“Corpus: Medical Debt Stage” dried willow tree branches, hostile bird spikes, antique rug beater, collected rocks for gua sha + fidgets, metal dental molds, dried wild teasel, shibari rope, carved calla lily (or alcatraz), wooden CDOT sign holder, metal fence bases, astroturf, spray paint and house paint, 2024, 3’ x 7’
Voices Embodied: Reverberations
Design Museum Chicago, July 13 – October 13, 2024
Defined by the welcoming color story taken from disposable dental bibs, Chalfin-Piney’s modular sculpture-set invites from afar with its cooling colors yet produces a painful wince at closer inspection. A densely populated altar offers intimate moments from the artist’s hand and mouth. The work shows the medical world slowly taking over nature through color, with elements of hope shining through. The rocks collected by Chalfin-Piney are part of the artist’s personal collection of found gua sha tools, which morphed into stim toys overtime—lake and ocean gifted, untouched by western medicine. The sculpture acts as a set and first act for a forthcoming performance, revealing two stories—one of dental trauma and the disabling chronic pain created during a series of medical malpractice surgeries— one of physical relief and healing outside of the medical industrial complex: a path that might offer a modicum of relief from a body attacking itself. The performance, created with Chicagoans who have experienced dental trauma and chronic pain, activates research and healing engaged through bodyworking modalities in thai massage, cupping therapy, moxibustion, gua sha and acupuncture.
Archangels: “We believe when the body dies - disaster, as opposed to this person I love is in a body for a short period of time and more of their love for you will be released after they pass.”
papier-mâché mask, dried fruit and spices on carved plywood, 2023, 8’ x 5’
apexart, San Antonio, TX
February 24 - March 23, 2024
Death Rights presents creators engaging with death, loss, remembrance, and the afterlife, from political, spiritual, and radical perspectives. Death Rights brings together a breadth of artists to radically reshape and reclaim our relationship to death.
Exhibiting artists explore end of life rituals, alternatives, and communal processes of grieving and laying to rest; our relationship to the past and buried histories and ancestors; and the politics of who is allowed to be remembered. They demand new ways of grieving and celebrating those lost, and create ways of relating to death when danger looms close to their communities. They explore archival work and death research as a radical creative and political act; they imagine future legacies and use past generations and current grief to uncover identities in the present. They reorient and queer our relationships to spirituality and its role in our understandings of grief, death and the past/future, and they unravel heteronormative life and death versus queer time, place, and community.
Together, these artists present a thoughtful and multi-faceted exploration of our rights, as humans, to interact with death in an abundant, creative, and healing way - rights that too often are taken from us (by capitalist forces, governments, and other systems of power), or that we forget to remember to use.
“When Souls Stick”
Work by Jess Bass and Gabriel Chalfin-Piney
Comfort Station, September 1 - October 1, 2023
דאָיִקייט - doikayt - “hereness”
Here and then exists simultaneously in the present as it is retold, rehearsed, reshaped. Through archiving Jewish folktales, studying incantation bowls and Jewish households from the Aramaic period to now,
When Souls Stick collages and interprets Jewish history and mysticism to discuss the human impulse, throughout time, to imbue matter with souls and purposes.
The exhibition, corresponding performances and workshops explore how non-conscious objects come to life through mystical encounters, making bonds through human attachments.
Timely Sanctification was a duo exhibition featuring new works by current HATCH 2021-22 artists-in-residence Jade Williams and Gabriel Chalfin-Piney.
Curated by Cristobal Alday at Chicago Artists Coalition in 2012. The exhibition featured accompanying sound pieces by Devin Shaffer.
The exhibition will be on view from February 25-April 7, 2022, with an opening reception on Friday, February 25, 5-8pm.
Timely Sanctification encompasses the ways in which the artists find themselves investigating histories and how they make sense of their spiritual and familial influences.
i like your earring is a collaborative installation by Kayla Taylor and Gabriel Chalfin-Piney. The work explores how objects come into contact with bodies, through ingestion, decoration and occasionally violence. Tattooed grapefruits include collected oral histories surrounding early relationships to fruit and jewelry. Clay objects take on the dual form of a fishing hook and the curved loop of an earring.
Installation for Open sheds used for what? organized by Marina and Cecília Resende Santos, August 5th-12th 2020