With a Little Help From My Friends

******Guest Curated by:

Megan Foy is an arts organizer living in Chicago, IL. She is currently the Institutional Relations and Strategic Partnerships Coordinator at EXPO CHICAGO. Previously, she held positions at Monique Meloche Gallery, Apparatus Projects, and Woman Made Gallery. She received her BA in Art History from DePaul University in 2019.

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Julian Van Der Moere lives in Chicago. He is an artist and curator working with a variety of materials and collaborators. Among other interests and goals, he works to articulate the awkwardness of our perceptions. He received his BA in Art History from DePaul University in 2018 and his MFA from University of Illinois at Chicago in 2021. In 2017, he co-founded the non-profit Apparatus Projects.

******Featured Artists:

Marcelo Anon, Renata Berdes, Aki Goto, Stefan Harhaj, Frances Roberts, Michael E. Smith, Vincent Trasov, Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, Noah Wieder, Jean Wilson

Play manifests in the in-between. Play is often the result of trust, and safety, but allows one to edge towards something unknown. To chance a misfiring and then to sit still in the silence. Play explores the infrathin, a term coined by Marcel Duchamp to describe minute shades of differences between objects, words, or events. Infrathin is understood as the event that happens between an object’s action and the result of that action. We can imagine this as something like the space between a football being tossed and being caught.

Philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin wrote about addressivity, described as the unthought moment where one considers how the addressee will respond to what one is about to say, thus changing the nature of communication to fit the expectations of the addressee. Addressivity aims to protect oneself from the possibility of misinterpretation by anticipating the response and adjusting the intended message.

Let’s say an artist provides a set of directions, clear in their demands but unrestrained; the participant must choose a situation, select a set of players, and act out the situation as one of the players. The player’s roles, the situation, the level of involvement are all up to the participant. While the goal does not lie in the completion of a task in specific, instead the goal is participation. The goal is to encourage a willingness to play along.

Provided the appropriate restrictions, we are given the freedom to play. Successfully freeing ourselves from addressivity. If we respond to situations as just scenarios with a given set of rules, validated upon completion, then we do not consider how the audience will respond to our communications, actions, or production. Play allows for one to articulate free of preemptive perception.

Play begets the joyous re-ordering of things. Icons, symbols, mascots, no longer deeply rooted and solely associated with what they represent, instead become pliable material for making masks and costumes.

A camera, a child, a car ride home from school, nose picking, teeth brushing, a favorite pop song plays. Once upon a time the mundane and the mandatory became amusing, shinny little moments. Staring at your reflection in the kitchen window and sticking your tongue out at yourself. The five-minute song and dance before bedtime, the trust between a mother and her child. We wear our inner thoughts and respond to our ideas immediately.

The unexpected playful dance on the way out of the party, or goosebumps from a lake dip on a cool day. It is all the infrathin, unexplainable peace, these are the moments we play.

It seems play is a threshold, or a contract, that one must walk into with one another. A prior acknowledgement of the meeting is required. A negotiating of rules, of bounds. Outside of this line is the street, it is where cars go, it is no longer play as the rules of reality are too overwhelming. Within the agreed upon limits, anything goes, it is shockingly all up for debate. It also seems that the more play mimics and regurgitates reality to its preciseness the more that play is tainted. Play that earnestly adheres to the minute limits of reality is a perverse type of play.

We leave you with these instructions:

1. Upon reading this you must choose whether or not to become part of the play.

2. Everyone and everything and everywhere and everywhen can be a part of this play.

3. Our play will be improvised – we will not read from the script tonight.

4. Individual moments will become scenes – heightened, important, cinematic. Pay attention.

5. There is not one audience, you will see, you must play for yourself, for your friends, for your friends to be, for your lovers, for the art, and for the strangers.

6. Play is of course made to the end of entertainment and recreation, the ailment of boredom. However, we must celebrate our moments of intentional boredom as they in turn produce and invite more play.

7. One’s own play will not eclipse another’s play, our plays (one’s play) will exist in various relations to form a constellation in the night sky.

8. There is no stage cue for the end of the play, instead we will all decide when our play is done. We will go into the night adorned in the dress that time’s destruction has made for us.

Play us out maestro!

Megan Foy and Julian Van Der Moere

Opening Reception:
March 15th 5-8 pm

EXPO Art After Hours
April 12th 5-8 pm

Flyer Image:
Eugene von Bruenchenhein
Untitled (Marie squatting on stool), n.d.
Gelatin silver print
4 x 2.75 in.
Courtesy of Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, gift of Lewis and Jean Greenblatt