Chicago Reader - No dust to shake off

Chicago Reader
By Erin Toale
May 13, 2024

The walls are covered with tactile displays of timelines, correspondences, and ephemera selected from Binion’s archive. Credit: Tom Van Eynde

On a sunny spring day, Experimental Sound Studio’s Audible Gallery is an ideal place to immerse oneself in the five-decade retrospective of interdisciplinary artist Sandra Binion. The walls are covered with tactile displays of timelines, correspondences, and ephemera selected from Binion’s archive by curator Mariana Mejía (166 distinct artifacts, to be exact). In the center of the gallery, three screens loop video documentation of performances that took place between 1975 and 2024. At any point, the viewer is between these panoptic screens and covered walls—becoming yet another figure activating the work.