Frances Lee

Exhibition Catalog including a curators’ essay put a bow on it. The ribbon as fuse and artist contributions.

put a bow on it. investigates a visual vocabulary that we are calling “girl stuff”: iconographies that read as unapologetically feminine, formal strategies that suggest a restlessness around the idea of adornment, materials and making processes that move towards craft, and representations of introspection and intimate exchange. “Girl stuff” is a category that we see operating in the practices of artists that employ a wide variety of media, come from different generations, and may or may not identify as “girls.” Many of the elements of this vocabulary have been viewed, historically and contemporarily, as surface-level effects: artistic moves that are lacking in creativity, originality, or depth, that are trivial or not worth attending to. put a bow on it. ties together these elements to make a prism through which to both see and reflect on “girl stuff.”

Featuring work by Chicago-based artists Cecilia Beaven, Sarabeth Dunton, Mari Eastman, Flor Flores, Jazmine., Cydney M. Lewis, Liz McCarthy, Matt Morris, Selina Trepp, and Allison Wade.

Exhibition graphics designed by Debra Kayes.

Curatorial essay first published at Chicago Artist Writers, February 2025.

Download Essay
Download full Exhibition catalog

It’s a Muscle brings together two new bodies of work by the Chicago-based artists Rex Delafkaran & Colleen Keihm to investigate the fluttering experience of being a body in space. The works in the exhibition foreground thresholds of gestural action or slippages between sight, touch, and movement. Through a collection of photograms, drawings, words, and objects, the artists present an ever-shifting state of perception that resists the tradition of the frame as a fixed position.