“An unpredictable, yet insistent, flow… not the ostensibly eternal stability of a house in your name, but a safety conjured up moment to moment, spell-like.”
– Fear of Losing, Love of Having
In conjunction with October’s featured exhibition, five music makers will spend an evening creating an unscripted soundscape. We invite you to step inside this softened space, one produced out of mutual intention and a possibility for trust – a living meditation on collaborative and intangible safety.
As the audience you’re welcome to sit, stand, lie down, and rest as the music is made. Your hosts will provide free face masks, as well as a HEPA air purifier for your protection.
It becomes easy to forget how much we need each other.
Intercepted by the market, needs previously met through collaboration have now warped into an endless pursuit of independent preparedness. The dominant ethos is this: take care of your own. You don’t owe anyone anything. Protect your peace. We place our faith in a constant warding off of loss, traceable in the stuff of our surroundings. Abundance is guarded as stockpile.
Then there exists, alongside the kind of safety-making that decays social bonds, a softer method of survival that reinforces them. A sense – in certain queer and nonwhite and broke groups – of mutually generated security. An unpredictable, yet insistent, flow of crowdsourced rent relief; shared meals; clumsy good intentions; homemade air purifiers; the same $20 venmoed back and forth; herbal remedies; moving assistance; living room acupuncture; tenant unions; shared passwords; skin to skin contact… on and on.
Not the ostensibly eternal stability of a house in your name, but a safety conjured up moment to moment, spell-like. A space you might step inside and learn to recreate.
Fear of Losing, Love of Having probes our daily attempts at safety-making, dysfunctional and humane alike. The show is a material hypothesis of noticing as resistance, of slowness and widened eyes as crucial tools in the creation of gentler futures.
Rather than positing an answer, the works within hold up objects, moments, and efforts like flash cards, images connected to questions: How did this way of life come to be? Who decided it so? And how might we nudge our collective reality towards more humane, more loving methods of safety-making?
Ray Madrigal (b.1999, Sacramento, CA) is a third generation chicanx lesbian and maker in many mediums. Their work is concerned with worldly details, and how elements of the everyday might be studied to the benefit of vibrant queer survival. As a descendant of immigrant farm laborers, Madrigal strives to take nothing for granted in an increasingly unlikely life.
Madrigal holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and was named Home Depot Associate of the Month at store #6675 from October 2020 through February 2021. Their work has been featured by the Corning Museum of Glass in New York, The National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago, and the Brownsville Museum of Fine Art in Texas. They currently live, work, and play in Chicago, IL.