Ron Athey – Marquis Von Bayros – Rachael Bos – Jamie Fletcher – Danny Frownfelter – Norbert Kox – Bill Lilly – Monika Plioplyte – Sun Ra – Philipp Schopke – Jon Serl – Bronislaw “Bruno” Sowa – Maria Vanik – Jean Wilson – Albert Zahn

Pray, carve, bleed, sing. Insist that to look death in the face, ritually and repeatedly, is how one kisses life on the lips. This is magic understood plainly: not sleight of hand, but the discipline of transformation, and religion in its most degraded form.

The sacred, in this view, is not piety but rupture: sacrifice, ecstasy, laughter, daemonic entities, and the corpse. Death here is not simply a subject but a method. Art becomes the site where the restricted economy of production and survival is deliberately breached, where a sovereign act of wasting oneself – bleeding, praying, dancing, carving toward no useful end – recovers a continuity between beings that ordinary, bounded selfhood forecloses. The works gathered here stage exactly this breach: each refuses the discreteness the self is supposed to maintain, offering itself instead as a willful expenditure, a controlled burn of the prairie’s boundary – on the border where the living meet the dead.

Beneath that scorched wound runs a river. Death is not an event waiting at the end of a life but a force already coursing through it. A pure differentiation, the self already a multiplicity being continuously undone and reassembled beneath its own name. This current treats the human not as a form to be preserved but as a threshold to be laughed at, dissolved, desire and death fused into a single accelerant burning through identity toward what is on the other side. This exhibition’s icons are not meditations on mortality, they are remnants of mortality’s discharge, operations and apparatuses built by hand, and by body, to run the current of death through the self on purpose – not to master it, but to see, however briefly, who or what rears its head from beneath the surface.

On view through September 25th, 2026