Plead
@ Flatline Gallery
1925 N Milwaukee Ave, Chicago, IL 60622
Opening Saturday, June 20th, from 6PM - 9PM
On view through Saturday, July 11th
Join us this saturday June 20th from 6-9pm for the Opening reception of Plead, curated in collaboration with Dana Dawud
To Plead is to beg, testify, confess, perform sincerity, and ask to be believed. It is also a ritual act: a speech directed outward, toward an other. The works in Plead emerge from this compromised address, where identity is not simply expressed but externalized, encoded, and offered up.
The artists are not interested in authenticity as a return to some stable inner self. Rather, they work through the overproduction of selfhood: avatars, screenshots, selfies, cute/sexy/kawaii masks, and platform-native fragments. Plead stages an ego death through the self. The self is not overcome by being stripped away, but by being pushed through too many surfaces, symbols, and iterations. Personality becomes impersonal. Persona breach into the expanded field. Painting, drawing, sculpture, and cinema appear not as life rafts for a dead internet, but as ritual technologies for handling its remains.
Plead gathers works that ask what kinds of sincerity survive inside insincerity, and what forms of selfhood must be exhausted before one can finally get outside oneself.
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Tags: Anne-Joelle Tan, Anthony Yew, Chicago, Dana Dawud, FLATLINE GALLERY, Logan Square, Machine Yearning, Poorspigga, Ruby Bailey, Safiya Hawa, West Town
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