Please Set Me At Ease

Duo Exhibition:
Alexander Breus & Elijah Ross

Opening December 6th, 2025 – One Night Opening

3012 S. Archer Ave, Chicago, IL, 60608

In Please Set Me At Ease, artists Elijah Ross and Alexander Breus examine contemporary experience by translating personal and collective anxieties into new systems of symbolic communication. Together, the two artists generate a contemporary hieroglyphic language—an index of mythologies, psychic states, and ideological pressures that shape life today.

Breus draws from external crises and social ruptures, including the ongoing war in Ukraine and the erosion of political ideals. After closely studying each subject, he distills it into a generalized construct: a man-machine, an automaton, or a theatrical façade. This reduction produces totemic figures reminiscent of pagan patron deities—spirits presiding over a craft, a city, or a calamity. In works such as those from his Strolling Through Chicago series, Breus constructs emblematic protectors and antagonists of contemporary urban life. The Immovable Mover, for instance, captures the dark ambience of Chicago as a mechanism that absorbs individuals into its gears: a sharp-edged, faceless, armed figure embodying the political, industrial, and economic forces that animate the city.

Ross turns inward. His work navigates the psychic turbulence of trauma, isolating the estranged aspects of human interiority that recur across individuals. Drawing on the figure of the Primordial Man—a shared, unconscious origin point—Ross treats the body as an empty vessel that can be stretched, fused, and reconfigured. This interior, clay-like anatomy becomes a stage for conflicts between psychological states. In Solo Duete Dancers, two aspects of the self struggle to integrate: an intimate, almost tender posture colliding with the violent dissolution of separate archetypes into one. The figures’ embrace, equal parts brutal and protective, attempts to reconcile a mental rift within an indifferent, airless space.

Though their approaches differ, both artists construct and manipulate archetypal figures to grapple with the psychosis of contemporary life. Breus employs geometry and monumental patterns that flatten individuality; Ross uses a unifying corrosive texture that erodes the boundaries of his characters. Both confront—and confront us with—the pressures that shape modern subjectivity.

Please Set Me At Ease offers a memetic catalog of our current condition, presenting new mythologies through which the contradictions of modern life might finally become visible, legible, and—perhaps—bearable.

Official Website

More events on this date

Tags: Alexander Breus, Bridgeport, Elijah Ross, Please Set Me At Ease, RUPCORP