Present Tense
March 23 - May 5 2024
Prairie, Chicago



Nice dream
Nice dream
Nice dream
Radiohead lyrics narrate each self-similar day with apocalypse rock, a teenage heartache-for-no-one in the soft gray of nuclear winter. The lo-fi high-strung soundtrack rings true, all anxious outro, all nostalgia for fiction, looping around worlds never named.
Efil ym fo flah
Efil ym fo flah
Efil ym fo flah
Riding down the gravity well, it's a familiar spin round the microwave, where time stands still as it runs out. The toxic desire is to touch down, to crash. Delusions are a secret indulgence, and a dream is a want/need that never reaches a solution.
It wears her out
It wears her out
That I still throw my little coins away and make my little wishes is, I hope, evidence of a beyond, past the moment that drags on and on, past the electric metronome in an open, airless sky.
Keep it moving
Keep it moving
Superglue your thumb and index finger together to make a circle, a constant touch. Look through: a hole and a jeweler's loupe. Loss and wealth. Islands and monuments. Such things belong also to their futures.
Plastic stars dance on the ceiling.
Made you look.
Until the penny drops,
In you, I'm lost
In you, I'm lost

- Jenine Marsh



Toronto-based artist Jenine Marsh’s exhibition at Prairie features a concrete fountain situated on a floor lined with the Canadian newspaper People’s Voice. Marsh has removed select words and phrases from the paper’s pages and placed them on a bouquet of preserved flowers hanging directly above the fountain’s central basin, which is filled with altered coins and gold feet. The coins reappear on a pair of purses installed in the backroom. A fountain, newspaper, flowers, coins, purses, feet—all paraphernalia of contact and exchange, rearranged to elicit a response to the shared conditions of our times. Marsh’s practice resonates with a utopian spirit: her works are manifestations of hope and failure, possibility and stagnation, amplifying the temporal uncertainty of a present caught between the failures of the past and unrealized futures.