Sadie Benning Daily Forecasts: July 19th - October 14th, 2020

Press Release

Opening Reception: November 6, 2025 | 6-8pm

Corbett vs. Dempsey is delighted to present Daily Forecasts: July 19th-October 14th, 2020, an exhibition of new works by Sadie Benning.  This is the artist's first show at CvsD and debut gallery exhibition in Chicago.  

Benning presented Shared Eye at the Renaissance Society in 2016, and they lived in Chicago for an extensive period, during which their work as a video artist gained international recognition.  This show introduces a new body of work in watercolor made daily during the pandemic, each painting based on Benning's preparatory collages.  This routine image-making practice grew into a series of chronologically sequenced works, all of them modest in scale but packing an immense amount of emotion and visual complexity into its diminutive frame.  The title work of the show consists of 31 of these miraculous Covid microcosms. 

Sadie Benning:

I started making watercolors during the Covid lockdown in July of 2020. What first began as experiments became Daily Forecasts. The idea was to make a portrait of the day—to take the temperature of that particular moment, and have a record. The process involved clearing my mind—trying to get a psychic read of the day I was inhabiting—and writing down words that came to me—words I wasn’t logically thinking—language that came from somewhere else. And then I would search online using those words—creating a database of found digital images, the source material being anything from a family snapshot to a news photograph to a press image.

I made mock ups—many trial collages from these photographic images before settling on one, then painting the image using watercolors on paper. All works are intimate, postcard or paperback book sized, appealing to analogue senses while being informed by technology and the internet.

I used my intuition to create these works—but I’m also invoking the intuition of the viewer—I’m inviting that. I think it’s political to have an intuition—to listen to yourself—and also to listen to others—what others are feeling or thinking—and what’s happening around you—and what might happen in the future if you don't pay attention, if you don't listen.

All images and all art contains a subconscious space—and you can always inuit it and feel it and interpret it. But what I’m doing is bringing that concept to the surface—visually. The words which prompted each painting disappear into the work but they do also persist in some way—wordlessly, the ghost of them remains legible.

There’s honestly a little bit of irony in the idea of trying to capture a day. A day is porous, its liquid, it’s slipping away. And if you think about the whole planet—the “day” has multiple time zones and it’s inhabited by so many experiences. I can't capture that. And the day is based on a calendar which is centered around work and capitalism—and not about a subconscious time space. And so I’m not attempting to depict the day for the whole world, it's fragments within fragments—it's trippy and it's one read. It's a portion—even the scale of these paintings reflect that—they are small and cognitive and cropped. They suggest a piece of something much more vast.