On view from October 24 - December 5, 2026

Saturdays from 2 to 5 or by appointment

The Missing Game Warden

The Missing Game Warden is a two-person exhibition at Compound Yellow presented by Chicago-based artists Frances Lee and Zespo. The exhibition brings together new and past works to explore the possibilities of painting to describe and embody our current social experiences and questions around how we are governed.

On a recent trip to the Kohler Art Preserve (Sheboygan, WI), the artists encountered a sculptural work by Peter Jodocy (b. 1888, Belgium — d. 1971, Michigan, US). The striking wood and plaster, life-size composition — depicting a kneeling hunter aiming a rifle at an animated deer — was made for the artist's own home as part of a yard environment with offbeat sculptures expressing humorous reflections on American culture. Reading the museum label, they learned the original composition had a third element, "a game warden," not on view and missing, with the Art Preserve actively searching for information on its whereabouts.

This third element — an official consulting a rulebook and representing the regulations of hunting season and wildlife management — would surely change the asymmetrical power relationship between the hunter and deer. With no visual reference for the game warden, the two artists draw associations between the missing figure and their own memories and cultural references of this role.

In this exhibition, Zespo and Lee use the medium of painting to individually imagine the missing warden, considering how this third presence would alter how we understand what we see. Through formal means — composition, color, cropping, and the description of figure/ground relationships through light and space — each artist brings their own painting approach to expand upon the narrative stakes of the missing figure and its responsibility as a guardian of shared rules. Alongside these two new paintings, the artists bring together a group of their works that point away from the missing and toward what remains: social activities and systems that invite a need for expression. 

At a time when we are reckoning with the role of government and the experience and impact of rules, regulations, and the figures who enforce them, Zespo and Lee offer two ways of responding to the same prompt — imagining the missing warden — to ask: how are we governed, and how do we trust others with this responsibility? Their distinct interpretations and constructions of a social form for the three characters — the hunter, deer, and game warden — bind the represented "official" to the humanity of a social system, the humanity of the painter's individual perspective, and the humanity of the viewer's own expectations of the tableau.

Zespo is a Chicago-based artist whose practice situates personal and cultural experiences within a tradition of figurative painting, working from direct observation, photographs he makes, and preexisting imagery. For him, painting is an aspirational pursuit — a way of translating the visible world and embedding it with layers of meaning and magic. Recent exhibitions of his work have been presented at Pueblo Unido Gallery (Chicago, 2025) and Cuarto de Servicio (CDMX, Mexico, 2024). Zespo also serves as Artistic Director for the Lit & Luz Festival and as Program Administrator and Curator for the Open Practice Committee at the University of Chicago.

Frances Lee is an artist, educator, and arts administrator whose practice explores the symbolic language of images, materials, and objects through the relationship between abstraction and storytelling. Inspired by moral tensions in public space, civic discourse, and gender experience, her work asks how social forms are enacted and observed. Recent projects include the solo exhibition A tax on a bag and other landscapes (University of Illinois Springfield, 2023) and put a bow on it., a curatorial investigation into the visual language of "girl stuff" (Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago, 2025). Lee is a Lecturer at Northwestern University and Deputy Director of the Lit & Luz Festival.