Current and Upcoming
Rituals for Field Transmissions
josh brainin
Curated by Youssef Boucetta
Opening April 10, 6-9PM
April 10 - June 6, 2026
Barely Fair
Jesús Hilario-Reyes
April 3 -19, 2026
Neighbors Fair
Joseph J. Greer
April 8-12, 2026
Verge Showroom (co-curated)
josh brainin, Corrine Slade,
Jairo Granados-Cardenas,
Wendy Robles, Elaine Schutz Kurtz
March 27 - June, 2026
Riga Contemporary (Latvia)
Roland Knowlden
July 2 - July 5, 2026
Exhibition Archive
THROAT
KC Crow Maddux
December 13, 2025 - January 31, 2026
How Close Can You Get to a Stranger
Steven Piper
November 14 - November 23, 2025
Minor Harmonies
Laila Majid, Joseph J. Greer, Anastasia Sif Karkazis. Curated by Misael José Oquendo
October 8 - November 9, 2025
Marked
Lola Ayisha Ogbara
May 22 - July 22, 2025
Website currently under construction -
full documentation to come for:
Barely Fair 2025
Roland Knowlden
Temenos
Misael José Oquendo
March 14 - April 12, 2025
Stars Shown In the East
Mandela Hudson. Curated by Denny Mwaura
January 17 - March 1, 2025
[Hold]
Fengzee Yang, Sharon Xinran Zhang, Janet Lee, Eric Saudi. Curated by Rupture
Blinked Twice
Vani Aguilar
August 9 - October 6, 2024
Iceberg Process 5
Pierre-Alexandre Savriacoty. Curated by Stephanie Cristello
June 28 - July 21, 2024
Inaugural Exhibition
Ang Ziqi Zhang, Chaveli Sifre, Corrine Slade, Farah Salem, Jasmine Huaimin Yeh, Isra Rene, Kiam Marcelo Junio, Kushala Vora, Roland Knowlden, Roland Santana, Pierre-Alexandre Savriacouty
April 12 - June 9, 2024
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Tala is a contemporary art gallery located in the West Town neighborhood of Chicago, IL. The space includes a gallery, a library, and an atrium marketplace, offering a new model of gallery format that champions confluence and experimentation across disciplines and programming. Tala’s library is the permanent home of Chuquimarca Art Library.
The name Tala means ‘bright star’ in Tagalog and is derived from the mythology of Tala, the goddess of the morning and evening star, who was revered for her guidance of light during times of loss.
Thursday - Saturday 1-6PM
1644 West Chicago Ave #1, Chicago IL
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Opening:
April 10, 6-9PM
April 10 -
June 6, 2026
Rituals for Field Transmissionsjosh brainin
Curated by Youssef Boucetta
Rituals for Field Transmissions is the first solo exhibition by filmmaker and artist josh brainin. The exhibition stages an intimacy shaped through digital language, where the self can slip, scatter, and reassemble. As such, brainin urges us to understand identity not as a fixed condition but as a space of ongoing negotiation, one that holds both disorientation and possibility.
Rituals for Field Transmissions is a continued exploration into the mechanisms by which (un)stable selfhood is constituted. Moving away from video and film, this exhibition showcases brainin’s latest experimentations into physical printmaking techniques and sculptural installations. Rituals for Field Transmissions, is split into two components: a 2-channel video installation and a series of digital collages that stage the uncanny space where the now-all-too-familiar repertoire of cellphone symbology dissolves into landscapes between the real and the virtual. Avoiding the trap of falling into either techno-pessimism or techno-optimism, brainin uses the visual language of digital user interfaces to render age-old questions of subject formation, morality and individuality, at times verging on the spiritual.
At the exhibition’s core stands personhood² (2026), a 2-channel video installation made up of two CRT-TVs stacked atop each other, facing in opposite directions (this spatial composition references a retrofuturist version of Janus, the Greek god of transitions, passageways and time). This totem-like trunk of TVs mounted on a pedestal stands at 6ft tall, a size equivalent to the artist's real height. The mounted TVs are enclosed in a chamber of industrial PVC strip curtains, which both isolate and prismatically display the installation behind it. The two CRT-TVs display two symmetrical minimalistic clips looping in opposing order. Filmed with an iPhone in brainin’s childhood bathroom, the artist recites a fractured mantra “I am a Black man, I am a White man, Am I doing it right?” echoing the visceral malaise of Bruce Nauman’s installation, Clown Torture (1987). Evoking Adrian Piper’s investigations into racial ambiguity and the complexities of blackness, personhood² (2026) shows racial and gender identity as a recursive performance caught between self-affirmation and external validation. The installation’s curtains function as a skin, attempting to contain a scattered, multidirectional cry while allowing only faint traces of its sonic residue to pass through. They establish a quarantined processing zone - an interior space where identity is rehearsed, fractured, and reassembled. Like any skin, however, the membrane remains permeable, allowing materials, sounds, and gaze to cross its threshold in both directions.
The installation is flanked by aluminium digital collages mounted onto wood frames, made with a mix of iPhone photos, DALL-E 1.0 computer-generated imagery, and screenshots. The aluminum surface echoes the luminous infrastructure of screens while featuring bits of journalistic intimacy that come in a contemporary form—the phone notes app. These bits melt into landscapes whose meme-like color distortions scramble any firm sense of location, space, and time, disrupting the firm border between the real and the virtual. Ironically perhaps, the only sense of orientation—and in some of these frames, comfort—comes in the shape of the recognizable icons of iPhone user-interface symbology. Choosing to combine aluminum and wood into one frame is yet another way to foreground brainin’s broader interests in the thresholds where the organic meets the mechanical, where digital tools act as emotional prosthetics. In this way, the collages constitute a site of intimate externalization where the artist shares deeper strands of his vulnerability, affirmation, and, at times, struggle with the self.
In making visible a digital aesthetics of intimacy, the work attends to the fractures of the self, especially when the latter fails to fully cohere. To denaturalize one’s own homogeneity is a strategy against the violence inherent to the process of identity formation.
brainin has selected an additional 70 prints to accompany the exhibition Rituals for Field Transmissions - these prints were selected from his larger body of collages, revealing further insight into his extended collection of experiments with digital cultures and imaging.