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Fever Dream
Fever Dream
Featuring Mikey Coleman & Braden Skelton
Curated by Yue Xu
Nov. 15 – Dec. 15, 2024/ Opening: Nov. 15, 6 pm to 10 pm
@ The Plan, 610 N Albany Ave, Chicago, IL
Fever Dream features a series of paintings, photographs, and sculptures by Mikey Coleman and Braden Skelton, resurrecting the cultural detritus of the late 20th- to early 21st-century American culture as both a site of nostalgia and as raw material. By dissecting and distorting mass media iconography, the two artists open a dialogue about how contemporary society engages with its collective past, and how the detritus of a bygone consumer era continues to haunt and shape our present realities.
The exhibition reflects a broader critique of the media-saturated, cyber-driven landscape that formed these artists’ sense of self. It offers a space where time folds in on itself— where the symbols and metonyms are stripped of their original meaning and reassembled into something haunting, something unsettling in their absurd forms. Capitalism’s playful manipulation of human emotion is laid bare— there exists a sense of both nostalgia and revulsion. The uncanny familiarity breeds both recognition and alienation.
Coleman and Skelton's overlapping methodologies of collecting, dissecting, and reconfiguring imagery mirror the fragmentation of attention from corporate mascots, childhood heroes, and media tropes—blur the line between personal nostalgia and mass-produced identity. In this feverish state, two artists conjure a humid, dark, sticky, twisted, and adrenaline-fueled fever dream.
