LESLIE BARLOW
& GRACE ROSARIO PERKINS
POSTCOMMODITY

Expo Chicago 

4.24-4.27.2025
Chicago

Bockley Gallery is pleased to participate in two sections of Expo Chicago, which brings together contemporary and modern art galleries at Navy Pier’s Festival Hall, this year taking place from April 24–27, 2025. In the Galleries section, the gallery presents paintings by Leslie Barlow and Grace Rosario Perkins (Diné/Akimel O’odham). The collective Postcommodity is selected for IN/SITU, a curated section which features artists from leading international exhibitors participating in the fair. 

In Bockley Gallery’s booth presentation (booth 200), paintings by Grace Rosario Perkins (Diné, Akimel O’odham) and Leslie Barlow come together from respective lineages and languages of storytelling and futurity. Perkins’ expressive, abstract paintings hold the methods of their becoming: intuitive conjuring of ritual, magic, and family; autobiographically inclusive of generations past, present and future. Referring to her practice as pictorial storytelling and scenographic placemaking, Perkins refuses legible visual narrative. Instead, gestural, layered, and maximal surfaces carry additive and subtractive negotiations with symbol-rich color and imagery. Of late, Perkins physically and conceptually folds medicinal plant studies into her existing practice with enamel, acrylic, and diaristic traces of language, fabric, and photographs. Barlow’s new series Us, Becoming furthers her exploration of race, identity formation, fluidity, belonging, and representation through painting. While a collaborative storytelling process is central to her practice as a portraitist, Us, Becoming welcomes new frictions and potentialities through the masked form, speculative fiction, comic/pop culture, and performance. Large-scale oil and fabric-embellished paintings embrace a liminality where identity is fluid and self-defined, while asserting Black participation in the catalytic possibilities of futurity and radical play. 

Postcommodity is one of eleven artists/collectives selected for IN/SITU, a curated section of large scale works presented throughout the fair. For the 2025 program, Jessica Hong, Chief Curator at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, selected Postcommidity’s kinaypikowiyâs (2021) – an installation of four 100-foot industrial debris booms used to catch and hold environmental contaminants – to feature suspended from the center of the expansive, vaulted architecture of Navy Pier’s Festival Hall. With kinaypikowiyâs, a Plains Cree word meaning snake meat, Postcommodity asserts that all people living in the Americas are riding on the back of a snake that has been divided by colonial mapping: South America, Central America, North America, and all of the surrounding islands. While its industrial colors – red, yellow, blue, white – are codes for specific threats from hazardous materials, they are familiar to many Indigenous peoples of the Americas as medicine colors that carry knowledge, purpose and meaning. Postcommodity calls for border-crossing discourses on land, resources, and shared knowledge to be led by Indigenous peoples. 

Navy Pier 
Booth 200