Sirens

work by Dushko Petrovich Córdova

March 1 – 30, 2025

On View Sundays
11 A – 2 P

Opening Reception
Saturday, March 1st
4 – 7 p

Join us in celebration of the opening of Dushko Petrovich Córdova’s solo exhibition, Sirens. 

Artist Talk
Sunday, March 23rd
2 p

Join Dushko Petrovich Córdova in conversation with Matt Morris.

The images initially collected were used as stand-ins when a news outlet didn’t want to show us some particularly gory details — when, for example, a family of four was murdered, or as one headline put it: Blood Leaked from the Ceiling.

As the artist painted them, these stand-in sirens reminded him both of early lockdown — when blaring ambulances indexed the severity of the pandemic; and of later lockdown — with its mass protests against the epidemic of police violence. Sirens pair glowing enticement with obliterating overload, a combination that is designed to interrupt the ordinary, to signal an exceptional event. The moment of emergency becomes suddenly (and blindingly) visible.

But when the sirens begin to accumulate—as they undoubtedly have, in reality, on the doomscroll, and in our minds—they stop signifying temporary rupture and begin to establish their own continuity, a condition of seemingly uninterrupted emergency, this new phase of history we find ourselves in.

The sirens are the first set of works for PNTG and serve as its overture.

Dushko Petrovich Córdova works across media as a painter, writer, and publisher. He is a co-founder of Paper Monument, which has published numerous critically acclaimed books, including Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment. Petrovich has also produced Adjunct Commuter Weekly and The Daily Gentrifier under his personal imprint, DME. He has written about art and visual culture for many publications including n+1, Bookforum, and the New York Times.

His work has been exhibited at galleries and museums nationally and internationally—including Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and Gallery 400 in Chicago—and has been reviewed in publications such as Artforum, The New Yorker, and the New York Times, among many others. Petrovich currently serves as professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His current project, PNTG, identifies and collects emerging types of digital imagery and rematerializes them through a method of reverse-glass airbrush painting.

SLAPHAPPY

work by Alana Ferguson

April 5 – 27, 2025

On View Sundays
11 A – 2 P

Opening Reception

Saturday, April 5th
4 – 7 p

Join us in celebration of the opening of Alana Ferguson’s solo exhibition, SLAPHAPPY. 

What does it mean to be productive? How is it measured? Is a pregnant person, someone who naps, has brain fog, and a small human inside, considered productive? Is internal reflection with no clear agenda productive? When and how is visual craft productive?

The works in this exhibition are concerned with productivity as framed by convenience, ambition, and literal production. The sculptures are posed as useful appliances with visible mechanisms and moving parts, though they are practically useless and their effects—whether actual or potential—are nonsensical. The drawings are made on top of architectural plans for large warehouses, strip malls, and hotels. The diagrammatic nature of the plans is a foundation for extemporized instructions, which obliquely explain how to operate specific sculptures or graph states of mind.  In these works, information for the planning and construction of buildings is obscured in order to be reimagined.

The work in this exhibition is part of a larger body; other selections were recently exhibited at Patient Info Gallery in Chicago.

Alana Ferguson is an interdisciplinary artist and educator in Chicago. Raised in New York City and the child of architects who built private homes, she was raised with keen awareness of the ways design conveys class and status. Her work examines connections between femininity, domesticity and consumerism with humor. She received a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis in 2012, an MAT from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2016, and an MFA from University of Chicago in 2021. She has been an educator for over 10 years, teaching in K-12 public schools and university classrooms. She is an adjunct professor at the College of DuPage and a lecturer at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Alongside teaching and making art, she has coordinated artist performances in her front yard, in a project called The Lawn.

@fergalana

(un)learning Center

work by Madeleine Aguilar and Jordan Knecht

May 4 – June 1, 2025

on view Sundays
11 a – 2 p

Opening Reception

Sunday, May 4th
2 – 5 p

Join us in celebration of the opening of Madeleine Aguilar and Jordan Knecht’s exhibition, (un)learning Center. 

parallel + forms = find = forms + parallel
a presentation of the amorphous venn-diagram of the practices of Madeleine Aguilar + Jordan Knecht

In collaboration with Comfort Music –
Thursday, May 8th
6 – 9 p

amateur H|O|U|R
randomly generated collaborations for improvised micro performance

In collaboration with Comfort Music –
Thursday, May 15th
6 – 9 p

Somebody Else’s Record Fair
buy from local DJs, dealers, and collectors + experience live vinyl DJ sets

Details to follow, scheduling depends on construction.

un)learning Center is an amorphous venn-diagram of two peoples’ practices. Over three years of both direct collaboration and parallel play, Madeleine Aguilar & Jordan Knecht have spilled into each other, intuitively developing a methodology of improvisation, responsiveness and iterative creation. The result is a collection of structures and published works which nurture (un)learning, exploration, and collaboration.

The exhibition contains modular, interactive sound making structures built individually + collaboratively by the artists, serving as documents of mutual iteration. These structures are designed to nullify expertise, prioritizing collective exploration, empathetic interaction and ecstatic improvisation. The structures invite multiple players at once, cultivating a sonic-social awareness in relation to one another and all who are sharing the space.

For this exhibition, Aguilar and Knecht have curated a series of performances, inviting a variety of soundmakers to engage with these structures, pushing performers into new territory though creative constraints and expanding the sonic vocabulary of the objects, whose uses + functions are invented (discovered) anew with each use. As the structures are activated throughout the duration of the exhibition, distinction between visitor/creator/collaborator/artist quickly becomes unclear (and unnecessary). A small corner of the gallery hosts a library and self-service gift shop, displaying the parallel and intersecting publishing practices of Aguilar and Knecht.

The front entrance of the gallery will host a collection of artist-made wind chimes which will resound throughout the duration of the exhibition. Contributing artists include Mikey Mosher, Andi Crist, David Sprecher, Chad Kouri, Ruby Que, Kazuki Guzmán, Jacob Polhill, Brick Cassidy, Nick Chiado, Christian Gutierrez, Sofía Fernández Díaz and Philip J Lesicko. Books and garments are available to browse and purchase in a non-centralized store in which purchases are made based on trust. The two artists have collaborated on new garments and books specifically for this exhibition.

Over the past seven years Jordan Knecht moved from Denver to Chicago, worked at a ramen shop in a basement, went through some breakups, found a therapist who did EMDR, completed graduate school during a global pandemic while teaching art at three elementary schools remotely and house sitting back and forth across the United States for about 16 months, experienced some deep self-shattering, started climbing, began DJing, founded a new performance project, almost went on tour, but caught covid instead, successfully went on tour a few months later, bought around 3,000 pounds of used turf from a football field in Denver, finished therapy, shook out around 2,000 pounds of synthetic fill from the turf with the help of some very kind friends, learned a bit about the chemistry and biology of scent, started a garment publishing entity, presented at some national arts education conferences, and read quite a few books while lying down by Lake Michigan. Jordan still lives in Chicago, but given the way he’s been living for the past seven years, it’s reasonable to be unclear on that fact.

@jordanknecht

Madeleine Aguilar is a multidisciplinary artist + musician from chicago. Her work is often mobile / modular / interactive and can be found in backyards, libraries, storefronts, homes, galleries & book fairs. She responds to existing environments, building structures, furniture & environments that prompt users to actively reconsider & redefine their function(s). Using the archive as form, she marks time by cataloging lived spaces, collected objects, familial histories, personal relationships, natural phenomena, mundane routines, and ephemeral moments.

She is the founder of Bench Press, a risograph press based on friendship, play & collaboration. Bench Press often partners with artists who are new to the book as form, utilizing the risograph as a tool for skill sharing and cultivating new friendships. She currently runs the print lab in the school of design at the University of Illinois Chicago and co-teaches a summer risography & bookmaking course at Ox-Bow School of Art & Artists’ Residency.

@__bench_press

Wind Reenactment

work by Mauricio López F.

June 7 – 29, 2025

on view Sundays
11 a – 2 p

Opening Reception

Saturday, June 7th
4 – 7 p

Join us in celebration of the opening of Mauricio López F.’s exhibition, Wind Reenactment. 

In collaboration with Comfort Music –
Thursday, June 19th
6 – 9 p

Reencarnación del viento
Performance featuring two collectives, in response to the work on view

Possession is an impulse that quickly settles into control. Inevitably, what is not understood is captured, examined, and when it presents some exploitable quality, it becomes a tool, a possibility. Wind is a strongly romanticized element, allowing heroism to be injected into moments that might otherwise seem tasteless. At the same time, its manifestation has a revealing quality. It dusts off what is latent and shows us that our environment is not pristine—that there is the precarious, the hidden, the forgettable, the unfixed. This duality forces its will upon us; we cannot stop it—it is there whether for our convenience or not. We can try to simulate it in forced controlled conditions, but it is well known that that’s not wind.

The exhibition consists of three exemplary objects—Fig. 1, Fig. 2, and Fig 3. Each one aims to recreate, with different processes and materiality, the tensions between misinformation and the drive to capture.

Mauricio López F. is an artist from Santiago de Chile based in Chicago, USA. He studied Musical Composition at the Escuela Moderna de Música. He later participated in the Copiú: Improvement Course in Composition and Interpretation of Contemporary Music and earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Aesthetics at the Pontificia Universidad Católica, focusing on avant-garde movements in the Chilean sound scene.

Recently, he completed his MFA in Sound at SAIC, where he received a complete scholarship. He is currently exploring various mediums, including sculpture, installation, performance, photography, and drawing. His works, which address themes such as translation, labor, and cultural friction—often with a sardonic lens—have been presented across South and North America and Europe, recently highlighting the 30th anniversary of the SAIC Site Gallery and Expo Chicago.

@mauriciolopezfernandez