PRESS
Chicago has always been more than a city. It is a body—complex, layered, and alive with contradictions. Its bones are the railways that once defined the nation’s center, stretching lines of steel toward the East Coast’s industrial seaboards and the West Coast’s imagined horizons. This historic intersection of movement and labor gave Chicago its pulse: a city that does not merely receive, but circulates, redistributes, and redefines.
Gudunk!, the latest project by TOSSAROSE, a collective of eleven emerging artists, embraces this metaphor with bold intimacy. For them, Chicago is not a backdrop or stage, but an organism. Its arteries are the expressways and rivers that carve through each neighborhood. Its lungs are the parks and trees shading more concrete than grass. Its scars—the vacant lots, the burned-out warehouses, the gentrified blocks—bear witness to a century of flux and reinvention.
Each artist arrives at this body from a different direction, carrying the weight of migration, memory, and personal geography. Some are new to Chicago, encountering its scale and density with fresh astonishment. Others are shaped by long familiarity, knowing its rhythms like muscle memory. Together, their perspectives entwine: strangers and residents inhabiting the same body, interpreting it with divergent and sometimes contradictory sensations.
This is the city as lived anatomy—felt through walking its grids, inhaling its air, tracing the uneven histories of its neighborhoods. To enter Gudunk! is to encounter Chicago not as a singular narrative, but as a body that shifts depending on where and how it is touched. A body both intimate and immense, fragile and resilient.
TOSSAROSE’s collective practice itself mirrors the city’s restless vitality. They claim space outside institutional hierarchies to test how artists can reimagine belonging and find the balance between creating meaning through a collaboration of shared voices, while honoring their individuality and differences. In Gudunk!, their collective heartbeat insists that Chicago is not static—it grows, resists, and demands to be felt anew. As in any living body, parts may die, decay, or transform, yet their traces remain within the organism’s memory, shaping and nourishing what is born in the future to come.
Text by Karyna Vovkotrub
Featured Artists: Harry Lee, Calvin Guo, Zeynep Karahasan, William Wang, Taylor Ekern, Koki Kin, Pruthvish Dangat, Alexander Breus, Abby Haskins, Autumn Pease, and Sabine Pierce Jones