Pope.L No Thing Skin Sets

Press Release

Corbett vs. Dempsey is honored to present No Thing Skin Sets, an exhibition of recent works by the artist Pope.L. This is the gallery’s first exhibition with Pope.L and the first major gallery show of his work in Chicago.

One of the key figures in contemporary conceptual art, Pope.L was based in Chicago for the final 13 years of his life, from 2010, when he started teaching at the University of Chicago, until his untimely death at the tail end of 2023, at the tender age of 68. Pope.L first came to international attention with a number of performance- and endurance-based pieces in the early 1990s, though he’d already been working for more than a decade by then. His graduate studies at Rutgers University included a performance art class with Fluxus-associated artist Geoffrey Hendricks, whose influence was profound and lifelong. Reflecting that lineage, right out of the gate, in performances like The Great White Way and Eating the Wall Street Journal, Pope.L established himself as an artist unbounded by the usual artistic silos, freely mixing performance with sculpture, painting, drawing, installation, and video. And he was unafraid to present work that challenged assumptions about race and class, pressing buttons with satire, sarcasm, irony, absurdity, and a healthy dose of countervailing earnestness. Among the indelible, confounding works Pope.L presented in Chicago were the 2013 Renaissance Society exhibition Forlesen and the 2018 Art Institute of Chicago performance The Escape. Subtly, but through sheer force of intellectual rigor and nonconformist experimentation, Pope.L infused the city with his unorthodox way of thinking. It’s possible to consider the environment we now live in as post-Pope.L Chicago.

Conversations around a potential show at CvsD with Pope.L evolved organically after the gallery’s move to its present location in 2019. We were able to continue discussions about the exhibition after his death, courtesy of the Pope.L estate and the artist’s longtime studio manager Dave Lloyd, whose guidance in choosing and installing No Thing Skin Sets has been invaluable. The exhibition covers several areas of Pope.L’s recent work. The North Gallery is consumed by a major installation piece, I Machine (2014–2022), which integrates multiple overhead projectors, tubing, water, a painted canvas onto which constantly shifting images are projected, and many, many Post-It notes, each one featuring a little drawing. I Machine has only been exhibited once previously; in an earlier iteration, it was featured in a 2020 profile in The New York Times titled “A Work In Progress that Explores Our Collective Ignorance.” In the South Gallery, CvsD presents a number of distinct groups of works related to Pope.L’s ongoing “Skin Set” series. These include a group of four “sluice” paintings made of birchwood and filled with acidic green acrylic paint, and a group of four “window” pieces, which involve rectangular holes cut out of the top of the gallery’s west wall, recalling the out-of-reach apertures in a prison cell. Well (Redistribution Version) (2019), is a floor-piece consisting of nine decorative drinking glasses meant to remain filled to the brim with water, a futile directive recalling Fluxus artist George Brecht’s Drip Music (1959–1962). A small painting features in King Actar’s Wife (2018), but it is lit unusually by a penlight mounted on a bulky stand positioned directly in front of it. These mysterious, provocative works, as well as others, give the exhibition a multi-ring quality, with Pope.L as its inscrutable ringmaster.

Pope.L’s works on paper, of which the gallery also presents two iconic examples, are currently the subject of Certainly an Act, a 50-year retrospective, at New York’s Drawing Center.