Paris London Hong Kong and Pickleman are excited to announce the return to Chicago of Academy Records, and the presentation of a new suite of works on paper entitled An Ellipses, A Vector, an Arc (The Dramatic Universe) Or The Well-Known Stranger.

Academy Records is the artistic platform of Stephen Lacy.

The twenty works on view are oddly shaped and peculiarly put together. Eschewing the rectilinear, the works present an expanded use of collage, wherein paint, sandpaper and press-type simultaneously decorate and distress a series of found images whose references point historically backward while forecasting the future like some disheveled weatherman.

Each individual composition displays a constellation of images that generate a multiplicity of readings, from hippie dreams of the past to fashion crisis of the present: think the early collage experiments of Kurt Schwitters meeting the punk amalgamations of Linder Sterling.

Or better put: a Sex Pistol walks into a bar and orders a dada performance to go, only to be torn and thrown to the wind thus finishing the composition.