is a contemporary art gallery/curatorial umbrella founded in 2022, with an office space (Annex/Cointelpro) in Chicago's Albany Park neighborhood, and a vitrine (Hole) in Chicago's Logan Square neighborhood. The gallery's program focuses around allowing artists opportunities to present ambitious and challenging work in a site-responsive and collaborative manner, alongside exhibition-specific ephemera.

Directed by Milo Christie and Sam Dybeck.





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Tenebrae
Justin D’Acci, Tom Koehler, Nandi Loaf,
Andrew Rutherdale, Hanna Umin



July 11th, 2024 - August 18th, 2024The death drive is the suicide lever of capitalism, framing “its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure” (1). There is no escape; there is only relief through ceaseless consumption, designed to induce a nicotine-like rush and briefly conceal the gaping hole in our jaded souls. 

The accumulation of things operates as a protection against loss, and the production of art acts as plexiglass armor against mortality. Trapping Eros under glass, within screen surfaces, wrapping it in plastic, and mummifying it with varnish serve to demonstrate victory over it—that is to say, design's victory over nature. The pervasive layer of transparency around nature and society is capitalism's way of exerting control through surveillance. Transparency also eradicates moral ambiguity, erotic suggestiveness, and intimate trust—conditions that nurture the creative forces of Eros. 

Tenebrae explores the antagonistic relationship between light and darkness. It sustains the tension between didactic transparency and suggestive opaqueness, emasculated Eros and disarmed Thanatos, and an aversion to the parasite of logos, language, and reason. Tenebrae recognizes art's eternal handicap: an inability to break free from the symbolic into the real, relegated to merely depicting the real without interfering in it. At Weatherproof, you will find no blood but red finger paint, no gun but wood curvature, no prize but a package. 

Tenebrae implies that the death drive is inherently void, like a black hole sucking everything into itself, in pursuit of the ultimate narcissistic implosion. Here however, this inward deficiency is cunningly aestheticized as a longing for Eros.

The last candle in the Tenebrae ritual symbolizes a flicker of hope, albeit faint and erratic. It represents the struggle to sublimate the destructive forces of capitalism into art, even as these very forces threaten to co-opt and neutralize our efforts.

1. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."

-femcel_larper



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3336 W Lawrence Ave #303
Chicago, IL 60625
Open Saturdays 1-4 while a show is up.