PATRON

Nelson’s conceptual practice explores how science fiction, and the ongoing pursuit of space exploration, offer venues for the consideration of new social possibilities outside the limitations of heteronormative society. Utilizing analog chemical photographic techniques, historical science fiction and its archive, and visual culture from recent NASA missions, Nelson suggests how extraterrestrial, or non-human actors can function as proxies for queer life. I can’t make you love me pulls open the human, and often deeply romantic quests at the heart of astronomical discovery, both real and imagined. Since 2020, Nelson has researched an extensive archive of letters between science fiction writer Alice B. Sheldon (under the male pseudonym; James Tiptree Jr.) and novelist Ursula Le Guin between 1971 and 1976. Their exchange held space for real-life para-fiction. While withholding her true gender identity, Tiptree’s flirtatious fantasies were received and reciprocated by Le Guin—Tiptree would eventually reveal her true gender identity to Le Guin in 1976, and subsequently see Le Guin as a confidant “Ursula, Ursula I am petrified. - - - will they take it as “deception”? The exhibition opens with the persistent melody of everything but the signature is me (2023), an automaton typewriter, programmed by Nelson to perpetually dictate Tiptree’s excerpted term of endearment for Le Guin; “Starbear.” This coded evidence of Tiptree’s unrequited desire is extracted from their original context, scattered over the page in blue ink. The incessant transfer of the name by a non-human writer, suggests how Tiptree’s own use of a pseudonym functions as a metaphor. The letter, much like the format of science fiction, is a truth written in the present to apply to a future sense. Nelson further collapses past, present, and future in her Solaris series, expansive gelatin silver prints developed from stills of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film. Solaris narrates the plight of Kelvin, a cosmonaut who is pulled into the waking nightmare that has befallen his space station comrades as time and psychological acuity become increasingly warped. Nelson took screenshots from the film and rephotographed them onto 35mmx film at high speeds, a process which accentuates the silver grain of the image. The textural, impressionistic prints, developed with one of the last remaining Fotar Enlargers from the 1950’s, position us within the film itself, vulnerable, gazing outward onto the swirling waters of a foreboding form of extraterrestrial life. Solaris’s swirling waters of the ocean planet, like the mist-moody landscapes of Romantic painters, suggest that the scene is not an image of an experienced reality, but an existential experience of loneliness and mortality. Functioning as a coda, and bringing us to the present is I can’t make you love me, a single channel video, titled after Bonnie Raitt’s 1991 sentimental ballad. Edited from Nelson’s first-hand documentation during a research trip over the summer of 2023 at Hat Creek Radio Observatory in Northern California, the film tracks the artist’s own encounter with an isolated astronomical telescope array (Allen Telescope Array or ATA), technologies specifically designed for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). In the film, a presumed human subject sweeps spotlights across the open fields of the observatory, glimpses and fragments of the satellites appear as outlines in the dark as they themselves contemplatively yearn for the faintest glimmer of data to affirm their existence. Brittany Nelson: I can’t make you love me collapses and expands Nelson’s poetic parallels between Tiptree’s own closeted desire, the speculative space of scientific discovery, and the ongoing human quest to find, and communicate with, someone like us.

PATRON is proud to announce Errata, a group exhibition highlighting works by four artists, Nyeema Morgan, Samira Yamin, Keren Benbenisty, and Miao Wang. Borrowing an editorial term for collected corrections or clarifications for a previously published document, the exhibition considers how we build our identity from fragments of memory, images, and knowledge. Memory is always incomplete–our brains fill in gaps with fictional specifics, mis-remembering, torquing, partially erasing. Any attempt to revisit the past will be colored through the lenses of one’s current experience. Through experimental and material-based approaches to painting, photography, and drawing, the artists in the exhibition reinforce the power of recurrent images as constant, rich shapers of personal and social identity. Nyeema Morgan’s Forty-Seven Easy Poundcakes Like grandma Use To Make (2007-2012) is a series of forty-seven digital drawings. Morgan searched the web for “easy poundcake recipes” in the years after her own maternal grandmother’s passing. Finding 46 distinct, published recipes, Morgan assembled the typed instructions for each, starting with her grandmother’s–adding arrows and strike-throughs to indicate where each recipe diverged from the one previously listed. As a group, the works fracture apart from the definitive recipe. Intention, audience, and style are left to the wayside, the text divulges from their original use, and take on new potency. Likewise taking familial ephemera as a point of departure are Samira Yamin’s Entrainment Exercises (2023), unique prints developed from a series of negatives the artist received of her paternal grandfather, who was training as a professional gymnast in Iran during the 1950s. Employing a self-developed, analog process by which water ripples over the images as they are being developed. Yamin’s shifts the subject of the images from the individuals pictured to her own psychological processing of these images. Yamin’s re-engagement with the images animates an otherwise untapped connection to her family’s past through this act of image making, that suggests a sense of play, which belies the separation forced by time, space, and migration. Keren Benbenisty’s collages mimic the horticultural technique whereby cuttings taken from different plants are joined to create a hybrid species. Drawing on a personal slide archive of color photographs taken by her father, shortly after immigrating from Turkey to Israel in the 1960s, Tristeza is the result of the artist’s single-minded attempt to cultivate a blue orange (oranges are historically a symbol of Israel nationhood). An industry historically heavily dependent on manual labor, including the artist’s own Moroccan-born grandmother, the fruit holds the intersection of personal and political. Titled after the plague that struck orange trees during 2020, and the word for “sadness” in Latin-based languages, Benbenisty’s futile attempt at growing a surreal blue fruit unpeels a confluence of past-present-future, the contradictions and failures of which are only made visible through their own erasure. Wang’s jewel-like watercolor paintings extend the power of water, with a direct confrontation between the artist’s life in Chicago (where she has been based since 2011) and her native China. Developed from hundreds of layers of watercolor wash, Wang’s diptych, ________ (2023), offers a bodily score of her immediate surroundings in reaction to the deeply symbolic, and political, color red. Layered on a synthetic, waterproof paper, the liquid layers form an almost skin-like membrane, bearing the physical traces of its environment. In II (2023), Wang allows the wash of her black watercolor pigment to pool and fall, forming a pair of kindred spirits. Like Yamin, Wang embraces the soft power of water. Like waves on a shore, whose constant repetition shapes and erodes, constructing the shoreline, images–commercial, political, personal, mythological–wash over our beings, shaping formation of identity through repetition. Morgan, Yamin, Benbenisty, and Wang consider the impulse to revise, to correct, to revisit. Their attempts at correction serve only to underscore the ambiguity of symbols, the delusions, and failures of myth, and the impossibility of revising history. Yet by re-engaging with the past, the artists in the exhibition return to elements of errata, and, through their own material processes, recombine them into active containers of presence.

Dialogues is a series of projects that highlight the work of Chicago’s contemporary artists from the perspective of their colleagues and peers, celebrating and interrogating the ways in which generations of artists learn from and look to each other. Dialogues began as an invitation to five local artists, each of whom invited an artist, or artists with whom to exhibit. Over the winter of 2023-2024, PATRON’s five discrete spaces become containers in which intimate visual and practice-driven conversations are hosted, suggesting ways by which material, image, and research can be rethought, shared, and expanded. Organically resulting from years of mutual respect, or suggestive of forays into new contexts, the dialogues generated offer a current perspective on the diverse landscape of contemporary practice within Chicago today. The exhibition unfolds as a series on one-to-one visual exchanges, visual metaphors for the foundational connections of the creators and makers that together shape the city, and region, today. Dialogues features work by: Alex Chitty (with Richard Rezac, Diane Simpson, and Gordon Hall), Samuel Levi Jones (with Amanda Williams), Caroline Kent (with Nate Young), Alice Tippit (with Barbara Rossi), and Soo Shin (with Sungjae Lee and AiRos 頌恩 medill).

PATRON is proud to present Songs of silence, yet bluebirds hum, our second solo exhibition with Brooklyn-based artist, Kaveri Raina. Raina’s multilayered paintings emerge from the artist's unique approach to narrative construction, a performed collection of gestures and events that evoke a chorus of abstraction coiled through the threads of visual storytelling. While referencing various sources of imagery; from the personal to the art historical, her visual language of recurring, abstract forms are culled from a net of art history, cinema, and fantasy. Painted entirely on heavy pigmented burlap, Raina transforms the agrarian material into a diaphanous screen across and through which she pours and contours acrylic paint that is then further obfuscated through layers of loose graphite, oil paint, and pastel. Visible on both sides of the porous, rough fabric, the compositions appear as fleeting, momentary constellations of information.

“Writing is writing what you cannot know before you have written: it is pre-knowing and not knowing, blindly, with words. It occurs at the point where blindness and light meet.” —Hélène Cixous PATRON is proud to announce pre-knowing / un-knowing, our first solo exhibition with Chicago-based artist Dianna Frid. Over the past three decades, Frid has developed a deeply materially rooted practice that explores the kindred spirits of text and textile. Since 2010, Frid has been excising key phrases in the New York Times obituary columns. This ongoing series suggests how language continually folds back upon itself, ferreting new portals and forms for language and context. Incorporating embroidered text, graphite, and aluminum leaf, Frid’s builds upon a material language first introduced in her artist books from the 1990s. Expanding beyond the proverbial page, her works are inter-woven mosaics, building and layering material elements. Frid’s monumental work on canvas We Have No Word in English for This (2021) is rooted in text originally excerpted from cultural scholar Richard H. Hoggart’s 2014 obituary. Selected from a longer quote in which he defended the publication of D.H. Lawrence’s censored novel Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), Frid replaces the subject of Hoggat’s statement with an ever-unraveling commentary on the act of translation. It opens a question: what is the “it” for which there is not word in English? For Frid, “text is not necessarily linguistic–even though we think of text as words.” She recalls her earliest exposure to textiles, viewing Mayan textiles in Mexico City museums as a child. Still largely indecipherable to the post-colonial viewer, the Mayan texts, taking the form of abstract pictographs painted onto fabric panels, exist also as amongst the earliest surviving “texts” in the Americas. Taking a cue from textile abstraction, Frid’s letters take the shape of symbols, they create patterns that are recognized before being legible as syntax. In Weave, Frid's eponymous text is encoded through layers of aluminum and syncopated in colored embroideries as if emerging from a spectral archaeological site. Frid’s “weavings” are not the result of the warp and weft, but use concealment and pattern to eludes and exceed language. Using materials more often associated with the literary arts, or works on paper, Frid skirts the categorization of textiles and unfolds the capabilities of graphite, aluminum leaf, and colored thread into a textural collage. In this way, Frid suggests how text (not only as language) can exist materially–“what happens when you reduce language down to its essence, its material?” Evidence of the Material World #10, a site specific installation created from hand-drawn graphite membranes, applied directly to the gallery walls, suggest what can be considered a concentrate of the remains of the written word. By reducing language and text into graphite, the message is replaced with the pre-verbal, the organic, the material, the ineffable. For Frid, writing is not solely a communication to future generations but is itself a material to be “ adapted as a movement towards intimations and glimmerings.” Where we expect to seek meanings and translations, Frid finds the open, the possible, the exciting, the precipice “—Nothing is foreclosed.”

PATRON is proud to present Luscofusco, the gallery’s third exhibition with São Paulo-based artist, Lucas Simões. Marking his largest presentation to date in the U.S., Luscofusco premieres a series of recent sculptural works with a site-specific intervention into the gallery’s architecture. The exhibition’s title refers to a Portuguese word which roughly translates to the magic hour between day and night, where light blurs definitions of color, shape and intent. For Simões, the term indicates the constant slippage between understanding of intent, narrative, history, time, and place. A more literal translation would mark this word as the time of day we refer to as twilight, the moment when the light shifts from presence to absence, a daily occurrence where time exists in transitional inertia, both future and past at its present.  Trained as an architect, Simões’s research-based practice draws connections between seemingly divergent visual cultures. This presentation of new sculptural works introduces a new chapter in his oeuvre, evolving from a previous series which more specifically explored a query into how Modernist architecture’s utilitarian minded approach to design attempted to move beyond the symbol and give precedence to function over aesthetic. Luscofusco indicates Modernity’s naïveté. Embracing the cumulative persistence of the symbol, Simões traces connections between ancient Pompeiian frescos, and 1st century Greco-Roman sculpture and iconic modern architectural buildings, interrogating how these visual elements maintain and morph meanings over time and through cultures. Luscofusco is a study of stillness. His sculptures suggest an extended duration of physical balance. Percolating with an even yet anticipatory energy, Simões’s sculptures result from close observations of forms and his relationship to the practice of drawing, which in the field of architecture precedes and predates the eventual construction. Here, three large scale, languid Dormentes constructed of pre-fabricated plates of iridescent galvanized steel rest on the gallery’s floor. Hollow, the sculptures are akin to the molds used for Simões’s works of concrete and carbon steel, pointing to the heady possibilities of pausing on the planning and observational process of production. Phenomenology of Roundness, Megabyxos, Perizoma (all 2023) introduce softly rounded pigmented concrete appendixes, whose muted organic tones refer to the frescoed walls of the ancient Pompeiian Otium houses–domestic retreats of the political elite for the purposes of intellectual reflection and rest. Departing from the linear process of drawing and construction, Simões’s forms resist the implication of control; leaning, dripping, anchoring in response and resistance to physical forces.  Erupting, dripping, and licking through and around their weighty armatures of metal sheets, Simões returns to the question of what constants exist and continue across and through language, cultures, and forms. Culminating in the Linguaruda - the collective mouth that speaks it all (2023) the exhibition suggests that these visual elements, as language, are always malleable. Images as do words speak truth as much as fiction. For Simões, the spaces between what is planned vs. manifested, told vs. understood, written vs. read are the space of possibility. In this way, the exhibition can be read as a luscofusco in Simões’s artistic trajectory, where the tension between complete control and the possibility of randomness is removed, as is the gap between drawing and reality.

PATRON is proud to present Showcase, the gallery’s third solo exhibition with Chicago-based artist Mika Horibuchi, for which the artist hosts a presentation of art and merchandise. Showcase extends two main tenets of Horibuchi’s practice— her “Watercolors,'' meditatively rendered trompe-l’oeil oil paintings of photographs of paintings completed by her grandmother, and her “RD'' series, a series of gray paintings of “duck rabbit.” Appropriating an early illusionistic parlor trick, Horibuchi demonstrates that things are often not what they appear to be.

Being and Becoming presents a series of sculptures Hofmann created during the past three years, many originating during the confines of the COVID-19 pandemic. Carved and finished entirely by hand, the works in the exhibition demonstrate Hofmann’s sensitive attunement to the natural physical properties of her stones. African Black Stone, Marble, and White and Pink Alabaster, stored in the artist’s garage for years or even decades, others identified from quarries in Italy and Zimbabwe, some remnants from her father, a memorial mason. Over a nearly seventy-year career (she graduated from the School of the Art Institute in 1955), Hofmann has forged a transformative relationship to her materials, finishing the surfaces in such a way where the same material appears to hold entirely different, complementary qualities. Evident is her study of modernism – the cubist figural sculptures of Jacques Lipchitz, or the organic approach of Barbara Hepworth yet for Hofmann, sculpture is manifestation of a reality, a futurity, not a memorialization of the past.

PATRON is proud to present Liat Yossifor’s third solo exhibition, Life Against Itself. The exhibition opens to the public on Saturday, February 4, 2023 and continues through March 25, 2023.

PATRON is proud to present Myra Greene’s second solo exhibition, Kept. The exhibition opens to the public on Saturday, February 4, 2023 and continues through March 25, 2023.

Alex Chitty produced this series of wall-based sculptures and photographs over the course of two years—the two extraordinary years of the initial Covid disruption, to be specific. In this extended period of close looking and unhurried experimentation, she developed the pieces presented here as a single, ongoing body of work: She refers to the first work we encounter in the gallery, Figs break open of themselves (I, II, III) (2020–22), as “an index of ideas” that holds the “individual chapters” of the other pieces. Within this triptych, we are introduced to the full array of artistic strategies that reappear across the rest of the exhibition—the back and forth between surface and depth, striking configurations of textures and finishes, moments of humor and withholding.

Over the last decade Kadar Brock’s practice has been engaged in an ongoing act of contemplative erasure. A self reflective process of recording imagery and eradicating it, continuously, over and over again, in an attempt to make sense of the fractured reality that is memory, formative experience, and the kaleidoscope of imagery our minds record as lived experience. In recent years, Brock has been diving into the history of a new age cult known as The Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness (MSIA), and its founder John-Roger Hinkins, through research and pilgrimages to various sites throughout the country. This research and interest point deeper into Brock’s past, his upbringing within the cults’ teachings and its community, and his memories of this chapter of his life. While the work itself isn’t entirely about MSIA or its founder, John-Roger’s claim to be “The Mystical Traveler”, an all-knowing being that incarnates every generation to share its spiritual wisdom, does engage Brocks’ interest in how memory and identity are formed. How every layer of sediment in the composed bedrock of our identity is a chapter of information, mashed together; a totality made up of many collisions and revisions scattered through time.

Kent sources from the legacies of geometric abstraction to develop her own, ever-evolving, gestural language. In paintings, sculptures, and, at times, performance, Kent’s practice extends the traditions of abstraction. For the artist, abstraction—in its various forms—ignites new modes of meaning-making. The artist imagines interior architectures as sites of encoded exchange. In her current treatment of the exhibition space, Kent incorporates floor plans of traditional Mexican homes with modernist influences and adaptations. She has painted large-scale details from these plans directly onto the walls, shifting our viewing perspective of architectural plans from an aerial to an alternate point of view. Kent draws a comparison between the architectural floor plan and a theatrical stage: both are sites for projecting imaginative speculation. The gallery visitor becomes both a spectator and an actor in the space of this exhibition.

Heft is a three-person exhibition featuring works by Daniel G. Baird, Dominique Knowles and Kaveri Raina. Occupying all four galleries of PATRON, these paintings, sculptures and installations stage a ceremonial procession of loss and becoming.

Nyeema Morgan’s practice is characterized by an interplay between text, image and object. Her work questions our systems of knowledge and information production: what stories have we been told? Who has done the telling? How have images and language been used to tell those stories? Inspired by recent political events, our angst-ridden culture and media, and the death of her mother in 2017, Morgan grapples with the subject of catharsis in narrative forms such as storytelling, history, and jokes. The exhibition features three bodies of work—horror horror, a print-based series begun in 2018; Like It Is, an on-going series of graphite drawings, and two new sculptures. In The Set-Up, Morgan re-presents iconography to critique the structures and devices that influence our social, political and historical ideologies.

PATRON is proud to present our third solo exhibition with artist Bethany Collins. The exhibition titled, Cadence, opens to the public Saturday, March 5, and continues through April 16, 2022. Cadence reveals the complicated histories embedded in the songs and narratives that echo from our collective past into the present. Collins’ language-driven, often multipanel works unveil the many translations, adaptations, and erasures present in the texts that shape our national identity. The exhibition’s title refers to the combination of chords that bring a section, movement, or entire piece of music to a close. Cadence focuses on three American songs: The Star-Spangled Banner, Dixie, and Auld Lang Syne. Each of these songs are contrafactum, a musical term referring to a song in which the melody is similar to another, but the lyrics have changed. This tactic of altering the lyrics of important songs has been historically used to serve different political agendas.



PATRON is proud to present, We, Dandelions, our second solo exhibition with Chicago-based artist Soo Shin. The exhibition will open to the public on Saturday, March 5 and continues through April 16, 2022. Soo Shin’s sculpture and installation-based practice emphasizes materials charged with their own poetry, such as brass, iron, cedar, and found feathers. Here Shin employs these materials often to render parts of the human body in uncertain states of transformation where the hint of a foot, leg, or forearm outline the absence of a full figure. It’s a language of objects described by their implied movements, gestures. Shin incorporates her own body in many of the casts. In this way, her work is a fragmentary self-portrait. However, this composite is not just of isolated elements of her own body, but also seeks to render the affect of a space, an experience, a personal memory. One that reaches towards a longing. Something akin to walking into the memory of a stranger.

For his second solo exhibition with PATRON, Los Angeles based artist Greg Breda paints masterful portraits depicting revelatory moments for African American characters within film spanning the mid-1960s to 2019. Rendering the figures in his paintings with lush brushstrokes on vellum, Breda’s compositions reference film stills that portray scenes of self-reflection and contemplation for the character. Still, the exhibition’s title alludes to meditative and spiritual connotations of stillness, as well as the reality that society continues to grapple with and rehash the same issues.

PATRON is proud to present our second solo exhibition with Los Angeles-based artist Melanie Schiff. The exhibition will open to the public on Saturday, September 18 and will continue through November 27, 2021. While reservations on tock are encouraged, they are not required to visit the gallery.

PATRON is proud to present our first solo exhibition with Columbus-based artist Carmen Winant. The exhibition will open to the public on Saturday, September 18 and will continue through November 27, 2021.

PATRON is proud to present Value Studies, our second solo exhibition with New York-based artist Anna Plesset. The exhibition will open to the public on Saturday, July 17 and will continue through August 28, 2021.

PATRON is proud to present, Proximity, our first solo exhibition with New Jersey-based artist Claire Sherman. The exhibition will open to the public on Saturday, July 17 and will continue through August 28, 2021.

PATRON is proud to present our second solo exhibition with Los Angeles based artist Samira Yamin. The exhibition titled, All the Skies Over Syria, will open to the public on Saturday, June 5 and will continue through July 10, 2021

PATRON is proud to present our third solo exhibition with Indiana based artist Samuel Levi Jones. The exhibition titled, No color on the pages, will open to the public on Saturday, June 5 and will continue through July 10, 2021

PATRON is proud to present, Manna and Braised Collards, our first solo exhibition with Houston-based artist Jamal Cyrus. This marks the artist’s first solo exhibition in Chicago and is followed later this year by a traveling solo exhibition at The Blaffer Museum of Art in Houston as well as his participation in Prospect 5 in New Orleans in October. Manna and Braised Collards will open to the public on April 24 and continue through May 29, 2021. Manna and Braised Collards is grounded in the collaboration of religion and social resistance as practiced in Black America. Known in some circles as Black religion, this non-denominational force integrates political action with moral values and eschatological frameworks. One of the inspirations for this exhibition is the long tradition of storefront churches in Chicago and the handmade design aesthetic that are often part of those spaces. These are spaces of recharge and rejuvenation. Of spiritual and artistic vitality, but one is able to fortify oneself before stepping back into the series of tests presented by the world or dunia. All nine works in the exhibition are created using recycled or repurposed objects and materials. In much of my work, I see collage as the motivating technique and accumulation as the formal determiner. In the objects and materials I use, I seek a certain flexibility in meaning or voice. And deeply rooted cultural foundations. Sometimes these connections are personal. Sometimes relate more to the Black experience collectively. Through these works, I am attempting to formulate a series of object lessons which ruminate on the connections between the spiritual and political. To show the perennial importance of this collaboration to American social justice and Democratic efforts. And to re-energize the broader nonlinear historical paradigm in thinking about the Black American plight and role within the cosmos as practiced by its earliest communities.
 JAMAL CYRUS (b. 1973, Houston, TX) lives and works in Houston, TX. Cyrus received an MFA from University of Pennsylvania and a BFA from the University of Houston. Cyrus has won several awards, most recently the David C. Driskell Prize, awarded by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA (2020); Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (2019); and BMW Art Journey. He has participated in numerous national and international exhibitions, including The End of My Beginning, Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, TX (2021); Slowed and Throwed: Records of the City Through Mutated Lenses, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (2020); Direct Message: Art, Language and Power, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL (2019); Front International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, Akron Art Museum, Akron, OH (2018); Jamal Cyrus x Jamire Williams: Boogaloo & The Midnite Hours, Lawndale Art Center, Houston, TX (2018); and The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 – Now, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL (2016).