Poseur II
April 26–May 25, 2024
Opening reception: Friday, April 26, 6pm - 8pm

Eric Ashcraft and Brian Hubble
with Jonathan Ellis, Madison Sternig, and Evan Stoler

Eric Ashcraft and Brian Hubble met as Eric was exiting and Brian was entering The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They share a love of art at the intersection of absurdist comedy and conceptual sculpture, and an upbringing far outside the official precincts of the contemporary art world. This was and is a recipe for imposter syndrome--but a certain kind of imposter syndrome that came for each artist with an attendant feeling of freedom and abandon that the more heeled set in the art world seemed to lack.

 The two joined work in an exhibition entitled "Poseur" in 2011, a tongue-in-cheek take on the idea of feeling like an outsider in an insider's game. The show featured work by Ashcraft and Hubble in a space with a lone work by another artist, James Powers, which happened to be a colorless, murky monochrome resembling a window frame, mounted in the upper portion of space as if hidden. This work was a cheeky take on the idea of the outsider/insider relationship in the art world. Who's the poseur, the upstarts trying to figure out the strange decorum of the contemporary art world, or the insiders who are so initiated that they don’t even recognize that presence of such restrictions? "Poseur II" is the sequel, pairing Ashcraft and Hubble again in the center of the space, with loud, insistent work, this time with a separate collection of Milwaukee locals reflecting a stance of self-possession, control, and formal restraint.

Work by Jonathan Ellis, Madison Sternig, and Evan Stoler will be “looking in” on Hubble and Ashcraft’s work during the exhibition. Who's inside and who's out; who's looking at whom? This fraught confrontation allows the show to take on the relationship between two prevailing forces in the art world, that of self-possession and control and the other of willful abandon. It also asks the question: who’s looking and who’s being looked at, and what it means to be in or out, out or in, in the first place.