Oak Park, IL
Compound Yellow projects
1000 Home Ave
Oak Park, IL 60304
Madelene Przybysz
Flag No. 1
Flag No. 1 investigates patterns of mycelium growth alongside a color palette of fungi native to Illinois. This abstract design and color palette mimics a type of natural stained glass that will ebb and flow in the late season winds. This flag not only showcases the complex weaving of the mycelium system but also the diverse color of fungal types.
Curated by Mara Baker
1000 Home Ave
Oak Park, IL 60304
Jackie Weaver
Future Forests
In collaboration with Michael Cunningham, Katherine Sifers, Alexander Morgan, and Mara Baker
What does it mean to dismantle a future forest?
What does it mean to care for a future forest?
How does human intervention impede or nurture life outside our own?
How can plant life teach us to care for the futures of all life?
Future Forests is a love poem and practice about finding ways to survive in our current
situation—how to live with grief, anxiety, and conflict, and find new ways of being through acts of love, care, and reciprocity. Over 1000 elm saplings were cared for during the course of this project. The Future Forests greenhouse contains 47 maple saplings, along with a collection of seeds, plants, and vegetables. The accompanying sound piece Lullaby for 1000 Elms was composed by Alexander Morgan after the loss of two neighboring trees for the sake of a three-car garage. Please take whatever plants you can use or share. Feel free to contribute seeds and plants for your neighbors. Your care is an extension of ours.
741 Fair Oaks
Oak Park, IL 60302
Amanda Mulcahy
Elemental Puffs
Inspired by natural processes, I create vibrant soft sculptural pieces based on my investigations of how the earth continuously churns inert materials into complex forms. Here I look at the relationship between fungi and environment. This installation focuses on illuminating the connection between fungi and its surrounding terrain. The forms in Elemental are inspired by mushrooms with their surfaces reflecting the changes of their environment. The dyed and painted surfaces will begin to fade in periods of sunlight and harsh weather revealing a screen printed image underneath. Responding to their environment, they will change over the course of the exhibition.
905 N Mapleton
Oak Park, IL 60302
Kathryn Rodrigues
Show Us The Way
"Show Us The Way" is an expanded version of a small mixed media photo collage that explore ideas connecting familial lineage, motherhood, the body as landscape, memory and mortality. As a middle-aged person raising young children and navigating aging parents and grandparents, essential questions arise: what do we carry from previous generations consciously and unconsciously? What do we pass on to our children? How do we stay connected and remember family members who have passed away? What memories do we retain and which memories fade away?
1011 N Grove
Oak Park, IL 60302
Trish Smithing
Carbon
From Steel farm tools found in the fields of Wisconsin to a yard in Oak Park, carbon has been an important element in society. This connection with Mycelium is important. Mycelium is a thriving underground network of fungal threads, vital to many natural ecosystems. Mycelium can be used for sustainable construction mostly due to its lightweight biodegradable structure and its ability to grow from waste source. Mycelium can serve as a carbon sink making mycelium bio-composites a possible answer to the emissions, energy, and waste associated with building construction.
1031 S Harvey Ave
Oak Park, IL 60304
Adrienne Elyse Meyers
Bungalowland
In the 1920s, the 1000 block of S Harvey Ave became home to fourteen bungalows. Built, designed, and developed by the same team, this block of homes represented the iconic style that swept across the nation and has become a staple of the Chicagoland architectural landscape. The design elements of the bungalow spring up from the land over and over again, creating a network of architectural kinship throughout the area. This project explores the bungalows of S Harvey with collaged paintings that incorporate visual elements from these structures to become cacophonous composites representing the fourteen homes of this block, convening here on the lawn of 1031 S Harvey.
938 Columbian Ave
Oak Park, IL 60302
Alex Mendez
What’s in the garden
This work is meant to be an interactive reflection of the kinds of plants and flowers growing in the particular garden or surrounding neighborhood. Participants are asked to display fresh or dried flowers in the work periodically throughout the duration of the installation.
537 S. Oak Park Avenue
Oak Park, IL 60304
Lainey Peltier
Specular Pool
Based upon the idea of reflections in a still body of water, this installation challenges a viewer's perception of their environment by offering many vantage points through which they can encounter the site: the reflection of sky, trees, and other plant life or the earthen surface beneath the translucent plexiglass. This work creates a space for questions regarding our relationships to our physical environment and invites the viewer into a moment of close looking and listening. I’m interested in remembering a magical moment of observation, capturing the momentary second of being enraptured by natural phenomena.
1034 Wisconsin Ave
Oak Park, IL 60304
Melissa Pokorny
Oak Park Home Circle
Ghost lilies. Phantom lilies. Resurrection lilies. Naked ladies. In early spring the leaves emerge then disappear. Months later the flowers appear as if from thin air. They are spectral. I made a lily circle in 2022 for a cemetery site in upstate New York, home to Spiritualist “camps”-- gatherings of believers and mediums convened to communicate across “the veil” with the dead. Seances were the main form of communion, undertaken by “home circles” of regular members. Lilies were “apported” gifts from the spirit world. Squirrels spread the bulbs, dispersing them in unplanned ways. They can also be found growing among ruins of razed home sites and empty lots. Human, non-human, and more-than-human collide in this project. Other ways of being and ways of knowing are acknowledged in this simple gesture of connectedness.
1120 Fair Oaks
Oak Park, IL 60302
Pamela Penney
Elferingewort (Elf Ring)
When a mushroom spore lands in a suitable location, the underground hyphae grow out evenly in all directions. As the fungus grows and ages, the oldest parts in the center of the mat die, creating a circle. When the fungus produces its mushrooms – the fruiting bodies – they appear above ground in a ring. I have utilized salvaged baler twine and handspun plastic yarn from newspaper bags to weave a web of wonder. Traditional basketry techniques around a wire armature, supported by PVC pipes are used to create these fanciful mushrooms, arranged to evoke a magical fairy or elf circle.
838 Fair Oaks Ave
Oak Park, IL 60302
Rine Boyer
Stop and Look Closely
We often think of the city as belonging to humans and our pets, while other animals and bugs are unwanted and exist unseen between our spaces. But if we pay attention, we are living together. Instead of thinking of these creatures as pests, Stop and Look Closely focuses on our coexistence. Like us, they are experiencing life’s highs and lows while trying to live in the city.
This piece is part of my City Life series, which asks us to consider our interconnectedness to the wildlife living around us. You can see other series, as well as some in-progress photos, at rineboyer.com
324 N Harvey Ave
Oak Park, IL 60302
Selden Paterson
Big Tube (Mieg’s Field Grotto)
Big Tube is an homage and shrine to the unique geology of Mieg's Field, where the terrain consists of chunks of human bureaucracy and destructive hubris mixed in a binding agent of fertile collapse. This environment is surprisingly hospitable to new life.
At 324 N. Harvey, Big Tube is shown alongside The Liquefaction 1.0 – together these works, both water features, adapt to this public/private space by borrowing a material sensibility from the lumpy practicality of roadside grotto shrines of the midwest and beyond.
527 S Humphrey Ave
Oak Park, IL 60304
Bryan Northup
Webs We Weave - Trails We Leave
My project for Terrain connects two separate spaces with installations made from a material we all encounter and use, single-use plastic and styrofoam.
One exhibit will occupy a miniature gallery in Oak Park, and feature works made from recycled styrofoam, while the other emerges north at the historic Edgewater Beach Apartments from underground routes to sprout fruiting bodies along a beach walk.
This work will be made exclusively from collected plastics from residents of EBA. Mimicking mycelium as it works in nature I'm creating connection with materials to place and cycling waste into works of art.
527 S Humphrey Ave
Oak Park, IL 60304
Elaine Luther (curator)
Angelica Kauffman Gallery: Outdoor Micro Gallery
The Angelica Kauffman Gallery will host three solo shows during the run of Terrain. The solo artists are Bryan Northup of Illinois, Jocelyn Mathewes of Tennessee, and Aparajita Jain Mahajan of Pune, India. The Angelica Kauffman Gallery is a dollhouse scale (1:12) gallery that lives in a domestic setting, online, and sometimes in places such as libraries and Terrain. The gallery is curated by Elaine Luther, and is a member of the international Guild of Micro Galleries. The gallery serves primarily emerging artists and charges no fees or commissions. Art in photo is by Bryan Northup.
elainelutherart.com | @Elaine_Luther | @AngelicaKauffmanGallery
1155 Lyman Ave
Oak Park, IL 60304
Mac Pierce
Bliss
Bliss is a 1 of 1 digital artwork that exists exclusively on a single industrial-grade computer. That computer is buried in a sealed doomsday-ready capsule and is currently buried under 3 feet of soil.
Should the apocalypses come about while Bliss is buried, it will survive, allowing it to exist as an art piece beyond the end of the world, in whatever form it may take.
616 N Taylor
Oak Park, IL 60302
Titus Wonsey
This Is It
1046 S Kenilworth
Oak Park, IL 60304
Rob Sohmer
K.C.K.A.A.K.A.T.B.T.B.
This is a large knot, with over 2000 feet of rope! It's a bit of a tangle actually. Sometimes the best way to address a problem is right on.
842 Fair Oaks Ave
Oak Park, IL 60302
Ann Marie Greenberg
Our Lady of Perpetual Plastic OP
Using the plastics as a base and as an inspiration, my work explores extending the materials life as art, creating beauty and joy with forever plastic.
When volunteering in my childrens’ school lunchroom, I took notice of the high volume of plastic waste generated by my community. I watched plastic bags and containers get tossed day after day, plastic became the center of my studio practice. I used plastic flowers to create prints in my series Forever Flowers. The non-life-cycle of plastic flowers ensures that they will never truly decompose, and they will go on living in landfills forever. It is the same with kitchen consumer plastic which is what I am excited to use in the work of Our Lady of Perpetual Plastic project, creating faux-stained glass with plastics. Using the plastics as a base and as an inspiration, my work explores extending the materials life as art, creating beauty and joy with forever plastic.