EXHIBITIONS

Death by Landscape brings together eight artists working across painting, sculpture, and kinetic systems to consider nature not as an exterior realm, but as a condition already inseparable from the technological, industrial, and human systems that attempt to contain it.

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Under contemporary conditions, a burning oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz becomes as natural as two dead stags, antlers locked together, buried in a waste of winter snow. Both belong to the landscape. Neither sits outside it. Nature persists not as purity or equilibrium, but as the unstable field in which catastrophe, adaptation, decay, and

continuation become increasingly difficult to distinguish.

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“What generally passes for nature in the bourgeois context of delusion is merely the scar tissue of mutilation.” 

- Theodore Adorno 

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Hope Barkov

Savannah Hodges

Fionn Kelly

Samantha Merrill

Zo Nicole Nielson

Lorenzo Osterheim

Jackie Pyles

Eva Tellier 

Veilance Press in collaboration with Flatline presents After the Flood; sculptures from artists Chris Bradley, Milo Brown, Daniel H. Hoffmann, Willem Kusserow-Lair, Neiva M., Radu Nistoroiu, and David Sprecher. This collection coincides with the release of Issue 1: UN/NATURAL, a new publication by Veilance Press, and includes new work from artists featured in the issue.

Inspired by the Babirusa, a species of wild swine known and sensationalized for their long, curved tusks which–if not manually dulled–will eventually grow so that they pierce the skull in a natural suicide; Both the show and Issue 1 do not attempt to mimic nature, but are phenomena of nature and nature's contradictions. Like a silent wooden slab which becomes an instrument, or an adaptation which subverts its animal, nature turns back to reference itself with the circular effort cruelly demonstrated by the horns of the Babirusa.

Soft Systems in collaboration with Flatline Gallery present "Paths for the Study of Contingent Dimensions," a group exhibition of five artists exploring the diagram as narrative. Here, the diagram operates as a vector for world-building, constructing a new type of reality according to the patterns and structures through which the artist thinks, plotting rationality in spatial terms.

Featuring work by Vivien Adamian, J. Grace Giordano, Ian James, Tong Pan, and Deb Sokolow.

The group exhibition features works by Chicago based artists Andrew Orne Glass, Patricia Kirby, Reilly Martin, Jackie Pyles, Sydney Szymczak, Connor Totten, Emma Xhaxho, and Ivy Youtongzhang. Spanning across many mediums, the exhibition investigates the conditions surrounding the self and the celebrity, blurring the lines between adaptation and exploitation. iPhone Face explores the identity of the flesh transformed into digital bodies, and inversely, the flatness of images applied to the human experience. Back-and-forth, manipulating each other, physical and online realities are accelerated, expanded in anunseeable scale. Body modification and image manipulation intertwine where individuality and vulnerability are estranged from the body through rapid image sharing. A combination of painting, textile, video, and sculpture borrow and reevaluate the conversion of an image into a physical object, investigating the fears and cravings they expose. In this collection of works, formal qualities of images are deconstructed, asking questions of how we assign visual elements of a photo to personal identity and self alterations.Please join us for an opening reception on Friday, August 7 from 6 - 9 p.m. at Flatline Gallery. Following the reception, the gallery will be open for regular viewing hours Thursday through Sunday, 11am to 6pm, or by appointment. iPhone Face is curated by Mariana Ito and Jordyn Taylor (Triple Portal) and co-curated by Marley Geisler-Amhowitz (Triple Portal) and Hanna Glatz (Triple Portal) in collaboration with Flatline Gallery.

To Plead is to beg, testify, confess, perform sincerity, and ask to be believed. It is also a ritual act: a speech directed outward, toward an other. The works in Plead emerge from this compromised address, where identity is not simply expressed but externalized, encoded, and offered up.

The artists are not interested in authenticity as a return to some stable inner self. Rather, they work through the overproduction of selfhood: avatars, screenshots, selfies, cute/sexy/kawaii masks, and platform-native fragments. Plead stages an ego death through the self. The self is not overcome by being stripped away, but by being pushed through too many surfaces, symbols, and iterations. Personality becomes impersonal. Persona breach into the expanded field. Painting, drawing, sculpture, and cinema appear not as life rafts for a dead internet, but as ritual technologies for handling its remains.

Plead gathers works that ask what kinds of sincerity survive inside insincerity, and what forms of selfhood must be exhausted before one can finally get outside oneself.

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Featuring work by: Anthony Yew, Dana Dawud, Poorspigga

Safiya Hawwa, Anne-Joelle Tan, Machine Yearning

Ruby Bailey

Gothic Materialism, a group exhibition featuring the artists Henry Adams, Ruby Bailey, Arna Beth, Ben Glass, Brian Oakes, and Chris Velez.

The gallery's inaugural show takes its name from Mark Fisher's 1999 PhD dissertation Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction, a work that posits an aesthetic landscape on the margins of organic and nonorganic life. Gothic Materialism develops out of ongoing conversations with artists around technology's relationship with mysticism and historical consciousness. Technospiritualism operates to reconsider our present reality through the clash of transcendental and material.

Curated by Olivia Ek