Mall is pleased to present Wave After Wave, a group exhibition with works by Christopher Daharsh, naakita f.k., Anukriti Kaushik, Lydia Kern, and Sophia Oppel.

The works in the exhibition are made through repetition. Something is cast, scanned, redrawn, or dug out of the ground, and the process is run again time after time until the original becomes something else. Each artist is concerned with what’s left over; what a body, image, or place turns into after it has been taken apart and used.

Sophia Oppel’s All Assets are Liquidated is a mirrored wall sculpture with a video, Everything Must Go, set into it. Pink foam reliefs, cut by machine like the inserts that come in a shipping box, hold the impressions of body parts. The cut-out lettering across the mirror shouts the language of a store closing for good. In the video, an AI assistant named Claudia, made from a scan of Oppel’s own body, cycles through sales slogans and replies while turning on the person she’s meant to serve. The body here is stock to be cleared, and the AI selling it is built from the same material.

Lydia Kern also works with scans of the body, but toward a different end. She builds her pieces from things she finds, such as a brain scan, a leaf, small cut forms, stacked one above another on a black ground and held at the edges like a window. Images made to locate what’s wrong in the body become markers for getting through grief.

Anukriti Kaushik’s drawing installation is concerned with how a woman takes up space in public. She draws the same images over and over, from sources ranging from Mughal miniatures to her own photographs of the city, until each drawing is reduced to a few gestures and many images collapse into a single one.

Christopher Daharsh takes the city and landscape home with him. On walks, runs, and drives, he collects rubbings, photos, and debris, then joins and casts them into single objects. The surfaces are stained and washed repeatedly until they look weathered. Brick, leaves, and the rim of a manhole cover fuse into one lumpy body that carries the marks of the street.

naakita f.k.’s To Meet Your Resting Place connects the Shinkolobwe mine in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which supplied uranium for the Manhattan Project, to the project’s former Site A in Red Gate Woods outside Chicago, where its early reactors were later buried. The installation uses video, sound, and smell, and treats soil from these sites as evidence. The history is something to be experienced with the body, rather than read from a distance.