Laying in Wait
Hair and Nails Gallery
Open hours Thursday/Friday 3-6, Saturday/Sunday 1-6, thru May 11, or by appointment

Conversation: Saturday April 28th, 7pm with Chicago artist Molly Roth Scranton and Minneapolis curator Diane Mullin.

Laying in Wait examines what it feels like to wait. The unpunctuated, endless time of physically being in one place and mentally miles away/nowhere. The dentist asks how your day is while your mouth is wide open and you stare at a waterfall on the ceiling. You check and recheck your email while going pee. The hold music on speakerphone becomes your breakfast soundtrack. Can this space of non-presence or stasis be a place of potential? In this time of political turmoil, which is actually all times, is it possible to have productive waiting?

Hair and Nails has been transformed into an indeterminate waiting room replete with a distorted drop ceiling, a stretched sunrise calendar and a room of tissue boxes. Visitors are invited to “fish” for bodily conveniences such as mints, tampons and tylenol through a hole in the floor. Where the upstairs gallery space is about the experience of being physically and mentally unsynched, the basement gallery space brings the needs of the body back into focus with a bathroom installation that includes a television and snacks and a suite of handmade toilets resembling a familial gathering. Sometimes being a person or supporting a person is purely tending to the needs of the body.