“Road to the Farthest Room”, September, 2026, exhibition at Devening Projects (Chicago, IL) with sculptures by Ben Driggs and additional paintings by Jobe Gemmell Hughes (not pictured).
“Road to the Farthest Room presents...an abiding trust in the private life of attention—in what solitude, repetition, and uncertainty can reveal. These are practices that proceed through voracious curiosity, rather than toward resolution. Operating within a kind of dream logic, paintings by Julia Firestone Callis and Jobe Gemmell Hughes (not pictured) and sculptures by Ben Driggs are rooted in domestic and psychic spaces, yet they do not present life as a coherent image of itself. Instead, these are works born from quiet thought, fixation, and the desire to attempt. Meaning arrives slowly in these works, through embodied encounter and atmosphere rather than immediate recognition.
The works...refuse the reassurance of a floor. Familiar forms drift loose from ordinary perspective; objects associated with the home enter the public space of the gallery, carrying the inside outward. Scale, distance, and relation become uncertain. Yet the works do not abandon space so much as make it provisional, asking us to navigate by instinct, memory, and attention. These works unsettle space not to leave us lost, but to make navigation an imaginative act. A journey without arrival.”