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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The Sacred Conspiracy Manual of Graphic StandardsSam Dybeck, Jenn Smith
August 25th, 2023 - September 24th, 2023
Sam Dybeck (b.1998, Seattle, WA) is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Chicago, IL. His work primarily oscillates between print media and sculpture. Much of his studio practice is informed by American consumption habits, nostalgia, internet culture, and security.
Jenn Smith lives and works in Chicago. She received her MFA from SAIC in 2016 and her BS from Illinois State University in 2001. A selection of recent exhibitions include Soup Kite Laser Church, Flatland, Chicago IL; Biosis, Het Von Ulsen, Brooklyn NY; University of St. Francis Art Gallery, Joilet IL.
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Every thousand years it's a new religion
Unc m the streets screamin', 'New religion'
Pastor got diamonds. rockin' True Religion
Pray to who? You must be trippin'
Bitch, I’m prayin' to my money racks
They said we livin' in Revelations
Vaccine got us mutatin'
So fuck it then, I'ma go take it'
- RXK Nephew. American tterroristt
'Life always occurs in a tumult with no apparent
cohesion
- Georges Bataille. The Sacred Conspiracy
Sacred Conspiracy… is a two-person exhibition consisting of works which relay the symbols of a lived experience, both personal and collective.
Standards manuals aim to train the faithful continuation of an image. There is something to be said about the way in which the outward image of a collective experience may be perceived by a general public.
Dybeck and Smith’s work seeks to bound that gap of vision between observer and participant in their own personal histories. Both graphic and almost archival, they attempt to provide us with routes/roots to tackle the multiplicity and intensity of the cultural landscapes their works emerge from.
Our position as observer extends us the leisure of finding humor in this array of objects. Both in its content and in its formal presentation, irreverence becomes the first point of contact.
Dybeck’s work, a spiral of digital mediation, SoCal skater aesthetic, absurdism, and the dust that clouds your vision as worlds of information collide, proffers up arrangements of the stuff that might constitute a Gen-Z habitus.
Congruently, Smith’s calmly comic world of religious ephemera shows, as KT Hawbaker writes of Smith's 2019 Show at Flatland Soup Kite Laser Church: ‘The mayhem of the evangelical marketing team’.
Each surface bears a fingerprint and each mark is the start of an anecdote.
Conspiro - I sound in unison.