title: Record
artist: Joshi Radin
materials: Vinyl
dimensions: 47”x 23.5”
location: 1850 N California Ave, Chicago IL
“Drawing from questions related to problems of scale, I began a series of monotypes
using found packing materials and clothing for new bodies. The prints record and refer,
marking the absent fresh body—a unit and a package. Enlarged for a street audience,
the window frames a monotype fragment, revealing a partial record of an absence.” —
Joshi Radin
During the COVID-19 crisis in the first months of 2020, communities all over the world have
experienced extended times of isolation and social distancing became the norm. With our daily
routine significantly changing, many of us had to adapt to a new pace of life. In this
unprecedented situation, we share the feeling that time has slowed down. It is becoming harder
and harder to keep track of the days passing.
Unconventional Times, is a pop-up window exhibition that tracks time through art. This exhibit
presents a rotating selection of works from three Chicago-based artists: Naomi Elson, Bryan
LeBeuf, and Joshi Radin. Each selected artwork occupies the exhibition window space for two
weeks and then rotate. The same cycle of artworks is repeated throughout the duration of the
project, the end of which will correspond with the end of the COVID-19 lockdown.
With an increasingly static environment, we have the opportunity to experience our
surroundings in new ways. We notice small changes to our proximities that we were not able to
pay attention to before. With a continued two-weeks rotation of artworks, this exhibition will help
the local neighbor and community to track time in an unconventional way.
Unconventional Times is curated by Fabiola Tosi.
Photography by Amy Shelton.
View Bryan LeBeuf's window exhibition What Is Your Name is a simulation of a game environment within a MMORPG. A portrait of a vast virtual world looking towards the participant, melding physical and virtual space.
More on Joshi Radin's practice
Joshi Radin investigates questions concerning nature, cosmology and expanded landscape.
Drawing on childhood experiences living within a utopian back to the land community, she
traces historical and genealogical roots of utopianism and nature through imagery and
processes as spaces of knowledge production. She has published essays and presented work
in the US and internationally and received her MFA (2016) and MA (2018) from the School of
the Art Institute of Chicago as a merit scholar.
Joshi Radin is an artist and writer living in Chicago. Working independently and collaboratively,
she generates and examines practices of valuation and questions investigating nature,
cosmology and expanded landscape. Drawing on childhood experiences living within an
experimental, utopian back to the land community in central New York, Radin traces historical
and genealogical roots of utopianism and nature through imagery and processes as spaces of
knowledge production. Currently her work focuses on examining nodes of intersection with
contemporary theorists engaged with ecological, scientific and anthropological approaches to
narrating the global imaginary. Through an engagement with the advent of planetary vision and
the recognition of military and technological advances, Radin is interested in propositional
narratives of interconnectedness that simultaneously think with and through political histories. In
spite of their failures, Radin's work questions what previous utopianists sought: what might
forms of resistance to dominant paradigms of late capitalist modernity look like?
Follow her on Instagram: @joshi_radin
More on Fabiola Tosi's practice
Fabiola Tosi is a Chicago-based curator and arts administrator. Originally from Italy, Fabiola is
an experienced project manager promoting international cultural exchanges. Her curatorial work
aims to unveil cross-cultural practices as a platform for discussion around politically and socially
engaged issues. Fabiola is the current Exhibits Project Manager at the Peggy Notebaert Nature
Museum in Chicago, and formerly Assistant Director of Exhibition and Programs for the US
Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2018. In 2017, she received her MA in Arts
Administration and Policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently a
resident at Chicago Artist Coalition’s Hatch Program. Follow her on Instagram: @faby_tosi