A bellwether is a herald or a harbinger.

In this exhibition, Threewalls brought together a group of artists (currently or formerly based in Chicago) whose work imparts a kind of warning or predication. Riding the line of disaster prophesy, the work suggested cultural and environmental decline, as well as simultaneously deconstructing the meaning of art or the Avant-garde as a pilaster of faith in the abstract. Positioning a group of artists whose work created disruption within the accepted narrative of modern art alongside work that proposed a menacing or hesitant narrative, Bellwether was both a document of doubt and anxiety in the face of cultural disrepair, as well as a provocation from a group of artists working from outside the traditional poles of the Avante-garde. 

Bellwether featured work by Daniel Anhorn, David Coyle, Caleb Jones Lyons, Christian Kuras & Duncan McKenzie, Josh Mannis, Heather Mekkelson and Jenny Walters. Bellwether was curated by Shannon R. Stratton, who was Director and Chief Curator of Programs at Threewalls at the time.

In exchange, the Alternator sent Scott August, Sarah Fuller, and Bracken H’anuse Corlett to Chicago to present their work in an exhibition titled Turned Intos.

Threewalls, an evolving Blk-space, fosters contemporary art practices that respond to lived experiences, encouraging connections beyond art. Threewalls provides support to artists, produces innovative programming, and creates a space for artists and creatives to thrive. The work of Threewalls rests firmly within a culture of care, a culture of intentionality, a culture of space, a culture of rootedness that centers humanity through the lens of art and relationship-building.

For more information about Threewalls, visit their website.

Daniel Anhorn is an artist originally from Revelstoke BC, with an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He currently works as a Preparator at the Red-Deer Art Gallery and Museum.

David Coyle is a painter and artist currently working out of Philidelphia, PA.

For more information about Coyle’s work, visit his website.

Caleb Jones-Lyons is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been exhibited in the United States and abroad including High Energy Constructs (Los Angeles), 40000 (Chicago), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York) and Bemis Underground (Omaha).

Christian Kuras & Duncan McKenzie have been collaborating on projects since 2003. Christian Kuras lives in suburban Manchester, England. His work has been shown and published across Canada, the United States and Europe. Duncan MacKenzie is an artist, pundit, educator and a founding member/producer of Bad at Sports. His works have appeared in galleries all over the world including Canada, Australia, The United States of America, New Zealand, Estonia and England. He currently enjoys a posting as an Assistant Professor in Art + Design at Columbia College Chicago.

For more information about their work, visit their website.

Josh Mannis has an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  His exhibition record includes the Mattress Factory Museum of Contemporary Art in Pittsburgh, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, Musée d'art Contemporain de Montréal, Québec, the Tate Modern in London, and solo and group exhibitions at contemporary art galleries in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Portland OR, Boston, Mexico City, Vancouver and Berlin.

Heather Mekkelson is a sculptor and installation artist based in Chicago. She has had several solo exhibitions at Chicago galleries such as 65GRAND, 4th Ward Project Space, and STANDARD. Her work has been exhibited in group shows in galleries and institutions nationally since 2001. Mekkelson’s work has been featured in Art Journal, Art21 Magazine, Artforum.com, Artnet, Flavorpill, Hyperallergic, Newcity, Time Out Chicago, and others. She has been the recipient of several fellowships and grants including the 2020 Illinois Arts Council Agency Fellowship in Sculpture and a 2012 Artadia Award.

For more information about Mekkelson’s work, visit her website.

Jenny Walters is a photographer with an MFA from the University of Chicago. Her work has been exhibited in Chicago, Houston and Kansas City. Walters has been reviewed in ArtForum, Modern Painters and Art Monthly.

Faith Moosang & Christoph Runné‘s The Blair Bush Project formed a representation of war, concentrated on the motivations that fuelled military and economic conflicts at the time, within the ever-changing alliances of international politics. 

Hand-processed, speed-manipulated 16 mm film looped imagery of a guard dog lapping water, a nuclear blast and an oil-filled nodding donkey blended with appropriated imagery from the movies Wall Street and MacArthur, and were projected on to a rotating screen. Audio of motors blended with the noise of the projectors to create a feeling of confusion and chaos. 

Faith Moosang is a multimedia artist, curator, writer and researcher who lives and works in Vancouver, BC.. Her work centres around inquiry into spectacle culture, media, mediated imagery and the mechanically reproduced image. She has an MFA from the School for Contemporary Art at Simon Fraser University and has expanded her practice to the realms of public art and curating contemporary art. She has also published books, articles and blogs relating to culture, pop culture, research, history and photography. Her research and writing have garnered awards and her specific passions are things archival, historical and political.

For more information about Moosang and her work, visit her website.

Christoph Runné is a Vancouver-based experimental film, video, and installation artist. Through his work, he explores the unhidden yet seemingly invisible world around us. He creates visual tone poems with a humanitarian heartbeat whose minimalist and impressionistic methodology contradicts the complex human conditions with which Runné engages.

Drawing upon notions of spirituality, mobility, history and power, this photo-based and video installation mixes the traditional with the contemporary, suggesting that tradition is contemporary and that the contemporary is traditional. Through the blurring of definitions, ancient philosophies and cutting-edge representations of the aboriginal body and image, Claxton attempts to pay homage to Black Elk and the Horse Dance.

This project was commissioned by the Alternator Gallery for Contemporary Art with assistance from Arts Partners in Creative Development and the Audain Foundation.

Dana Claxton is a critically acclaimed artist who works with film, video, photography, single/multi- channel video installation, and performance art. Her practice investigates indigenous beauty, the body, the socio-political and the spiritual. Her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC), Walker Art Centre (Minneapolis, MN), Sundance Film Festival, Salt Lake City (UT), Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Indianapolis (IN), Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney, AU), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR), Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University (Durham, NC), Memphis Brooks Museum of Art (TN) and the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MN). Her work is held in public, private and corporate collections including the National Gallery of Canada, Winnipeg Art Gallery, Vancouver Art Gallery, Mackenzie Art Gallery, Audain Museum, Getty Museum, Eiteljorg Museum, Seattle Art Museum, Forge Project, Minneapolis Institute of Art, University of Toronto, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art and the Moose Jaw Museum and Art Gallery.

She has received the VIVA Award (2001), Eiteljorg Fellowship (2007), Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Award (2019), YWCA Women of Distinction Award (2019), Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts (2020), the Scotiabank Photography Award (2020), and the Audain Prize for the Visual Arts (2023). She is the winner of Best Experimental film at the IMAGINATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival (2013).

Fringing the Cube, her solo survey exhibition, was mounted at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2018) and the body of work Headdress premiered at the inaugural Toronto Biennial of Art, Toronto ON (2019). She is set to have a solo exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2024.

She is Professor and Head of the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory with the University of British Columbia. She is a member of Wood Mountain Lakota First Nations located in SW Saskatchewan and she resides in Vancouver Canada. 

Dana comments, “I am grateful for all the support my artwork and cultural work has received. I am indebted to the sun and my sundance teachings – mni ki wakan - water is sacred. ”

To learn more about Claxton and her work, Visit her website.

The House That Herman Built was the result of Jackie Sumell’s five-year collaboration and correspondence with Herman Wallace; an inmate at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola (USA). The question they tried to answer was, “what kind of house does a man who has lived in a 6-foot by 9-foot cell dream of after 30 years of solitary confinement?” This question is explored in different modalities including a scale wood model of the house, a CAD model video, as well as dozens of drawings, diagrams, and letters of correspondence.

Jackie Sumell is a multidisciplinary artist and abolitionist inspired most by the lives of everyday people. Her work has been successfully anchored at the intersection of activism, education, mindfulness practices and art for nearly two decades, and it has been exhibited extensively throughout the world. She has been the recipient of multiple residencies and fellowships including, but not limited to, a Source Fellowship, A Blade of Grass, Robert Rauschenberg Artist-as-Activist Fellowship, a Soros Justice Fellowship, an Eyebeam Fellowship, a Headlands Residency and a Schloss Solitude Residency Fellowship. Sumell’s collaboration with Herman Wallace (a prisoner-of-consciousness and member of the Angola 3) was the subject of the Emmy Award-Winning documentary Herman’s House. Sumell’s work with Herman has positioned her at the forefront of the national campaign to end solitary confinement and seek humane alternatives to incarceration.

Herman Wallace, one of the ‘Angola Three’, was incarcerated at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in 1971 for robbery charges. In 1972 he and fellow inmates Robert King and Albert Woodfox were charged with murdering a prison guard, and Wallace spent the next 42 years in solitary confinement; maintaining his innocence over the decades. Jackie Sumell began a correspondence with Wallace in 2006, which kicked off years of activism and artistic collaboration. Wallace was released from prison on October 1st, 2013, and passed away, a free man, three days later.

Jackie Continues the legacy of Herman to this day through the Solitary Gardens organization- which can be viewed here. Below is an excerpt from the website:

“Jackie sumell’s most celebrated project, Herman’s House, resulted from an incredible 12-year collaboration with political prisoner Herman Wallace. Herman spent over decades in solitary confinement in the State of Louisiana, for a crime he could not have possibly committed. In his 29th year of isolation, while a graduate student at Stanford University, she began writing him, eventually asking: “What kind of house does a man who has lived in a six-foot-by-nine-foot box for almost thirty years dream of?” This question launched our collaborative project, The House That Herman Built (Herman’s House), an ongoing exhibition, installation, book, advocacy campaign, and Emmy Award-winning documentary (Best Artistic Documentary, 2013). After spending over 41 years in a 6’ x9’ cage, Herman’s conviction was overturned and he was released from prison on October 1, 2013. He died 3-days later from the complications of advanced liver cancer. Fueled by the desire to keep Herman’s legacy alive, The Solitary Gardens, turns solitary confinement cells into garden beds that are the same size and blue-print as the cell Herman, and so many others spend decades in. The contents (plants, flowers and herbs) of the prison-cell-turned-garden-bed are designed by prisoners serving their sentences in isolation through proxies on the outside. Central to this project is a call to end the inhumane conditions of solitary confinement, simultaneously inspiring compassion necessary to dismantle systems of punishment and control.”

Balloons and plastic masks are definitive markers of celebration. In his installation For My Culture, Brendan Fernandes subverted these synthetic signs of festivity to pose the question: whose party is this anyway?

The pristine gallery space became an artificial landscape in NeoPrimitivism II.  Decoy deer stood proxy for their natural counterparts, hidden behind flimsy plastic masks.   Modeled from African tribal masks, the white party favours were consumable artifacts. They offered a level of superficial disguise – making the false deer more conspicuous while simultaneously providing camouflage within the white-walled sanctuary. Made of commercial plastic instead of sanctified wood, these artifacts were designed for a different ritual – viewing art. The masks speak of cultural translation: objects taken out of context, drained of color and visually simplified.

Translations of culture occur every time people cross borders and assimilate.  By pointing to what is lost during naturalization, Fernandes addressed larger questions of post-colonial identity and the role of art in the transcription of power and purpose. 

Visitors to the gallery were playfully implicated in this complex exchange by a box of white balloons printed with linear drawings of African masks. Offered as souvenirs of the exhibition, the balloons were free for the taking, but at what cost?  The act of inflating a balloon with helium distorted the image of the mask, distancing the reproduction even further from the original.  At the same time, it raised the visibility of the pseudo-artifact, quite literally. Tethered to viewers, the balloons became mobile signifiers of a dislocated idea of ‘Africa’ – casual diaspora that can extended the exhibition beyond the gallery doors.

The title of this piece, Authentic POP, was a reminder of the ephemeral nature of these inflated emissaries, but also made reference to the commodification of culture as exemplified by Pop Art. In contrast to ‘authentic’ experience, Fernandes presented identity as a marketable export – an inoculated version of the self, globally acceptable, but dislocated from its source.

At a post-colonial moment when many people were experiencing a displaced life, the artist questioned the basic premise of ‘home.’  In a short video loop, a repeated lion’s call was translated in subtitles as “Go Home”. But after a complex journey, the viewer could no longer be entirely sure of which home the lion speaks. Is it ‘ours’ or ‘his?’ And once the barrier between the two is crossed, does ‘home’ truly belong to anyone? At the end of the party, the viewer may have started to recognize an uncomfortable truth: in this space, we are all masquerading.

Brendan Fernandes (b. 1979, Nairobi, Kenya) is an internationally recognized Canadian artist working at the intersection of dance and visual arts. Currently based out of Chicago, Fernandes’ projects address issues of race, queer culture, migration, protest and other forms of collective movement. Always looking to create new spaces and new forms of agency, Fernandes’ projects take on hybrid forms: part Ballet, part queer dance hall, part political protest...always rooted in collaboration and fostering solidarity.

Fernandes is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program (2007) and a recipient of a Robert Rauschenberg Fellowship (2014). In 2010, he was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award, and is the recipient of a prestigious 2017 Canada Council New Chapters grant. Fernandes is also the recipient of the Artadia Award (2019), a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2020) and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant (2019). His projects have shown at the 2019 Whitney Biennial (New York); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York); the Museum of Modern Art (New York); The Getty Museum (Los Angeles); the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa); MAC (Montreal); among a great many others. He is currently artist-in-residency and Assistant Professor at Northwestern University.

To learn more about Fernandes and his work, visit his website.