What Will We See?
A Review of Windows to the World at 6018|North by Amanda Dee
What did you bring me to keep me from the gallows pole? by AJ McClenon for Windows to the World at 6018North, in front of Caught from the wind and anchored to the arch قوس قزح by Tom Burtonwood and Maryam Taghavi from a previous exhibition Living Architecture
Neon signs melt or flicker in the upstairs windows. T-shirts dangle on a clothesline pinned across the doorway. In the front yard, there is a steel portal.
The public group exhibition Windows to the World at 6018North, on display in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood through Autumn, defies what we might expect to find on a residential street. As everyone else has had to adapt to social distancing limitations, so too did the collective of curators, shifting their original vision for the interior space to one looking outward.
Street view of Windows to the World at 6018North
Hanging on the fence, one of Mashaun Hendricks’s banners asks, “DOES THE ‘SYSTEM’ NEED ‘CRIMINALS’ IN ORDER TO SUSTAIN ITSELF?” Looking at the question, I am reminded of Black Lives Matter protest signs proposing to “ABOLISH POLICE.” Both these messages challenge the penal system that is disproportionately harming Black Americans; further, both ask or command us to imagine what new systems might look like, if we have not already been doing that work.
Imagining new possibilities can be an act of hope and a risk. For some of us, like Tschab Her, it is a matter of survival and resistance. Her will create a Hmong flag on the exhibition site, a response to the fact that their people, the Hmong, are at risk of cultural extinction. In the front lawn, Rohan Ayinde’s Fracturing the Horizon / A Poetics of the Black (W)hole erects a corner in open space. The two “walls,” steel beams forming quadrilaterals, connect to the third side of the structure on the ground, an obsidian-looking surface that at once resembles a mirror and a black hole. Throughout the summer, Ayinde will read Afro-futuristic works at the portal, drawing forth new futures into the present.
Street view of Windows to the World at 6018North
In Audra Jacot’s Selfless, one of the neon works upstairs, “SELF” and “LESS” blink to one another in conversation. At times, the blue “SELF” is alone. Together with the red “LESS,” the neon message reads as “SELFLESS.” Perhaps because both the individual and the collective are necessary. Watching the flashing lights, I am back in front of my glowing laptop screen on a late night in June, hours deep into research on prison abolition. Back then I thought, again and again, “What can I do?” I wonder now if I should have spent more time asking, “What must we do?”
The group of curators reflects this back-and-forth communication between the individual and the collective through a survey, asking individual viewers to share their feelings and ideas not only on the exhibition but on “systemic inequity and other messes.” If we engage with the survey questions, which are also present in the artists’ work, then we join forces with the artists and curators in the work of imagining new ways of living, together.
In the wake of Nazism and Stalinism, philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote on the origins of evil in our world. Evil is bred from thoughtlessness, she says; the solution is solitude. In solitude, we develop conscience, thought, and creativity – the assets, she suggests, that will help us rebuild our world. In solitude, we are connected to everyone. To look out, we must first look within.
Amanda Dee is a multimedia storyteller fixed on Midwestern identities and relationships to place. She is a writer at Sixty Inches from Center and the former editor-in-chief of Dayton City Paper. For more info, visit amandadee.work. This review was written as a part of the 6018North Writer’s Workshop.