Cream Co takes over our Market School to present an iteration of their General Economy Exquisite Exchange (G.E.E.E.): Plant Your Fears Here.

This exchange station of plants and language will use fears as an opportunity for growth. Participants will be invited to write down a fear and attach it to an allium bulb to be planted the following week in a “fear garden” at William Hill’s Woodlawn Botanical Garden. Spider plantlets will be offered as a receipt of release.

Is your fear slow growing like an Allium Azureum, unpredictable like Allium Sphaerocephalon or sensational, huge and hollow like Aflatunense? Or maybe your fear is open ended and comes and goes like Fritillaria Meleagris. Transform your fears into beautiful alliums that will bloom in Spring! Come on out and see what plants can do!

This event is a part of our Environmental Concerns project taking place from September 26th-November 18th, which looks at local intersections between the natural world and social environments through exhibitions, installations, and public events.

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Cream Co. aims to collapse boundaries between the individual and the group, art and life, the mind and the senses.

We are a group of artists that share a commitment to using art as a social science and as a way to create interactive installations that propose alternative economies based on sharing. Established in 2000, our Chicago-based studio operates as a lab-of-sorts where we grow and look at live plants, wilting flowers, and self-sprouting succulents. We methodically record what we see, with painting, with sculpture and with plants. We use paint to catalogue the rates plants grow, how petals decay, and how light can support a plant in one context and hurry its demise in another. We use sculpture to record things like the power of the sun as it reveals itself through shadows on our studio floor. We use plants to measure how other plants fade and grow. In addition to our studio practice, we have a public practice where we use plants, especially heirloom tomato and herb plants, to create call-and-response installations that aim to turn public spaces into creative exchange sites and to empower urban dwellers to grow heirloom and conservation plants. We consider sites, ask what can we do to invite public improvisation, and trust others to use our works to work creatively. Each site evolves organically through exchanges made by the community and each site becomes a portrait-of-sorts of the audience that engages with the work. Often, public interactions with our work become stunning records of generous and hopeful gestures.All in, we see ourselves in plants and we see what plants can do.

Additional Links from our website:

https://creamco.net/about/
https://creamco.net/artists/brett-swinney/
https://creamco.net/artists/sasha-earle/
https://creamco.net/artists/marie-krane/

Official Website

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Tags: 61st Street Farmer's Market, Brett Swinney., Chicago, Cream Co., Environmental Concerns, General Economy Exquisite Exchange, Hyde Park, Marie Krane, Plant Your Fears, Sasha Earle