No End in Sight - Exhibition

The event will consist of a Folding Party/Discussion Panel occurring simultaneously.

Folding Party: Grayson Cox’s “Building” is achieved through a series of origami folding parties around the country. These parties consist of creating origami cubes, which once about 10,000 are created, will be blown up at a “blow up party”. The goal for the artist is to use the cubes to create structures that can accommodate one person at a time, and serve as monuments to the virtues of patience, work and cooperation.

Discussion Panel: Infinite Change

Josue Pellot
Aviva Alter
Burtonwood & Holmes

These artists each take on epic projects that utilize the overwhelming concept of the neverending to address social, political and environmental issues with the aim of creating change in some capacity.

In the minds of collaborators Burtonwood & Holmes, as far as war is concerned, there is no end in sight. Believing that consumer culture veils some of the grimmer realities of the Iraq war, the collective utilizes the most ubiquitous of commercial imagery – junk mail and flyers – to address the buying and selling aspect of war.

Josue Pellot was taken aback by a bulk vending machine he found in the heart of a Puerto Rican community in Humboldt Park titled “Boricuas”, the indigenous term for Puerto Ricans. Each toy figurine sold in the machine displayed stereotypes of Puerto Ricans and a satire of the entire Puerto Rican community. Pellot decided to purchase the machine, and add his own figures – of himself, his family - to create a critical and humorous statement about the dangers and pervasive nature of cultural assumptions and stereotypes.

Jon Cates is an Assistant Professor of Film, Video and New Media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Cates works with technosocially engaged digital art works. He uses these systems as a way to uproot the dominant cultures’ expectations.