmaking and risography class at Ox-Bow School of Art & Artists’ Residency.

About Joseph Josué Mora:

As a multidisciplinary artist and gallery worker with a politicized identity, Joseph Josué Mora highlights issues related to immigration, labor, and social disenfranchisement. He observes similarities between the bureaucratic systems and spaces he exists in—for example, the nuances of surveillance, erasure, and unseen labor. Mora documents the mundaneness of art preparators through labor, material research, and archiving, using them as tools in his artmaking process.

Joseph Josué Mora is a Mexican-born and Chicago-raised multidisciplinary artist. He has exhibited in the Chicago Latinx Art Now Biennial, the National Museum of Mexican Art, Indiana University Northwest, the Cleve Carney Art Gallery, and the Chicago Art Department. He was selected as one of the eight Breakout Artists of 2022 in Newcity Chicago Magazine and was featured in the accompanying exhibition at the Chicago Artists Coalition. Mora was selected as an artist for the Hyde Park Art Center’s Center Program in 2023. He exhibited his fourth solo exhibition titled Condition Report at Yes Project Space in 2024. Mora is the recipient of the Illinois Arts Council’s Creative Accelerator Fund, the Yollocalli Artist Fund for Alumni, and the Caxton Club Grant. His artwork can be found in the collections of the National Museum of Mexican Art and the Illinois State Museum in Springfield.

In addition to his studio practice, Mora also has experience working in galleries as an art preparator and, most recently, as the Assistant Director of Exhibitions and Staff Advisor for SITE Galleries and INCUBATOR at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where he worked between 2021 and 2025 and received his Bachelor’s of Fine Arts. He is currently pursuing his Master’s in Fine Arts in the Art, Theory, and Practice Department at Northwestern University in Evanston.

About the Exhibition:

cam.contemporarie presents, ETERNALRETURN, the first solo exhibition in Chicago of work by London based artist, Sofia Clausse. In a series of black and white pressed prints in dialogue with small ceramic sculptures, wall diagrams, and installation, Clausse explores the subversion of language, spiritual cycles, and the elusive nature of endings and beginnings.

The concept of ETERNALRETURN is a continuous loop — an hourglass, a zen garden of lines layered with meaning, or an experimental process and practice of terminology. “I’m always thinking about transformations from one thing to the next, and to the next, and to the next, and then back to the beginning,” Clausse says. “There’s always this thing of things being back at the beginning; there’s no beginning and no end, essentially.”

Clausse explores the ambiguity of time, the fleeting nature of it, but also the determined and definite aspect of it, through a series of text and topographical pieces. The works are worked methodically until they reach a state of illegibility, reminiscent of the conceptual rigour of artist Glenn Ligon. Intentionally placed black lines and blacked out letters, chopped and woven pages, and text as a metaphor for possibilities: an exploration of words broken down to their basic form, becoming a representation of patterns, codes, or mantras. For Clausse, her work exists somewhere between a mantra and a meditation, and a controlled experiment exploring the loss of control and the elasticity of meaning.

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Tags: Chicago, In Practice, Joseph Josue Mora, Lower West Side, Madeleine Aguilar, Mana Contemporary Chicago