Routine Maintenance is the first collaborative exhibition between artist and preparator duo Andi Crist and JP Culligan. Influenced by a full range of mundane routines, responsibilities, and ever-tedious tasks, the work in Routine Maintenance is a personal reflection upon the artists’ day-to-day lives as installation specialists in the fine arts field. The invisible tools and materials of exhibition-making are reworked, becoming the focus of paintings, sculptures and site-specific installations. Crist and Culligan hone in on these subjects in the studio, admiring them for their form and challenging their functions in new and unusual iterations.

Andi Crist was raised in Birmingham, Alabama and earned her BFA from Columbia College Chicago in 2011. She is the founder of Autotelic, a nonprofit arts organization that served artists on the northwest side of Chicago by creating affordable, alternative workspaces and exhibitions from 2010 until 2017. Crist’s creative practice is primarily sculptural, complemented by a career as a gallery preparator and fabricator. Her work touches on subjects of appropriation, practicality, and the assessment of value, frequently commenting on the industry of exhibition-making and unseen labor.

JP Culligan lives and works in Chicago, IL. His work is focused on materials that have been scavenged or purchased from the hardware store including: mis-tinted latex paint, joint compound, and discarded mail-order catalogs. Each work is a chapter in a series of exercises, a journal entry, or poetic scribble rendered in the searching moments in-between life and work. He earned a BFA from the University of Hartford in 2011.