Opening Friday, November 13th, from 6PM – 9PM
Closing Reception Friday, December 11th, from 6PM – 9PM

The Center for Mad Culture presents Living Madness: Joy, Anguish and the Terrors of Existence, a group exhibition curated by Aespyne Alix and Catie Burrill. Through intimate exchanges of personal narrative and iconography, the exhibition reframes madness as an emergent and restorative practice of resilience.

Featuring the work of Aespyne Alix, Cassidy Ott, Catie Burrill, Raine Yung, Riley Brady, Sofija Baykun, and Timothea Canny, Living Madness explores the raw landscape of each artist’s inner world. Across painting, embroidery, photography, textiles, film, performance, and mixed-media installation, the works on view resist clinical definitions of madness as a singular or purely pathological experience, embracing the unruly bleed between discordance and connection.

Drawing on the visual language of craft, mythology, religion, digital culture, and the uncanny, the works on view unsettle familiar boundaries between pleasure and pain, humor and horror, identity and environment. Each artist approaches the instability of selfhood and the search for meaning from a different direction: through tangled limbs and monstrous avatars, haunted domestic objects, internet rabbit holes, ritualistic gestures, and the strange theater of inhabiting a body that refuses to behave. Acts of rest, joy, and self-actualization exist alongside meditations on anxiety, dissociation, and estrangement. Within the gallery space, the pursuit of a better mood leads down a Google search wormhole; a smiley face invites an existential crisis; the unused trimmings of an onion become a subject of vanitas, a memento mori. Rather than arriving at a unified account of madness, the exhibition challenges stigma and isolation, making room for vulnerability, absurdity, and the occasional grotesque punchline.

Throughout the exhibition, art becomes a means of making the internal visible, translating the seemingly unspeakable into tactile form. Thread knots together gestures of patience, repetition, and care, transforming domestic craft into a record of obsession, endurance, and connection. Photography captures fleeting encounters with the self and a world that can feel both intimate and alien. Sculptures give awkward, oversized, almost monstrous physical form to experiences that resist description, while painted surfaces twist bodies, symbols, and familiar objects into vivid, improbable configurations. Across these varied mediums, the mundane becomes uncanny, the grotesque becomes tender, and the personal spills into the collective. Together, these tangible gestures bring individual experiences into relational proximity, allowing inner worlds to enter into a collective dialogue.

In a reflection on the Center for Mad Culture’s vision of madness as a rich and complex cultural identity, Living Madness: Joy, Anguish, and the Terrors of Existence treats madness not as a private failure to be corrected, but as a point of cultural connection with the power to bridge difference. The exhibition invites viewers into the beautifully uncomfortable space where our strangest impulses, private rituals, and unruly inner worlds meet. Here, the realities that so often isolate us become part of a shared language, making room for empathy, belonging, and the dignity to be understood on our own terms.

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Tags: Aespyne Alix, Cassidy Ott, Catie Burrill, Center for Mad Culture, Fine Arts Building, Living Madness: Joy Anguish and the Terrors of Existence, Raine Yung, Riley Brady, Sofija Baykun, Timothea Canny