Unpacked Mobile Gallery presents Home Grown (Vol.III), a plant-centered roving art exhibition touring Chicago from July 11 to 18, inside a Penske moving truck. The exhibition will travel to various neighborhoods, institutions, public parks, and community gardens over the week, offering docent-led tours, projects, and workshops directly within the community.
Home Grown works examine cycles of growth, decay, and regeneration while questioning how we relate to the natural world. The Unpacked exhibition features work by Aimée Beaubien, Kris Casey, Christine Forni, Naomi Hamlin-Navis, Hillary Irene Johnson, Noelani Jones, Tulika Ladsariya, Jaclyn Mednicov, CV Peterson, and SK Reed.
Risograph works by Aimée Beaubien, Christine Forni, Maven Kennedy, Tulika Ladsariya, Katelyn Patton, Monika Plioplyte, and Reina Sundara.
Program:
Docent-led tours of the exhibition, with the curators and several artists in attendance throughout the evening
8:30 or 9 PM - Performance by Mountain Laurel
Screening of Drawing You Outside, Evergreen Conservancy (Fall 2026) by Christine Forni, video loop or screening TBD — Link to video: https://www.christineforni.com/
Christine Forni, Drawing You Outside, Evergreen Conservancy (Fall 2026)
Tannoma Wetlands Abandoned Minne Drainage Treatment System & Environmental Education Center in Pennsylvania
Drawing You Outside is rooted in a deep-seated collaboration with the natural world, exploring the symbiotic relationship between ecological stewardship and creative expression. Together, we translate the silent narratives of the landscape into a visual language centered on themes of transformation, permanence, and the delicate balance of ecosystems.
MOUNTAIN LAUREL at Comfort Station - Sound Art featuring recordings from Chicagoland parks and nature preserves, mixed with a live performance of handcrafted, bowed instruments constructed with elements found in nature.
With a material interest in using sound as raw material, Mountain Laurel pulls apart ritual and superstition through field recordings, sampling, and uncanny instruments. Focusing on low-tech, ordinary objects as sonic instruments, they construct haunting sound that articulates breakage and variance within loops, repetitive action, and ritualization of labour. By using industrial materials like sheet metal alongside natural objects such as tree branches as instruments, the artist materializes the blurred relationship between modern life and archaic fears through sound.
Can You Steal From a River? combines spoken word, live looping, and audio manipulation using found sounds and invented instruments sourced from many of Chicago's interstitial natural spaces. Bounded by highways and major arteries, these natural spaces form grey areas between the natural and urban -- sonically separating these two differing environments becomes difficult for visitors seeking reprieve from concrete. While visiting these spaces, they seem to shrink, becoming increasingly difficult to find oneself lost in, alienating visitors from a true relationship with nature -- mirroring the increased frequency of larger-scale environmental destruction due to wildfires and other natural disasters, as a result of rapid industrialization across the globe. Can You Steal From a River? reflects on themes of loss and how we might allow nature to imprint itself on us as it seems to disappear.
Unpacked Mobile Gallery is partnering with the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art (UIMA). UIMA is exhibiting the third iteration of Home Grown, July 11 - September 6, 2026, curated by Lauren Iacoponi. Home Grown is a series of immersive plant-centered exhibitions exploring the deep entanglement between human and plant life, bringing together thirty Midwest artists who work with organic materials such as plants, fungi, fibers, and bioplastics. The exhibition continues to transform nonprofit gallery spaces into a layered ecosystem of living and symbolic forms.
Unpacked Mobile Gallery is an artist-run project space founded in 2017, organized by artists Naomi Elson and Lauren Iacoponi.
This project is partially supported by an Individual Artists Program Grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events.
The exhibition is also made possible through the Terra Foundation for American Art Community Engagement Grant, awarded to the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art. This grant helped fund a partnership between the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, Unpacked Mobile Gallery, and Spudnik Press to create Risograph work as part of Home Grown.