The Secondaries
Amay Kataria / Abhishek Narula
October 1-24
Opening reception: Friday, October 2, 6-9pm

The Secondaries is an exhibition about comfort in alienation and the strange familiarity of places that were never meant for anyone in particular. Working across light installations, sculptures, real-time video, and screenprints, Kataria and Narula repurpose vernacular images and objects to construct a landscape of secondhand signs and borrowed surfaces. The title refers to what emerges when a copy stands on its own, freed from its source with an unexpected sense of belonging that appears at the very moment the copy resolves itself. This exhibition attempts to seek whether certain elements of the American landscape – the very ones that produce alienation might serve as a blueprint for common ground. Bright, flat, and reflected in its own desert, it belongs to no one in particular, and perhaps for that reason to anyone. Within that totalized landscape of signs and media, the exhibition asks where comfort actually lives. For an immigrant moving through a world that was not built for them, belonging does not arrive through roots or heritage but through the very alienness of the strip, the parking lot, the branded storefront. The works in the show sit inside that tension without resolving it, treating alienation not as a condition to overcome but as a shared surface where displacement and rootlessness meet.

Abhishek Narula is an artist, designer, and educator who works across sculpture, installation, sound, and video. His practice takes the form of interventions, working with what is already present. He reorients and disrupts objects and sites in order to open up formal possibilities and poetic experiences within the familiar. He is influenced by physical and digital infrastructural systems that sustain modern life and culture, treating this ambience itself as raw material for aesthetic inquiry and exploring themes of labor, presence, temporality, and the sublime. Narula is a Lecturer and Robotics Systems Designer at the University of Michigan’s Robotics Department. His work has been exhibited at international venues such as the Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology, Science Gallery Detroit, Speculum Artium Media Festival, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, WaveFarm, The Hyde Park Art Center, and the International Symposium of Electronic Arts (ISEA), among others. He holds an MFA in Studio Art from the Stamps School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan and an MS/BS in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Amay Kataria (b. 1990) is a Chicago-based new media artist working in video, sculpture, installation, and custom software. His practice explores the friction between the exponential pace of technological change and the gradual evolution of human understanding, examining how we adapt, resist, and create meaning within this temporal mismatch. Kataria recently completed the Center Program at Hyde Park Art Center in 2025 and was among eight South Asian artists invited to exhibit in “What is Seen and Unseen” at the South Asia Institute in Chicago, curated by Shelly Bahl in 2024. His work has been exhibited internationally at venues including Vector Festival, Toronto; Ars Electronica, Linz; Piksel Festival, Bergen; Electromuseum, Moscow; Stasjon K, Sandnes; Art Center Nabi, Seoul; and Marina Barrage, Singapore. He has completed residencies at Art Center Nabi, AIR Sandnes, and Mana Contemporary. Kataria holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a B.S. in Computer Engineering from Virginia Tech.

Mauricio López F. is multidisciplinary artist from Santiago, Chile currently based in Chicago, USA. Emerging from Chile’s early experimental punk scene, he later studied Musical Composition at the Escuela Moderna de Música y Danza and earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Aesthetics from the Pontificia Universidad Católica, focusing on the Chilean avant-garde scene. He recently completed an MFA in Sound at SAIC with a full scholarship. His practice explores the entanglement of visuality, sound, and motion through unexpected social synchronizations.

David Jones
The Last Road Trip, Continued 2026 projections and monoprints
Oct 2-25

David Jones is Co-Founder and previous Director of Anchor Graphics, Chicago (1990-2015), and of Anchor Press, Paper and Print, Milwaukee. Raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, he moved to the Midwest to pursue studies in photography and printmaking, attending the Center for Photographic Studies, Louisville; Banff Centre for the Arts; the Vancouver School of Art; the Kansas City Art Institute (BFA); and the Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago (MA). He has taught printmaking at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, Columbia College Chicago, and AP3. He has served on the Advisory Board of the Highpoint Center for Printmaking, Minneapolis, as Board President of the Southern Graphics Council International, and was Interim Director at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, NYC. Artist-in-Residencies include Press Papier, Trois-Rivières, Québec, Canada; Cill Rialaig, Ireland; the Roger Brown Residency Program (School of the Art Institute of Chicago); Columbia College Chicago; Sabiedriska Organizacija, Riga, Latvia. Extensive Visiting Artist and Guest Lecturer positions include Indiana University; University of Wisconsin–River Falls; Southern Illinois University Edwardsville; State University of New York at Buffalo; Savannah College of Art and Design; State College of Florida, Bradenton; University of Iowa; and Universidad Veracruzana, Xalapa, Mexico.

Exhibitions include the Merwin Gallery, Illinois Wesleyan University, Bloomington; Columbia University School of the Arts, NYC; Galería AP, Universidad Veracruzana, Xalapa, Mexico; Kala Institute, Berkeley, CA; St. Mary’s College, Notre Dame, IN; State College of Florida, Bradenton; Printworks, Chicago; Flatfile, Chicago; mn Gallery, Chicago; Louisiana Tech University; Block Museum of Art, and the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art. Collections include the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University and private collections throughout the United States.
Publications include California Society of Printmakers, One Hundred Years 1913–2013 (essay, San Francisco, 2013); The Almost Metal Collective (catalog essay, A+D Gallery, Columbia College Chicago); and Selections from the PrintZero Studios, Exchange #8 (catalog essay, Chicago, 2012).

His work exists within the worlds of street photographer, printmaker & maker. He captures images seen in the periphery, recording the passing of time. Having created a computer system which selects his photos through random chance operations, he chooses a merged image, downloads and color separates in Photoshop, and creates Xeroxed paper plates. The images are reconstituted using gum transfer (paper plate lithography) and hand coloring. He is also exploring the relationship that images have with sound, creating video layers that build up texture and density, conjuring a space in time juxtaposed with fragments of sound compressed, truncated split and sewn together.
Website: www.proppjonesstudio.com

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Tags: Abhishek Narula, Amay Kataria, David Jones, Humboldt Park, Ignition project space