Still Life

*The following statement is a composition of fragments and sentences submitted by the artists in response to the prompt: What is your relationship with your surroundings?

Having a relationship with my surroundings is linked to my sense of being consciously present in one place.
The natural world and all its life force nourishes and enables out planet to survive. We should welcome the embrace as it fosters life on our planet.
I am navigating new surroundings while thinking through a familiar set of old concerns: geography, transience, shifts, slippage, belonging, community, identity, home.

I notice the subtle changes and movements in my surroundings. I respond to the environment, the spaces, the places and the objects around me. I try to create new meaning and logic by rearranging them.
If I’m thinking about the cosmos, my relationship is entangled and really really old.
If I’m thinking about DNA my relationship is my grandmother, my great grandparents, and their journeys across seas, an ocean, and colonized land to a place called the ‘middle-west.’

If I think about the cosmos I know that there is no upside-down, or north, or ‘western’ and that is useful. And if I look around myself I think about people I love who love me as well.

Not only do psychedelics re-connect us with nature but that connectedness also makes us feel better.
When I see, my eye is the material for the reception of the image. My toes touch soil of the same chemical cocktail as my foot. When I go, I’ll return what I’ve borrowed.
Constantly exploring new surroundings as sensory knowledge building through the structures, people and cultures I'm surrounded by.
When I think of my surroundings, I find myself thinking most deeply about our metaphysical landscapes. I think about what it does to our health to carry so much psychic weight in the form of personal, collective and ecological grief.
Is like being a stranger in a strange land. The limitations of knowing no one, lacking English skills, and having extremely restricted resources became my new possibilities.
Watching them continue to die is a transformation that takes on beautiful and unexpected turns. They help me pay attention to my surroundings, and all the things that come and go from our lives. They remind me beauty is difficult.

Inspired by two themes, landscape and absence, she conveys a wake-up call about the effects of economic growth on environmental sustainability and the island’s inhabitants.
I see a lot going on or nothing much at all and I try to make something beautiful of it either way. At my best I see the best in what is close.

Today on the train a black woman three seats away offered me a seat next to her. Smiled.
Nodded.
Mouthing words of understanding.

Kindred spirits.
Pleasing and appeasing the needs of others
with less of an ancestral weight of womaness of blackness.
The seat was left empty for stops.
Emptiness filled with fear of black skin and kindness for her likeness.

The natural world and all its life force nourishes and enables out planet to survive. We should welcome the embrace as it fosters life on our planet.
Grass, the cicada, and corn adorn the boot and skull, touching on each artist’s personal history as well as the rhythms and patterns of life, culture, politics, and death. We, like the cicadas and the corn continue our lives in cycles as we adapt to today’s ever-changing climate.

THE FRANKLIN is a Cultural and Organizations partner for the Chicago Architecture Biennial. Satellite partners for this exhibition and events include Garden Apartment Gallery @gagchicago and Compound Yellow @compoundyellow

Please visit thefranklinoutdoor.tumblr.com/ for more information.

IG: @thefranklinoutdoor
Location: THE FRANKLIN: 3522 W Franklin Blvd, Chicago, IL 60624

Contact: (312)823-3632 (text only) or thefranklinoutdoor@gmail.com