Spilling, sprawling, and other ways of building
1224 W Loyola Ave, Chicago IL
April 12, 2025 - April 27, 2025
Open Hours Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays 4-7 PM
Closing Performance Sunday, April 27 at 2:30 PM featuring Graciela Gonzalez, Clara Nizard, Steph Patsula, and Tina Wang
Roman Susan is pleased to present Shir Ende’s Spilling, sprawling, and other ways of building, the artist’s first solo exhibition pairing site-specific installation with live performance. Curated by Lauren Leving.
Both the installation and performance, created for Roman Susan’s final year in their 1224 W. Loyola Avenue home, draw from an artist-created score rooted in the language of architecture. Guided by this visual score, Ende expands upon her drawing practice to use the gallery’s walls, windows, and floor as her canvas. Embracing the possibilities of speculative design, she uses charcoal, chalk, and Velcro to overlay symbols from the score atop Roman Susan’s existing structure. A cyclical arrow signifying a revolving door is drawn onto the hinged door, the stairs become an accessible ramp, the window panes transform into a corridor, and the ceiling swaps roles with the floor.
Each element in Ende’s notational system of images has an associated movement. For instance, the sweeping gesture of a drawing charcoal curve onto Roman Susan’s wall can also be performed by two people leaning on each other. To create a column: jump; to build a wall: run.
Within Spilling, sprawling, and other ways of building, Ende assumes the role of choreographer-cum-architect, working alongside a troupe of four performers to explore movement’s potential to build environments. By employing a concept that the artist has termed “Movement-generated architecture,” choreography grafts to Roman Susan’s building, deepening our bodily relationships with inanimate structure.
A set of performances, developed in collaboration with performers Graciela Gonzalez, Clara Nizard, Steph Patsula, and Tina Wang, will take place during the run of the exhibition. Within them, physical movement responds to the gallery as a site of creative possibility and asks us to consider the future of this soon-to-be razed site. While Ende, Gonzalez, Nizard, Patsula, and Wang break ground on an ephemeral architecture, our awareness of Roman Susan’s impending removal heightens. The question, “What happens when a space is demolished?” lingers. Opportunity and disappointment are layered over memories past.
The mark-making and performance of Spilling, sprawling, and other ways of building operate in tandem as an experiment in embodied placemaking. Through this project, Ende shrinks the monumentality of the built environment down to human scale, proposing a more personalized spatiality that rejects the rigidity of building and allows us to imagine architecture with the absence of edges.
Shir Ende (she/her) is a Chicago-based artist and educator. Ende received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has exhibited at the University of Illinois Springfield, Riverside Art Center, Hyde Park Art Center, Comfort Station, Gallery 400, and was a sponsored artist at High Concept Labs. She has participated in the Center Program at Hyde Park Art Center, and residencies at the Chicago Artist Coalition and the Alex Brown Foundation in Des Moines, Iowa. For more information, please visit shirende.com.
Spilling, sprawling, and other ways of building exhibition guide (PDF)