On one wall of the Richard H. Driehaus Museum’s opulent sculpture garden, a couple of black-and-white photographs show the room as it used to be in 1900, lined with hunting trophies—deer heads, animal pelts, stuffed owls, guns. On the opposite wall, an outline of a large male deer is projected in gray light above bookshelves; the buck is chewing happily, his mouth opening and closing. Ambient animal noises—calls and tweets—filter in. It’s like you’ve wandered into a chamber of ghosts of ghosts, spectral remnants of the remnants of life that were removed long ago.
Olivia Block’s whimsically spooky video/audio installation Lowlands is part of a new exhibit at the Driehaus titled “Materialities.” Curator Giovanni Aloi asked fourteen contemporary Chicago artists to create pieces that explore the material objects and features that make up the Gilded Age-era Samuel Nickerson Mansion in which the Driehaus Museum is located.
But while the conceit suggests an engagement with physicality and presence, the artwork, like Block’s, is at its most compelling when it engages with what might be called ‘dematerialities’—erasures, absences, displacements. The result is an exhibition that explores the wealth of what isn’t in the Driehaus mansion as much as the wealth of what is.
Block’s piece about animals that are no longer alive and no longer in the space initially feels like a sideways approach to the exhibit prompt. However, as Aloi explained to Observer, “Materialities” was, in fact, initially inspired by taxidermy.
In the late 2000s, Aloi says, he spoke to many artists using taxidermy, and he initially didn’t understand why they didn’t use fake fur instead. “I spoke to many artists who said it’s because of the history of the material. What happened to the animal that was killed… what did people do to that material? So I thought, ‘If that applies to taxidermy, it applies to other materials as well.’”
From there, he says, “I discovered a whole range of artists who developed this relationship with materials as well, which sometimes they see almost as collaborative—they listen to what the material has to say, rather than imposing their vision on the material.”
Taxidermy also suggests collaboration with materials that aren’t there or that have been consumed or destroyed in the process of artmaking. Aloi notes that a Gilded Age mansion, and Chicago in general, are part of a “history of inaccessible areas and places.” Not everyone in Chicago could enter the Nickerson mansion during the Gilded Age. Not everyone in Chicago could even enter the neighborhood of the Nickerson mansion during the Gilded Age.
Segregation and absent bodies are at the core of Jefferson Pinder’s Gust. The piece, placed in the mansion’s smoking room, is an audio apparatus made of worn tin tiles from Bridgeport, an immigrant community whose members would never have been invited into the Nickerson mansion in its heyday. The speaker broadcasts audio from other parts of the city—including the voice of George W. Johnson, the first African American to record commercially.
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Another piece about borders is Palimpsest, a work by the artist duo Industry of the Ordinary (Adam Brooks and Matthew Wilson). The piece is a white door laid flat on a lush carpet beneath a chandelier. The doorknob is a 3D scan of a brass knob from an entrance to the servants’ quarters. The “new” knob is made of clay from the Chicago River—the same material used to create the bricks with which the residence was built following the Chicago Fire of 1871. The door on the floor is thus a kind of magical portal into the mansion’s past and a less magical reiteration of the semi-invisible hierarchies and closures that built the mansion’s wealth and walls.
Lalah Matlagh’s Threaded Memories also opens absence and presence out from the building’s history in unexpected ways. The piece is inspired by a Persian rug that used to occupy a floor in one of the house’s bedrooms, according to photographs. On a recent trip back to her family’s home in Iran, Matlagh collected leaves from a tree her father planted; she also collected leaves from the garden of the Driehaus Museum. She then dried the plant materials and shaped them into a traditional pattern, suspending the “rug” in clear acrylic so it seems to float off the ground, with different leaf colors and even the remains of a bird’s nest trapped inside.
“I wanted to create this connection between my home country and the Nickerson mansion through a material,” Matlagh told Observer. She also pointed out that the rug in the picture that inspired her no longer exists; she’s reweaving a connection between here and there, which was lost and is now rematerialized almost by magic.
Lost objects also reconstitute themselves in Barbara Cooper’s Unbound, a piece inspired by the faux books that currently fill the mansion’s bookshelves. Cooper took recycled paper and other materials and created three sculptural ‘books’ that look like they are twisting and swirling themselves into or out of wood and logs. The work is eloquent but speechless—an analogy for the way that the Nickerson family’s lives are both present in the materials they left and unknowable.
“There was actually very little information about the lives of the [families who lived in the mansion],” Cooper told Observer. “There’s very little personal information about them. So, I felt like I can’t open the book of what these families were like. And that was the heart of the forms that I created. I wanted them to be part book, part tree and kind of in this in-between place.”
Art, history and taxidermy are all about material bodies; they present you with things that carry a weight of form and fact. But presence only really has shape or weight because of the absence around it. The Driehaus Museum chronicles and contains a past of wealth and material excess. But that past can’t help but evoke the things that are no longer there or were never allowed to enter the doors in the first place.
An exhibit about materials is also, inevitably, an elegy for materials, be they books, rugs, doors, voices or deer. “Materialities” anchors the Driehaus Museum in the things that filled it and made it up. And at the same time, it gives you the vertiginous feeling that you are walking through a mansion that is dissolving around you. It’s a shimmering solidity of the immaterial, which is a decent definition of art.
“Materialities” is at the Driehaus Museum through April 27, 2025.
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