Zombie gathers the practices of Mauricio López F., Gabriel Moreno, and Pablo Lazala Ruiz, tracing systems of extraction across borders, languages, and industries. Through objects dislocated from place: tools rebranded, images redubbed, machinery left to break down, the work returns again and again to the worker: the body that labors, rests, and is called back to labor before rest is complete. This exhibition sits inside the exhausted systems that are already obsolete but refuse to finish dying, creating the working dead: zombie here not a metaphor, but a diagnosis.

Mauricio López F. is an interdisciplinary artist from Santiago, Chile, currently based in Chicago, USA. Emerging from Chile’s early hardcore punk scene, he later studied Musical Composition at Escuela Moderna de Música and earned a Bachelor’s degree in Aesthetics from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, where he focused on the Chilean avant-garde. He recently completed an MFA in Sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) on a merit full scholarship. His practice explores the entanglement of visuality, sound, and motion through unexpected social synchronizations. López F. has received several recognitions, including a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and a fellowship from The Arts Club of Chicago. He has been an artist-in-residence at the Chicago Artists Coalition, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, and, most recently, Monira Foundation. He was also named one of Newcity’s Breakout Artists for 2026. His work has been presented throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia, including at Centro Cultural GAM, EXPO Chicago, Chicago Architecture Biennial, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Gallery 400, Kobun Gallery (Japan), and the Ars Electronica Festival (Austria).

Gabriel Moreno (b. 1992) is an artist working in sculpture, drawing, and collage. He believes sculpture is a language of “touch”: a poetic operation where two things meet and change one another. His work has explored American histories of meat packing, refrigerator manufacturing, and logging as ways into studying industry, fantasy, preservation, and its failures. Moreno’s primary investigation is the paradoxical destruction implicit in modern development and production. Refrigerators are sometimes used to house precious contents. Other times they are cut down into molds for casting. He relies on the immediacy of objects to hold together material operations of maintenance,  presentation, splintering, and proliferation. Industrial artifacts and social propositions alike, these objects speak to the fantasy of defying entropy while admitting the impossibility of existing outside it.

Pablo Lazala Ruiz works as an independent artist, exhibition designer, and educator in Chicago. I am interested in the specificity of spaces and creating critical materiality to respond to the ideologies that haunt and inhabit them. My work investigates the dynamics that build spaces (public and private) and questions the ideals of progress and systems produced by the built environment and urbanization processes, especially in Colombia and Latin American diasporas. My work recurrently manifests in the invocation and burials of both the physical and ideological structures.

Serena JV Elston is a transdisciplinary sculptor and curator contemplating the body and its relationship to structures of power. Her research-based practice explores ecology, posthumanism, disability, and embodiment through a post-colonial lens. Her work asks if an institution can disable bodies, can bodies disable institutions. Grappling with disability as identity and condition, she depicts figures in states of decomposition and incompleteness. In her work, the body is never singular; it extends beyond flesh to encompass the institutional, the architectural, and the ideological. She renders bodies as precarious material forms that are vulnerable, interdependent, and impermanent. Serena interrogates the illusion of immortality alongside the certainty of death, asserting that all bodies, whether organic or constructed, require care to endure. Institutions that appear eternal are, in truth, as fragile as flesh. Through sculptural inquiry, she exposes systems of power as contingent structures sustained by our unconscious participation and vulnerability. By materializing their instability, she invites viewers to recognize the impermanence of these systems as clearly as we recognize our own mortality.

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Tags: Chicago Artists' Coalition, Gabriel Moreno, Mauricio López F., Pablo Lazala Ruiz, Serena JV Elston, West Town, Zombie