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A note on the show:

This exhibition began with a transaction and turned into a conversation. We connected with Elijah, recognizing a shared way of seeing: an interest in objects that carry history not through documentation, but through use, wear, and form.

We occupy a period when things arrive to us already named, explained, and defined into categories. House of Earth gathers works that resist that legibility. Without backstory to guide us, we turn to material, gesture, and presence. The opacity of their histories invites projection. These pieces ask to be met not through knowledge, but through attention. Their partial narratives leave space for interpretation, reminding us that intuition precedes explanation, and that form can speak in ways fact cannot.

Alongside these found objects—stools and painted root formations—are new works by Chicago artists, selected for their material instincts and their ability to dialogue with the past and the unnamed.

Together, these works reflect the values of KIOSK: that creating, collecting, and curating are acts of attention, not authority; that the everyday holds quiet meaning; and that interpretation begins with how we choose to see, sense, and engage with what surrounds us.

From Elijah Newman:

An object can exist in many unquantifiable places. Even physical space, the most popular of them, is hard to quantify. I’m interested in those that exist in the charmed space between memory and physical space, reminding us of the unknowable truth of existence, and of all the truths we love of existence.

In effect our memories of stories exist before the stories themselves. When we share a reality with an object we’re seeing what we are ready to see. We often go about our lives as if our ideas about objects define our experience of them—but experience is best lived when this dynamic is reversed. The age and material nature of objects are particular factors to pay attention to—not in judging an object, but in considering what it implies at that moment.

This show encompasses objects enshrined from anonymous past makers with artists that must be known today, their practices united on the secret scatter plot of formality spaciously littered with ambivalent dots.

Participants: Anonymous makers, Travis Morehead, Benjamin Zumbrun, Carolina Pereira De Almeida, Nick Chiado, and Elijah Newman