1224 W Loyola Ave has three descending stairs to a recessed floor; regrettably, the interior of the exhibition space is not wheelchair accessible. The public washroom is a very confined space, up two stairs from the exhibition floor. If these factors or others present a barrier for your visit, please write to art@romansusan.org or leave a voicemail at (773) 270-1224 in advance for alternate arrangements. Roman Susan at 1224 W Loyola Ave is located 85 meters northwest of the Loyola CTA Station, with direct access for public transit via the Red Line train and the 147 bus line. A Divvy bike-share hub is located at the west exit of the CTA. There is on-street parking on W Loyola Ave, and a paid parking garage at 1210 W Arthur Ave immediately to the south. For all projects at 1224 W Loyola Ave, open hours are scheduled in advanced, and available at other times by appointment. All projects are visible from the sidewalk immediately outside the space 24/7.
Eveningnessless
1224 W Loyola Ave, Chicago IL
December 27, 2024 - January 5, 2025
Reception Friday, December 27 from 6-9 PM
Performance Saturday, January 4 at 4:33 PM
For two days in August, I watched the light move across the walls and floors inside Roman Susan. From sunrise to sunset, and then again. This work is an attempt to remember that light.
–– Ruby Que
Ruby Que is an interdisciplinary artist focusing on site-specific intervention and expanded cinema performance. In their work they open portals and create hauntings. Many projects grapple with absence; through video, sculpture and installation, they attempt to give shape to what lies within and beyond the perceived void. Drawing on their lived experience as a queer, itinerant immigrant, they meditate on yearning and find home in transit. They believe in the power of collective myth-making, often engaging collaborators and viewers as co-conspirators towards liberation. For more information, visit rubyque.net.
SOUND BLEEDS
1224 W Loyola Ave, Chicago IL
December 9 - December 21, 2024
An insistent weight encroached the shadows of my uterus, forcing me through medical thresholds and normative expectations. With 16mm film, digital video, and sound, I suture the threads of control over what feels beyond reach: the sovereignty of the body and a digital form of self. Marking one year since my surgery, SOUND BLEEDS stitches together light and shadow, pulse and silence, conjuring a body unbound by flesh alone. Through the manipulation of medical film and optical sound, this work explores the complex dialogues of self—a merging of the physical and digital, reclaiming agency and embracing multiplicity.
–– Peixuan Ouyang
Peixuan Ouyang is interested in how images infiltrate and mediate everyday life, and how we negotiate the world and connect with one another through these images. Peixuan’s work primarily lives through light and readily shapeshifts into films, videos, prints, books, installations, or a combination thereof. Many projects investigate the intersection of monumentality and the absurdity of living, exploring the complexities of globalization, migration, and the human body within and beyond digital and material landscapes. Peixuan juxtaposes the lasting impact of creations with the fleeting nature of life, celebrating the tension between our desires and the realities of human limitations. For more information, visit peixuanouyang.com.
SOUND BLEEDS concluded on the Winter Solstice with a sound performance by Haruhi Kobayashi. For more information, visit haruhikobayashi.com.
Dissonant Body: A Review of Peixuan Ouyang’s “Sound Bleeds” at Roman Susan | Newcity - December 16, 2024
SOUND BLEEDS | Bad at Sports - December 19, 2024
Death Cleaning
1224 W Loyola Ave, Chicago IL
November 24, 2024 - December 1, 2024
Ruthless and regretful in a cloud of haunted dust, utterly owned by your belongings, you persist with death cleaning. It’s a ritual. It’s a chore. And no one rushes forward to help except the psychotherapist and the spiritualist. Your relics and hoardings want to slip free of meanings. They’re absurd, sad, embarrassing. But they’re hopeful survivors.
Go ahead, kill your darlings—they’re immortal anyway.
Carole McCurdy: installation, video, sound, full text score, performance
Paul Escriva: voiceover, Spiritualist research, brainstorms
Judith Harding: voiceover, performance
Noa Fields: spirit piano
Carole McCurdy is a Chicago-based artist whose movement-based work addresses grief and anxiety, duty and resistance, and the absurd mysteries of embodiment. She has performed at spaces including the Chicago Cultural Center, Epiphany Dance, Links Hall, Hamlin Park, High Concept Laboratories, Defibrillator Gallery, and Movement Research (NY). She received a 2016 Lab Artist award from the Chicago Dancemakers Forum and was a Fall 2016 Sponsored Artist at High Concept Laboratories, Chicago. She created and directed an ensemble piece, WAVER, with support from CDF, HCL, and 3Arts Chicago, and most recently created Just Passing Through (2021–22), a video, installation, and performance shown at Roman Susan gallery. For more information, please visit carolemccurdy.com.
Paul Escriva began exploring performance art with Frank Moore in Berkeley in the 1980s. He is inspired by Annie Sprinkle, Chilli Pepper, and Linda Montano. Escriva has been privileged to serve as midwife to the dying, having lost forty friends to HIV/AIDS, and his work investigates the queer body’s health within the community. His performance work has been shown extensively over thirty years, receiving a grant from the Alphawood Foundation.
Judith Harding has been kicking around the vicinity of performance as a writer/performer and all-around bottom-feeder. Hobbies include watching clothes dry. A teaching artist, Harding is an ensemble member of Tellin' Tales Theatre.
Noa Fields is a trans poet with hearing aids. She is the author of the chapbook With, and her work has been published in Tripwire, Anomaly, Zoeglossia, Elderly, Tyger Quarterly, and Sixty Inches From Center, among others.
‘Kill your darlings’: Exploring Death and Life in Performance Art Piece ‘Death Cleaning’ | Loyola Phoenix - December 11, 2024
Desynchronized Body
1224 W Loyola Ave, Chicago IL
November 10 - November 17, 2024
Performance Sunday, November 10 at 4 PM
The ridges and ravines on a shell, the furcation and fractures in my hair, backwater lingering, advancing within the flesh.
Able to see the ups and downs? The ashes and erosion?
Are they a whisper or a stare? Profound or invisible?
The growth rings, are growing and forgetting, grown and forgotten.
Engraved and obliterated, by whom?
It’s the name given by a mother.
Desynchronized Body is an interdisciplinary performance and installation work by Zachary Sun, part of the ongoing project, Fortuitous Peaks of Almanac. This project stems from a series of studies on body rhythms, inspired by a 1954 oyster experiment. Through the symbolism of oysters and a collage of occurrences, Desynchronized Body provides a physical intersection for examining the power dynamics of named bodies/labeled identities, modern cosmopolitanism, and environmental ideology.
Zachary Sun is a Chinese-born, Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist who creates performances, installations, writing, film, animation, and puppetry. He instrumentalizes his artistic practice as a way to observe and perceive. He deconstructs the semantics and media of presence to cultivate new syntactic forms beyond the poetic and absurd through the processes of weaving and collage. His current focus is to use this framework to explore personal experience, archaeological discoveries in his hometown, geological development, and power succession — and, through these elements, to uncover new possibilities for expressing structural relationships.