CXW hours with the guest curator:
September 17, 2026
5:00 – 8:00 pm

Ron Athey – Marquis Von Bayros – Rachael Bos – Jamie Fletcher – Danny Frownfelter – Norbert Kox – Bill Lilly – Monika Plioplyte – Sun Ra – Philipp Schopke – Jon Serl – Bronislaw “Bruno” Sowa – Maria Vanik – Jean Wilson – Albert Zahn

Pray, carve, bleed, sing. Insist that to look death in the face, ritually and repeatedly, is how one kisses life on the lips. This is magic understood plainly: not sleight of hand, but the discipline of transformation, and religion in its most degraded form.

The sacred, in this view, is not piety but rupture: sacrifice, ecstasy, laughter, daemonic entities, and the corpse. Death here is not simply a subject but a method. Art becomes the site where the restricted economy of production and survival is deliberately breached, where a sovereign act of wasting oneself – bleeding, praying, dancing, carving toward no useful end – recovers a continuity between beings that ordinary, bounded selfhood forecloses. The works gathered here stage exactly this breach: each refuses the discreteness the self is supposed to maintain, offering itself instead as a willful expenditure, a controlled burn of the prairie’s boundary – on the border where the living meet the dead.

Beneath that scorched wound runs a river. Death is not an event waiting at the end of a life but a force already coursing through it. A pure differentiation, the self already a multiplicity being continuously undone and reassembled beneath its own name. This current treats the human not as a form to be preserved but as a threshold to be laughed at, dissolved, desire and death fused into a single accelerant burning through identity toward what is on the other side. This exhibition’s icons are not meditations on mortality, they are remnants of mortality’s discharge, operations and apparatuses built by hand, and by body, to run the current of death through the self on purpose – not to master it, but to see, however briefly, who or what rears its head from beneath the surface.

This exhibition runs through September 25, 2026.

******Guest curated by Ryan M. Pfeiffer

Ryan M. Pfeiffer is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and curator based in Chicago, IL. His artworks have been exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art (Singapore), Breese Little (London), Abbaye Saint–Magloire (France), Come Again (Berlin), The International Museum of Surgical Science (Chicago), Western Exhibitions (Chicago), Andrew Rafacz (Chicago), LAXART (Los Angeles), 80 WSE Gallery (New York), Indiana University (Indiana), among others. His works and exhibitions have been published in The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, Fulgur Press, The New City, the Journal for Extreme Anthropologie, and the Religious Studies Review Journal. In 2022, he co-curated the first Austin Osman Spare (1886–1956) exhibition in the United States at Iceberg Projects (Chicago), celebrating the centennial anniversary of a rare folio of drawings from the Kinsey Institute’s collection. His current curatorial project is ORGANGRINDER at M. LeBlanc Gallery (Chicago).

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Tags: Albert Zahn, arts of life, Bill Lilly, Bronislaw “Bruno” Sowa, Chicago, Circle Contemporary, Danny Frownfelter, Death Magic, Jamie Fletcher, Jean Wilson, Jon Serl, Maria Vanik, Marquis Von Bayros, Monika Plioplyte, Norbert Kox, Philipp Schopke, Rachael Bos, Ron Athey, Ryan M Pfeiffer, Sun Ra, West Town