is a contemporary art gallery/curatorial umbrella founded in 2022, with an office space (Annex/Cointelpro) in Chicago's Albany Park neighborhood, and a vitrine (Hole) in Chicago's Logan Square neighborhood. The gallery's program focuses around allowing artists opportunities to present ambitious and challenging work in a site-responsive and collaborative manner, alongside exhibition-specific ephemera.
Directed by Milo Christie and Sam Dybeck. Genre Fiction
December 15th, 2023 -January 14th, 2024
Braden Skelton is from Atlanta, Georgia. He received his BA from the University of Georgia in Philosophy and Film Studies, and his MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He lives and works in Chicago.
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Checklist
‘To effectively confront the “naked apocalypse” or cataclysm without redemption, the opposite of spiritual depth is needed: an utterly irreverent comic spirit. One should recall that the best movies about the Holocaust – Pasqualino Settebellezze (1974), Life is Beautiful (1997) – are comedies, not because they trivialise the Holocaust but because they implicitly admit that it is too crazy a crime to be narrated as a “tragic” story….The comic effect emerges because ideological fantasies and reality are not opposed: in the heart of the darkest realities we stumble upon fantasies. Perpetrators of horrible crimes are not diabolical monsters who courageously do what they are doing – they are cowards doing it to sustain the fantasy which motivates them…Most of us know the culminating moment of Rob Reiner’s A Few Good Men (1992) when the lawyer Daniel Kaffee (Tom Cruise) cross-examines the Colonel Nathan Jessep (Jack Nicholson) and declares, “I want the truth!”, and Jessep shouts, “You can’t handle the truth!” This reply is more ambiguous than it seems: it should not be taken as simply claiming that most of us are too weak to handle the brutal reality of the world…And therein resides the final lesson of the stories about venturing from fantasy into reality: we do not only escape into a fantasy to avoid confronting reality, we also escape into reality to avoid the devastating truth about the futility of our fantasies.’
(Žižek, Slavoj. “Barbie Can’t Handle the Truth.” New Statesman, New Statesman, 28 July 2023)
Installation viewSelf Portrait with Michael Jackson, 2023, Engraved Mirror, 16” x 12”
Installation ViewInstallation ViewInstallation ViewInstallation ViewInstallatio ViewPestilent, 2023. Acrylic, Spray Paint, Happy Meal Toy, 27” x 160”Installation viewDetailDetailDetailUntitled (Live Más), 2023. Granite, Velcro, Oil, Glitter Decals, Taco Bell Chair, 30” x 21” x 60” Installatio ViewDetailDetailDetailMetropolis (after Mike Kelley), 2023. Particle Board, LED Strips, Acrylic, Blue Raspberry Drinks, 24” x 48” x 14”Installation ViewInstallation ViewDetailInstallation ViewAll of HIstory a Rehearsal for its Own Extinction, 2023. Granite, Drive-thru Console, Hardware. 30” x 21” x 60”Installation ViewInstallation ViewInstallation ViewInstallation ViewInstallation View