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.
NADA House 2023

September 1st, 2023 - September 2nd, 2023

Zander Raymond: In my studio practice, I see debris as a resource. Drawing from a stockpile of found materials, tools, and images, I improvise with what is at hand. Through gentle nudges, notices, and gestures, I coax the work into existence-- paying careful attention to the pre-existing character embedded in the material. In most cases, an object’s subjectivity or assigned role is deactivated as soon as it enters the studio space, often spending several months rubbing up against various other found materials before finding a spot in the work. I am interested in the subtle character that a mark develops through various forms of transfer; the forms tend to retain the essence of the source while simultaneously fostering the unpredictable marks of chance. I am equally interested in how utilizing the detritus that surrounds me could indicate an autobiography or say something about experience. I see the studio as a permeable environment, existing remotely anywhere that objects, images, tools, and ideas converge and ask me: “what is possible?”

NADA Website Weatherproof presents an installation of Zander Raymond’s sculptures on the front porch of NADA House. Raymond’s work comes from a basis of using debris as a resource, paying attention to the pre-existing character embedded in the material. His sculptural work applies strategies of organization and transfer to these found objects, emerging as things aware of their former uses but materially confused and confusing. In Mark Fisher’s book ‘The Weird and the Eerie', he writes that ‘The form that is perhaps most appropriate to the weird is montage — the conjoining of two or more things which do not belong together … the unconscious as a montage-machine, a generator of weird juxtapositions.’ Raymond’s work, whose materials often spend several months rubbing up against various others before finding a spot in the work, can exist as sculptural ‘montage’ resulting from unconscious decisions - improvisation and chance are large drivers in his practice. 

The historical context of Nolan Park and Governor’s island as an abandoned site, as well as the architectural era of the house being the primary style in media’s haunted house tropes, positions these objects as having an eerie affect; their provenance is questionable, toeing the line between leftover debris and staged trap - Fisher again helps us here: ‘Is there a deliberative agent here at all? Are we being watched by an entity that has not yet revealed itself?’ The material continuities between the work and the house, of debris, refuse, decay, solidifies this connection. On a more poetic level, we can imagine the house itself becoming alive and growing outward, these sculptures tumors on its exterior (see ‘Monster House’, 2006, and ‘House of Leaves’, 2000).


From the NADA website: ‘The collaborative, public exhibition brings together 27 artists presented by 26 galleries and art spaces, with participants engaging the unique character of the 19th century former military residence and exhibiting work in a diverse range of mediums.’




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3336 W Lawrence Ave #303
Chicago, IL 60625
Open Saturdays 1-4 while a show is up.