UNREAL
Free Events
Opening Reception: Friday, Nov. 6, 5-8 PM CT
Curator Gallery Talk: Saturday, Nov. 21, 11:30 AM CT
Family Day: Saturday, Jan. 30, 2027, 1-3 PM CT
This exhibition brings together five Midwestern artists who employ illusion, hyperrealism, trompe l’oeil, humor, art historical references and extraordinary craftsmanship to examine the unstable boundary between what we see and what we believe. Their works invite us to look more closely, not only at the art objects before us, but at the assumptions, desires, fears and systems that shape our understanding of reality.
Anthony Adcock transforms the humble materials and visual language of labor through painstaking trompe l’oeil painting and sculpture, drawing on his experience as an ironworker to make artworks that can be mistaken for discarded pieces of wood from a construction site. His illusions elevate overlooked labor while questioning authorship, value and the very definition of painting. Ari Norris similarly turns everyday objects into visual provocations, convincingly transforming materials to create moments of spectacle and playful deception. His deliberately staged objects elevate the unremarkable, asking us to reconsider the quotidian as wondrous, unexpected and even monumental. Chris Cosnowski creates impeccable hyperrealistic still life paintings of mass-produced trophies, toys and other trinkets that cleverly confront hierarchies of capitalism, celebrity, success and toxic masculinity. Through their polished surfaces and reflective subjects, the paintings mirror the artist and viewer back into the work, inviting us to consider our own relationship to the cultural values and systems they interrogate.
Like a shaman, Cindy Bernhard conjures mystical interiors and still life scenes illuminated by otherworldly light. Ornate mirrors act like portals connecting us with the unknown, the cosmic or the divine, while everyday objects become charged with metaphysical possibility. Cats, chandeliers, vases, rolled cigarettes, candles and other familiar forms occupy a space between the visible and unseen, the earthly and celestial, the tangible and transcendent. Renee McGinnis turns toward the natural world, painting lush biosystems alongside frozen landscapes, turbulent skies, shipwrecks and other symbols of capitalism and industry. Her fantastical environments hold humanity’s triumphs and tragedies in uneasy balance, transforming ecological anxiety into a sorrowful beauty.
Together, these artists demonstrate that illusion can be a method for revealing truths that ordinary perception allows us to overlook. In UNREAL, the fabricated can become revelatory, the impossible can feel familiar and the seemingly ordinary can become monumental. These artists use illusion not as an escape from reality, but as a way of examining its contradictions and connections to truth, power, labor, spirituality, fragile ecosystems and much more. Their works ask us to pause before what appears convincing and urge us to look again.
