STNDRD + NON STNDRD is pleased to announce the spring program of exhibitions, opening on Saturday, April 5, 2025 up through May 30th.
STNDRD will feature Devils Demons and Deuteronomy by Allen Moore and curated by Purple Window Gallery, while NON STNDRD will present Hidden Rhythms, a three-person exhibition featuring Cathy Hsiao, Frances Lightbound, and Anika Todd.
Join us for a free public reception for these exhibitions on Saturday, April 5. The reception begins at NON STNDRD, located at the National Building Arts Center, from 3:00 to 6:00 PM, and continues at Granite City Art and Design District (G-CADD) from 6:00 to 8:30 PM with a performance by Allen Moore at 7:30pm.
STNDRD will feature Devils Demons and Deuteronomy by Allen Moore and curated by Purple Window Gallery, while NON STNDRD will present Hidden Rhythms, a three-person exhibition featuring Cathy Hsiao, Frances Lightbound, and Anika Todd.
Join us for a free public reception for these exhibitions on Saturday, April 5. The reception begins at NON STNDRD, located at the National Building Arts Center, from 3:00 to 6:00 PM, and continues at Granite City Art and Design District (G-CADD) from 6:00 to 8:30 PM with a performance by Allen Moore at 7:30pm.
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Allen Moore: Devils Demons and Deuteronomy
Moore presents an installation using his collection of glow-in-the-dark artifacts and the process of making as a way of coping with grief, anxiety, depression, and confronting racism. Devils Demons and Deuteronomy takes ownership of Blackness and the power of resistance.
This exhibition is part of a gallery exchange between Purple Window Gallery and STNDRD Exhibitions. Devils Demons and Deuteronomy is the first of three projects Purple Window Gallery will facilitate during their Curatorial Residency at STNDRD Exhibitions during 2025.
Allen Moore is a Black interdisciplinary visual artist, experimental turntableist, sound artist, educator and youth mentor born and raised in the Historic Village of Robbins, IL. Moore holds a Bachelors of Arts from Chicago State University, a Masters in Arts from Governors State University and a Masters of Fine Arts from Northern Illinois University in 2016. His recent body of work investigates both the audio and visual element of Black death and Black grief. His conceptual premise is to analyze the signifiers of Blackness through performative improvisation and experimentation. Moore is driven to nurture and expand the agency of the Black imagination.
Moore has exhibited and performed across the greater midwest, including exhibitions at Tritriangle, Heaven Gallery, Compound Yellow, Experimental Sound Studio, Elastic Arts, Threewalls, The Museum of Contemporary Art, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Roots & Culture Gallery, Lula Cafe, The Star Media Group, Union Street Gallery, The Museum of Science and Industry Chicago, among other cultural institutions. Moore has had solo exhibitions at Glass Curtain Gallery, Columbia College Chicago (2024), Cleaner Gallery + Projects, Chicago (2022 + 2024), Upper Iowa University Bing Davis Gallery (2022), Open Studio Projects, Evanston (2020), Elgin Community College (2019), Nightlight Studio, Chicago (2016), Autotelic Studio, Chicago (2015), Cicero Public Library (2015), and Gallery 214 at Northern Illinois University (2015).STNDRD is an artist-run contemporary art program featuring exhibitions and site-responsive projects that rely on unconventional public sites. Our flagship location relies on a 15-foot flagpole that serves as an installation site. Artists consider the history and contemporary relevance of flags as cultural artifacts, and often draw from the cultural, historical, and architectural composition of surrounding communities and landscapes.
Hidden Rhythms presents artists Cathy Hsiao, Frances Lightbound, and Anika Todd, whose work investigates the underlying structures and imperceptible patterns that shape our built environments. Movement, mapping, and material interventions uncover the subtle systems, both natural and human-made, that regulate space and perception.
A sculpture that mirrors the slow, imperceptible shifts of a lock and dam, screen prints suspended in fluctuating light, and architectural symbols that blur the boundaries between physical and digital space; each artist reveals the rhythms embedded within structures we often take for granted. Situated within the raw industrial spaces of NON STNDRD, Hidden Rhythms challenges fixed notions of space and movement to encourage an awareness of the subtle and often imperceptible systems that guide our environments.
Cathy Hsiao is a diasporic artist and educator based in Chicago. Her practice examines the intersections of democracy, technology, and ecology, often intervening in existing cultural iconographies through coded language and a touch of play. Her diasporic experience growing up between Taiwan, the US, and Hong Kong, has shaped her interest in exploring various forms of sculptural storytelling. Utilizing both craft techniques and emerging technologies, Hsaio’s multidisciplinary approach manifests in installations that can include sculpture, sound, and sourced imagery. Past projects include growing indigo as a response to the police use of blue dye on protesters during the 2019-20 HK pro-democracy movement, using the supply chain as an exhibition model for tracing the socio-cultural and material microhistory of the iPhone, and translating the facade of the Forbidden City architecture into sculptures and wall reliefs. She was most recently a resident of Kohler Arts/Industry.
Frances Lightbound (b. Sheffield, UK) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago. Her work addresses the materiality of architecture, and relationships between time, bodies and buildings. Using printmaking as a two- and three-dimensional medium, she pairs print with sculpture and installation to explore layering in the continual (re)production of urban spaces. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues in the US and Europe, with recent solo exhibitions at Rule Gallery (Marfa, TX) and the John David Mooney Foundation (Chicago). Lightbound was awarded a Luminarts Visual Arts Fellowship in 2017. She holds a BA from Glasgow School of Art, Scotland, and an MFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Anika Todd is a sculptor/media artist who investigates the Western impulse to own and control. Their works critique the cultural assumptions and legislative frameworks that legitimize private ownership of earth and sky. Todd (b.1992, Boston, MA) earned a BFA from MassArt and an MFA from The University of Texas at Austin. Primarily working between Texas and New York City, Todd has presented solo exhibitions in New York at Flux Factory (2022) and Lydian Stater (2023), as well as in Texas at Cluley Projects, Sweet Pass Sculpture Park (2024), and CoLab Gallery in Austin (2019). They have been awarded residencies at Stove Works (2021), NARS Foundation (2020), and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2019). In 2022, they were a finalist for the NYFA Architecture/Environmental Structures/Design Award. Todd currently serves as the Beaumont Artist in Residence at the Sam Fox School of Art and Design, where they teach sculpture.
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NON STNDRD exhibitions are site-responsive and installed within the industrial landscape of the National Building Arts Center, once home to the Sterling Steel Casting Company. NON STNDRD utilizes two adjacent concrete bunkers–raw, exposed spaces–now repurposed as experimental venues for contemporary art. Marked by history and time, the NON STNDRD bunkers recast industrial sites into immersive environments where art explores the narrative of place.
STNDRD exhibitions are on view at all times for the duration of the exhibition run. Devils Demons and Deuteronomy by Allen Moore will run through June 13. STNDRD is located at 1822 State Street Granite City, IL 62040, on the campus of the the Granite City Art and Design District (G-CADD).
NON STNDRD can be viewed by appointment and during National Building Arts Center ticketed tours that take place every second Saturday of the month at 11:00 am. Spring exhibitions at NON STNDRD will run through May 30. NON STNDRD is located at 2300 Falling Springs Rd., Sauget, IL 62206, on the campus on the National Building Arts Center.
NON STNDRD and STNDRD are artist-run initiatives, with programming curated by collaborators Bruce Burton, Sage Dawson, and Allison Lacher. For inquiries, please email contact@stndrd.org.