OCTOBER 18 - NOVEMBER 15
Drifting off to Dreamland: A collaboration between Claire Burke Dain & Albert Reid Owens.
This is the work of Claire and Albert. The remnants of apartment hallways, window frames and basement scenes. The work is for humming, holding notes, not singing. In an apartment music plays. A hand runs through the fur of a dog. Out of the window are hundreds of other windows and in each one a hand runs through the fur of a dog. Here this is, the music left on, the maps folded up and dreamland drifts in.
Claire Burke Dain is a painter and educator who lives in Chicago. She has worked as a scenic designer and props designer in New York and Chicago. She received her BFA in Painting at the Kansas City Art Institute. Claire approaches painting by attempting to make shapes that balance each other and fit together. The colors are there to establish patterns and links between shapes. There are figurative elements as a way to portray human emotion. Some of the links are hostile or perverse because they are figures trapped and intertwined. At the end of the day she creates attractive patterned portraits that contain little people who are forced to act as a group.
Albert Reid Owens is an artist living and working in Chicago. He is currently pursuing a Master of Architecture at SAIC. He also holds a post-graduate certification from the Glasgow School of Art and a BFA in Sculpture from the Kansas City Art Institute. Albert maintains an interdisciplinary practice split between poetry, visual art, and architecture. The work Albert produces functions like music left on in the home while you go about your day. It is there, You hum its recognizable tune and speak the chorus aloud. A lyric generates a playback of imagery in succession. A repeating set of lived experiences float through— days, people, objects, fade in and out. The song played a hundred times is not listened to closely. The song allows you to project yourself against it. This claim for what the work strives to achieve is asserted through the use of handwritten text and concise mark- making. The text is derived from Alberts poems which are purposely camouflaged within the work to strip the text of a singular authorship. The work is ultimately made to hang in the home, to be the music left on.
OCTOBER 18 - NOVEMBER 15
ASIDES, BESIDES: ephemera, effluvia, flotsam, jetsam, sculpture, drawing, & a solo exhibition curated by JESSE MALMED
Alongside Drifting off to Dreamland Exhibition: A collaboration between Claire Burke Dain and Albert Reid Owens
Asides, Besides
A gathered gether of scraps for a tikkun collage, an anecdoted typography of choice, the cutting room walls at the marginal center, ties to and from the dream factotum yuga. A mirror from a car that was a gallery in a gallery that’s a different gallery from the gallery it’s in that magnetized a car called and caused affect, an auto body experience like a pothole for the portal set, a plothole. Conclusions, baths, blanks, but mostly faces. Mostly an eye that becomes a nose over there, someone else’s mouth.
* * * * *
Jesse Malmed is an artist, curator and educator working in video, performance, text, occasional objects and their gaps and laps over and under, Chicago and Milwaukee. Various pre-occupations include: Infinite Gesticulator, Disorganizer, Paranoiac Research Assistant, Choir Conductor, Cosmic Concierge, Junk Shop Salesman, Re-Titler, Poet-Comedian, Traffic Caller, Obstinate-Minded Professor, Bootlegger, Pro Bono Closed Captioner and Imaginary Television Host. He has free gaza performed, screened and exhibited widely at museums, cinemas, galleries, bars and barns and willfully entangles himself with the Live to Tape Artist Television Festival, Trunk Show, Nightingale Cinema, Bad at Sports, Western Pole, ACRE and the idea container and cap/sticker/doorhanger/magnet/bookmark/zine/temptat/etc. imprint Jetsy Merchblatt. Of Santa Fe, he studented at Bard College and the University of Illinois Chicago and currently professes assistively at fuck ice the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and via www.jessemalmed.net / jetsy.biz / @marmblatt. Next month, Western Pole celebrates its tenth anniversary with an exhibition at Patient Info, Chicago. Consider this biography your formal invitation.
SEPTEMBER 13 - OCTOBER 11
New works by Alex Bradley Cohen, Vivian Cohen, and Tim Pigott.
New works by Alex Bradley Cohen, Vivian Cohen, and Tim Pigott, in conjunction with Making a Compound, a mural by Nicola Florimbi with Chloe Florez and Ella Slossburg.
This exhibition, a show between Tim Pigott, Vivian Cohen and Alex Bradley Cohen seeks to celebrate the everyday working class. It’s an exhibition by three Midwesterners who seek joy and connection amongst everyday working people. Their works of art reflect this affinity that they have to the people and the joy those people bring into their lives.
Tim Pigott is a multidisciplinary enthusiast who practices painting, printmaking, embroidery, and animation at Sentimental Studios on Sawyer Avenue. Based in Chicago, he takes inspiration from public transit and the city's people and buildings, current, past and imagined.
Alex Bradley Cohen (b. 1989) lives and works in Chicago, IL. Alex utilizes painting to visualize the push and pulls of political life. Working with acrylic paint on canvas, he depicts friends, family members, and himself in scenes that foreground everyday moments.
Vivian Cohen (b. 1950) is a self taught artist living and working in Chicago Illinois.
Making a Compound
Inspired by Diego Rivera’s, Making a Fresco, this mural honors the community that comes from collective labor. Self sustaining diy spaces are only possible because of the hard work and dedication that comes from artists working together.
Nicola Florimbi is an artist born in Santa Fe, New Mexico who lives in Chicago, Illinois. Education:2022-2024- MFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL 2017-2019 - BFA, Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles. Group Exhibitions: Threadings, Parlour + Ramp, Chicago, IL, 2025- Masterclass: 25 years of painting alumni from SAIC, SECRIST | BEACH, Chicago, IL, Orange Noise,The Capsule, Chicago, IL, 2024, We will become an island, Compound Yellow, Chicago, IL, 2024, Graduate Show I, SAIC, Chicago, IL, 2024, Until You Say So, Bolsky Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA, 2018, AHWA, Salafi Cowboy Collective, Los Angeles, CA, 2017, Bibliography: “Graduate Admissions Painting and Drawing Catalogue”, 2024, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, cover image pg.1, “Brother Outsider.” Damien Rose, Minaret Records, 2020, album cover, “On Sexual Violence.” Journal: Art Speaks I, 2018, Otis College of Art and Design, cover image, pg.10-17, “Cosmopolitanism.” Columbia Journal of Literary Criticism, XII, 2014, cover image, pg. 20,110
Chloe Florez is a third year student from Massachusetts, currently studying at the School of the Art Institute Chicago. She is a multidisciplinary artist with a particular interest in experimental animation.
Ella Slossburg is a third year student at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a multidisciplinary artist and a color enthusiast. Originally from the Philadelphia area, Slossburg is currently focused in illustration, printmedia, and painting.
August 9 - September 6
My Little Realities Solo Exhibition of new works by Juliann Wang
My Little Realities
I grew up in the theater and story house as a kid, and between everyday life spent a lot of time dreaming inside my head. I’m fascinated about the idea of what reality is?
“My Little Realities” present the small taste of this ongoing experience. These photography series embody the theatrical narratives that both recreate and capture the moments from living fiction that evoke the beauty of daily life in vignette and humanity in landscape.
Juliann Wang is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist, working in visual art, sound, performance, and dance practice. This work focuses on the capacity to evoke a coherent vision of communication, harmony, and meditative contemplation, in dialogue with contemporary practices and societal context. She has been actively creating and sharing her practice through exhibitions, performances, workshops, community engagement, lectures, events, etc.
Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including solo exhibitions at Elon University, Oh Art Foundation, Saint Xavier University, The Schoolhouse Arts Center (China) etc and group exhibitions at Susquehanna Art Museum, Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts, The Cleve Carney Museum of Art, Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection at Art Institute of Chicago, Cetys University in Baja California (México), Hyde Park Art Center, Evanston Art Center, 33 Space (China) and others.
It has been fetured in various exhibitions and publications such as International Virtual Exhibition of “Bie-Modernism: Current Challenges and the Future”, the Center for Chinese Bie modern Studies at Georgia Southwestern State University, Art Center Highland Park, Sullivan Galleries at Art Institute of Chicago, China Residencies (New York City) and in the publication «ShuDo» Magazine (China). Select performance work has been presented at the Chicago Cultural Center, Anderson Japanese Garden, Experimental Sound Studio, Old Town School of Folk Music, etc. Additionally, her sound projects have been featured in the “Harris Theater Fest: Music + Dance in the Park” at Millennium Park 2023, as a performer/presenter for New Music Chicago’s 2023 “Impromptu Fest”, and curating a 16-Channel Listening Experience of the album at Elastic Art Foundation.
Juliann received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, BFA from Lesley University, a DCASE IAP Grant award recipient in 2021 + 2022, and recipient of the The Creative Accelerator Award from the Illinois Arts Council 2025. She was awarded Fellowship Artist at The Schoolhouse Arts Center in Beijing 2014, an Artist Residency at High Concept Labs, and subsequently a Fellow Artist in 2023.
JULY 5 - AUGUST 2
"Dispatched" by Connie Noyes
Dispatched is a site-specific, immersive installation that invites viewers to question perception and reflect inward. Blending physical and emotional narratives, the work incorporates sculpture, video, and sound to create a layered sensory experience. Discarded chairs—wrapped in yards of elastic thread and encased in wax—are stripped down to their essential forms, transformed into cocoon-like structures that suggest both absence and metamorphosis. Suspended at varying heights, these enigmatic forms hover in front of a shifting video projection, where presence dissolves into waves, light, and emptiness—blurring boundaries and inviting contemplation on what is seen, felt, and remembered.
During the exhibition, Connie will offer public talks, artist-led tours, and panel discussions to foster community connection, creating space for collective reflection on grief, renewal, and resilience.
An interactive workshop will invite participants to make cocoons and fill them with memories, keepsakes, or symbols of personal significance. The work will transform the YZ gallery into a
shared space for conversation, introspection, and collective healing through these encounters.
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Connie Noyes is a multidisciplinary artist working with water as a conduit for exploring grief, cultural memory, and collective emotional growth. Her practice examines how bodies—both
human and water—hold history, loss, and transformation. Born in Washington, DC, she earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MA in psychology from Notre
Dame de Namur University. Her work is shaped by training as a death doula and her studies in psychology and Butoh. Noyes received the Cabins Haystack Residency Fellowship and two artist grants from the City of Chicago, she exhibited internationally in Paris, Innsbruck, Munich, Dubai, and Bangi and participated in Art Abu Dhabi, Art Bahrain, and the Biennale
Internationale d'Art non-objectif. In the U.S., she exhibited with the Harvestworks Team on Governors Island, NY, and presented solo exhibitions at Evanston Art Center, Wedge Projects,
and Abel Contemporary. Her work is held in collections at The Museum of Contemporary Photography, The Ekstrom Library, RISD, and the Greenville County Museum. She currently
lives and works in Chicago.
* In conjunction with Connie Noyes' "Dispatched", GalleryX presents: "Walking, Lost and Found" + "Natural Pressure": sound installation by Rachel Epp Buller and designed seating by Maia Rauh and Caroline Branch.
july 5 - august 2
Walking, Lost and Found by Rachel Epp Buller + Natural Pressure
In conjunction with Connie Noyes' solo exhibition: "Dispatched" Compound Yellow is excited to present the work of Rachel Epp Buller: "Walking, Lost and Found" accompanied by Natural Pressure: Collaborative Seating by Caroline Branch & Maia Rauh
Opening reception: July 5th, 2025
2pm to 6pm
Walking, Lost and Found
I am pilgrim #15749 on the Walk of Wisdom, a self-guided path that winds through the eastern part of the Netherlands. In July 2024, a dear friend and I spent eight days walking alongside fields and waterways, atop dikes, up and down hills, through forests and sandy heaths. We walked through towns and villages, over bridges and canals, in sunshine and in rain.
Walking made new learning possible. I learned to know the feel of different surfaces through the soles of my feet. I learned to know the strength of my own body and the endurance needed to keep putting one foot in front of another. I learned to greet new neighbors as we repeatedly encountered brambles and nettles, yarrow and rowanberry, gradually attuning myself to the surroundings and learning to listen in this place.
The eight-part text of this sound piece is a meditation upon the rhythm of walking, getting lost and found, the strange becoming familiar as we learn to walk in a new way.
***The piece on exhibit here is a 2-channel version of an 8-channel sound piece that I made at the Sound Studies Institute, University of Alberta, Canada, in January 2025.
Rachel Epp Buller is a multimedia artist, avid walker, practitioner of Deep Listening, and mother of three. Her recent solo exhibitions include Invitations to Listen at the Mulvane Art Museum at Washburn University (2023), In/Visible Care at Outlook Gallery in Minneapolis (2022), Hoping You Are Well at the Salina Art Center (2020), and Taking Care and Other Words at Borough Road Gallery in London (2019). In June, she participated in the Walking & Art residency at Gibraltar Point on Toronto Island. She is a two-time Fulbright Scholar, to Germany and Canada, and her work was recently shortlisted for the international Marsarto Awards for Walking Art. She is a professor of Visual Arts and Design at Bethel College in Kansas.
Natural Pressure: Collaborative Seating by Caroline Branch & Maia Rauh
Natural Pressure in an interactive seating piece designed to accompany the sound work titled, “Walking, Lost & Found,” by Rachel Epp Buller. The bench's surface is inspired by the experience of walking on the different textures of the earth beneath us and how they can both cause discomfort and release. Various sizes and shapes of stones, foraged from nearby rivers in Madison, Wisconsin, are embedded in double woven fabric. This process of double weaving involves simultaneously creating two hand woven pieces of fabric on the loom. In this process the interchanging of the two fabrics creates seamless pockets for the rocks to rest.
In Buller’s piece, she reflects on the heaviness of her pack and how it transforms from a nagging discomfort to a dependable comfort. Rauh and Branch created weighted objects to sit with the listener throughout the duration of the piece. Made also from handwoven fabric these objects represent the comfort of heaviness and companionship.
These objects are to be held and played with while the listeners sit and listen.
Caroline Branch is an interdisciplinary craft artist from Richmond, VA. She graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2023 with a bachelors in Craft/Material studies. Branch also recently obtained a technical diploma in Cabinetry and Millwork from Madison Area Technical College in spring 2025. Finding comfort in the day-to-day oddities of life, Branch makes work that is both surreal and humourous in nature.
Maia Rauh is an artist and designer from Milwaukee, WI. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2024 with a Bachelors of Science in Textile Design and a certificate in Studio Arts. Rauh’s recent works are concentrated in weaving, exploring the visual complexities of pattern, color and texture.
april 26 - june 28
Petal Fold, Rabbit Ear, Inside Reverse: New Works by Hai-Wen Lin
Compound Yellow is honored to present the work of Hai-Wen Lin . Opening reception Saturday April 26 2PM - 6PM
Hai-Wen Lin is a folding artist, currently based in Chicago. Lin has designed numerous original origami models, published diagrams for the Pacific Coast Origami Convention, and has exhibited and taught at the East Bay Origami Convention, and the MIT origami convention. Their research in the application of origami techniques on smart textiles has been exhibited at the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles and has been published in the International Symposium on Wearable Computers.
In Xgallery
Ziki and Bubba Playspace by Hai-Wen Lin and Savanna Li
Petal Fold, Rabbit Ear, Inside Reverse
Two valleys diagonal—this is where I usually start. Then some mountains, a petal, again, one in front, repeat behind. A bird emerges. You can make anything with the right number of mountains and valleys. I was nine when I first learned to make a dragon. New creatures birthed daily from my hands; I was given the gift of knowing it is possible to create anything.
Let me rephrase: create is not exactly the right word. Everything is already here, the dragons too. Origami is an art of rearrangement. You do not add pigment, you do not carve stone. Take nothing, give nothing, use what you are and become something new entirely. I remember looking in the mirror as a teen, seeing the corners of my body, and folding my penis between my legs wondering what it might look like to be a woman. Sometimes I start thinking about surgery, but I hold off; I tell myself, "no cuts, no glue."
I’m rearranging again, refolding old parts of myself, trying to look new. I hear things always look better on paper. It is the surface of dreams, prayers, plans, revolutions, wishes. On paper, everything goes right. Claude asked me if I had ever folded 1000 cranes before and I told her no, I get bored of folding the same thing over and over. Maybe naïve to think wishes come quickly, swept in a breath blowing birthday candle or in the snap of a wishbone. Some wishes are slow and difficult and deliberate and annoying and boring and repetitive and administrative and costs $388 and needs you to wait in line at the circuit court so that it can be properly stamped.
Everyone is trying to get their paper in order. After the election in November, the urgency for trans people to update their documents felt more dire than ever. Paper is the place of dreams, but paper also makes real. Thankfully, I had already changed my name a few years prior. I have paper to prove it now. I carry both of my names in my bag, one living, one dead, folded up, neat, twice-over—two valleys. My deadname tucked, all my paper creatures and 15 years of origami aspirations with it. These days, more people know me for flying than folding.
I'm less interested in dragons now. I just want to look at the valleys and the mountains. I’ve begun to see the entire world as a single plane. Everything is a rearrangement: animals are folded, objects are folded, architectures are folded. I lived at the Grand Canyon last fall and hiking to the bottom, peering at the oldest geologic strata, I saw the Earth itself folded.
We begin with the embryonic fold and end with the wrinkling of our bodies, folding the soul a few million times in between. We're told to prize the pristine and uncreased, but there is no other way to become a crane. We're predisposed to sit and watch as the world unfolds before us, but origami is a commitment to folding, organizing and reorganizing, even after all has seemingly come undone. Origamists call this pre-creasing, preparation before collapse. We lay careful lines, begin to fold our names and our lives and our world, creasing the horizon so that with careful hands, we can coax this reality into a shaping of our own.
june 6 - june 29
Instructions on how to spread dandelions
Pegah Bahador
Hyeseul Song
Yue Xu
Pegah Bahador (b. 1998, Tehran) practices doori o doosti, a Farsi term that translates to ‘distance and friendship,’ and emphasizes how the two coexist and (even sonically) intertwine. This epistolary practice resembles letters- and is itself a type of correspondence between them and their subjects. They work between language, drawing, and video making as traces of perception to focus on place and language dislocation, and the gradual deterioration and loss of opacity and information that follows it. They earned their BFA at Tehran University of Art and are currently pursuing their MFA in Art, Theory, Practice at Northwestern University.
Hyeseul Song (b.1995, Seoul) lives and works in Chicago. She earned a Bachelor of Architecture from Sungkyunkwan University in 2021 and a BFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2023. She is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Chicago. Her works explore the areas where the built environment and nature overlap, where the inherent qualities of form and material intertwine, invoking an emotional resonance with the surroundings.
Yue Xu is an artist based in Chicago. She earned her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2021 and her BFA from Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in China. Her work has been exhibited at the National Museum of Mexican Art (2024), Chinese American Museum of Chicago (2024), 6018|North (2023), The Plan (2023), Chicago Art Department (2021), Terrain Biennial (2021), Mana Contemporary (2021), 062 (2020), and Comfort Station (2020) in Chicago, IL, USA; as well as the Guangdong Museum of Art (2017) and Xinzao Contemporary Art Center (2016) in Guangdong, China.
MARCH 22 - APRIL 5
"So You Want An Award Or Something?" Solo work by Mack Baker
What if sin wasn’t something to hide—but something to celebrate? So You Want An Award Or Something? is a bold, immersive exhibition by Mack Baker that transforms the seven deadly sins into award-worthy ceramic trophies. Set in a staged trophy hall complete with satin drapes and theatrical lighting, this provocative collection challenges conventional ideas of shame while inviting you to embrace the beauty of imperfection.
Join us for an unforgettable evening at our Opening Reception on March 22. Enjoy live sounds provided by Blesstonio and refreshing beverages courtesy of our friends at Kudu Social. This is your chance to mingle with a vibrant community of art lovers and cultural influencers. We're also proud to shout out our sponsors from the Design Museum of Chicago for their generous support.
Our dynamic exhibition program continues with:
Performance (April 5, 2025, 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM): A live performance by Mack Baker and Jeff Gibbs, blending movement and sound in response to the exhibition’s themes.
Artist Talk (April 5, 2025, 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM): A compelling conversation between Mack Baker and curator Justin Dwaun Redding, moderated by Inga Mutimura.
Dinner (April 12, 2025, 7:00 PM – 10:00 PM): A seven-course dining experience in collaboration with Txa Txa Club, where each course represents one of the seven deadly sins.
February 15 - March 15
FLOSS WAGON: SOLO EXHIBITION OF NEW WORKS BY VESNA JOVANOVIC
Opening Saturday February 15th
2pm to 5pm
On view from 2/15 to 3/15/2025
In this lively new body of work by Vesna Jovanovic, fleshy abstract forms rejoice in the buffoonery of carnival antics while adorned in sparklers, butt plugs, and candy. The surfaces of Jovanovic’s paintings alternate from glossy to matte, deep to flat, in ways that require a bodily presence for their observation. As with her past work, Jovanovic begins with chance operations. By intuitively pouring ink on paper (in this case Yupo), she encounters accidental motifs that guide the next decision in her process. This new work is influenced by historical accounts of French medieval carnivals and various other collective events such as Saturnalia, Holi, and Candy Kid Raves, with an emphasis on carnivalesque humor and joy.
Vesna Jovanovic is a Chicago-based artist whose work focuses on bodily topics such as posthumanism, biopolitics, and embodied phenomenology. She is a recipient of numerous residency fellowships including The Studios MASS MoCA, Santa Fe Art Institute, Ucross Foundation, VCCA France, and a long-term studio residency at the International Museum of Surgical Science. Her artwork has been exhibited widely and is included in permanent collections at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, International Museum of Surgical Science, and the Koehnline Museum of Art. Jovanovic has worked in various disciplines over the course of her career, including ceramics, chemistry, and photography, and is currently concentrating on painting and drawing.