now
House of Earth at KIOSK
from June 14 to July 13, 2025
Collections of garage-craft stools and root sculptures with special edition works of decorative and wearable art
from Travis Morehead, Benjamin Zumbrun, Carolina Pereira De Almeida, Nick Chiado, and Elijah Newman.
A note on the show from Tyler Roberts and Louisa Potthast, co-operators of KIOSK --
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, pressed leaves, 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.
A note on the show from Elijah Newman, operator of House of Earth --
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.
forthcoming
Partially Buried. Vernacular photographs of earthen homesteads surveying an intercontinental variety of indigenous cultures and subcultural trends to the present day.
past
House of Earth held an all-embracing show of new fine art and studio craft emphasizing the earth-bound nature of objects through progressive and traditional earthen mediums.
Artists include Travis Morehead, Benjamin Zumbrun, Amy Pearl Lang, Allegra Harvard, Terence Mulligan Jr., Rafael Goncalves, Rusha Moon, Gina Bouza, Josh Bulman, Tran Tran, and Noa Ryan.
The viewing hours and documentation happened between Friday, July 5 and Sunday, July 7, 2024 in the unwalled greenhouse beside the First Church of Chicago.*
Benjamin Zumbrun, twin blown glass vases on carved walnut rest
Amy Pearl Lang, incised handmade paper
Noa Ryan, knit banana silk fiber handbag
left to right:
Allegra Harvard, fused metal industrial scrap towers
Rafael Goncalves, sumi ink on stoneware floor vase and glazed stoneware floor vase
Rusha Moon, incinerated lace and acrylic on paper clay vase
Allegra Harvard, fused metal industrial scrap towers
Rafael Goncalves, sumi ink on stoneware floor vase and glazed stoneware floor vase
Rusha Moon, incinerated lace and acrylic on paper clay vase
Terence Mulligan Jr., plywood and natural canvas shelf with terracotta incense rest
Noa Ryan,
knit banana silk fiber handbag
Josh Bulman, stoneware hand sculpture
Allegra Harvard, fused metal industrial scrap towers
Gina Bouza, leaf pulp freestanding shelf with tumblers and flatware