“I am at this instant in a white void awaiting the next instant. Measuring time is just a working hypothesis. But whatever exists is perishable and this forces us to measure immutable and permanent time. It never began and never will end.” (Clarice Lispector, Agua Viva)

Grunts Rare Books is pleased to present Sympathy Ribbon, a two-person exhibition featuring the work of Margaret Crowley and Madeline Gallucci. The exhibition considers the transitory and its relationship to what is fixed or permanent, bringing together two practices attentive to the fragile ways time, sentimentality, and recognition are held in form.

In her paintings, Gallucci performs an accumulation of dust and weather, often treating the surface as if standing behind it, like fingers on fogged glass. These reflective grounds register time and perception, holding the residue of what pollutes or passes across them. Onto this atmosphere Gallucci affixes trompe l’oeil strips of ‘tape,’ a framing device immediately referring to the everyday, to labor, or to the provisional act of masking in utility painting. Stripped and twisted across Gallucci’s surfaces, the frame’s dual nature comes forward: tape is both precious as a material and utterly ubiquitous as a symbol, discernible here by its color. In some works the tape begins to spell, or cast spells, acting as a device for language and abstraction. For example, a shadow appears above the text in SPAT (2025) as if a body looms or has just passed by it. The distinct impression of another recalls the first double, the self split into a shadow on the ground or in a watery mirrored reflection. 

These echoes of presence, temporary and insistent, find a counterpart in Crowley’s sculptures where memory and loss, or a blend of them called devotion, are formalized in fixed or enduring objects. Occupying the center of the floor is 50 years of service (2022), an enlarged replica of a watch given to her grandfather by the International Union of Operating Engineers. The gift, meant to honor a lifetime of labor, is commemorative yet alarmingly slight, collapsing decades into a single object designed to keep time. What is meant to stand for permanence instead exposes its own instability and slips under the weight of what it is tasked to hold. Crowley’s scale shift, mâchéd in postmortem paperwork, marks and exaggerates the imbalance while also operating as an act of loving, allowing Crowley to commemorate better. Similarly, Husband (2025)  is a token of loss; such sympathy ribbons typically adorn funeral arrangements so guests can easily identify the sender of each bouquet. Considered here as a found spool, the ribbon strings mourning into ritual and extends the given language beyond its set occasion. 

Both practices beg how remembrance might be translated into form, and how fragile these forms may be. Gallucci and Crowley create works that measure: tokens of debris, labor, love, or grief. In their work, time and attachment play against the edge of memorial. The two suggest that the things we make to measure, to honor, or to keep ultimately disclose the impossibility of holding experience, or a synthesis of time, intact.

Madeline Gallucci (b. 1990, Greensboro, NC) is an artist and arts administrator living in Chicago, IL. Gallucci's work has been recently exhibited at venues such as Ivory Gate Gallery (Shanghai, China); Goldfinch, Produce Model, Patient Info, Weatherproof, Space & Time, and LVL3 (Chicago, IL); Below Grand (New York, NY); Rebekah Templeton (Philadelphia, PA); Skylab (Columbus, OH); Terrault Contemporary (Baltimore, MD); Pelican Bomb Gallery X (New Orleans, LA); Special Effects Gallery, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Plug Gallery, and 21c Museum Hotel (Kansas City, MO). Her work is also included in the collection of Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (Overland Park, KS). Gallucci received her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2012 and her MFA from the University of Chicago in 2020. 

Margaret Crowley (b. 1987, Ottawa, IL) is a Chicago-based artist. Recent solo exhibitions include the University Galleries at Illinois State University and Devening Projects in Chicago. Her work has been exhibited at Ditch Projects in Springfield, OR; Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago; Chicago; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Chicago Artists Coalition; Cue Foundation, New York City; and Área: Lugar de Proyectos, Caguas, Puerto Rico. From 2016 to 2023, Crowley was the co-director of Produce Model Gallery, Chicago. She received her M.F.A. from the University of Chicago, M.A. from Eastern Illinois University, and B.S. from Illinois State University.

𝐆𝐫𝐮𝐧𝐭’𝐬 𝐑𝐚𝐝𝐢𝐨, curated by Lia Kohl, debuts two new mixes for our fall season: Whitney Johnson and Allen Moore. 

Grunt's Radio is a sound series within Grunts Rare Books, presenting the fixed media sound work of Chicago-based musicians and sound artists during gallery hours (Saturdays and Sundays 1-4pm). The series, played through a radio in the bookshop, offers artists an opportunity to show new, unreleased, or longform sound works.

Grunt's Radio is curated by Lia Kohl, and begins with a series of works by Kohl. Other artists will begin rotating in the coming weeks and months.

Whitney Johnson is an artist using sound to understand bodies and minds. Based in Chicago, she composes, performs, and installs multi-channel sound with viola, sine waves, Max/MSP, organ, synthesizers, vocalization, tape looping, and field recording. As artist-in-residence at Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) in Stockholm and Inkonst in Malmö, Sweden, she composed sine waves, marimba, viola, ARP Odyssey synthesizer, and Halldorophone into a multi-channel performance-installation and her latest LP, Hav (2024, Drag City). As Matchess, the Stena cassette (2024, Drag City) embodies an alter ego to join the cult of Hermaphroditus in Cypriot and Greek antiquity. Recent performance-installations FIAT (2023-2025, Indexical, Roulette Intermedium, Forecast Platform Berlin), The Tuning of the Elements (2023, Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago), Death in Trafo (or, The Crater) (2023, Logan Center for the Arts), and Huizkol (2020, Lampo) consider the possibility of brainwave entrainment, an alternative healing technique using binaural beats to induce relaxed or energized mental states. These works offer audiences the opportunity to explore their own skepticism and belief in the effects of sound on bodies and minds. In tandem with her sound practice, she received her doctorate in the sociology of sound from the University of Chicago in 2018. She completed a postdoctoral research fellowship on sound and technology in the Centre for Gender Research at Uppsala Universitet in 2022 and an artist research residency on gender-based canonization at Q-O2 Brussels in 2025. She is currently Assistant Professor of Art and Technology/Sound Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Allen Moore (he/him) is a Black interdisciplinary visual artist, experimental turntablist, sound artist, educator, and youth mentor born and raised in the historic village of Robbins, IL. Allen holds a Bachelor of Arts from Chicago State University, a Master of Arts from Governors State University, and a Master of Fine Arts from Northern Illinois University. Through his work, Allen analyzes signifiers of Blackness through performative improvisation and experimentation. He is driven to nurture and expand the agency of the Black imagination. His recent body of work investigates the audio and visual elements of Black death and grief. Moore has exhibited and performed in spaces across the greater Midwest including Tritriangle, Heaven Gallery, Compound Yellow, Experimental Sound Studio, Elastic Arts Foundation, Threewalls, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Roots & Culture Contemporary Art Center, Lula Cafe, Star Media Group, Union Street Gallery, The Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, and many other spaces.

Lia Kohl (b. New York, NY) is a composer and sound artist based in Chicago. Trained as a cellist, she also incorporates synthesizers, field recordings, toy instruments, and radios into her work. Kohl gravitates towards sound practices which reveal and speak to their time and place: field recording, improvisation, radio broadcast and transmission. She performs as a soloist, a collaborator and composes works for ensembles.

Recent venues for Kohl's work include the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Renaissance Society, Union Station Chicago, Eckhart Park Pool, and Big Ears Festival. She has created sound installations for Experimental Sound Studios' Audible Gallery and Roman Susan Art Foundation. She has been a resident artist at ACRE, Vashon Artist Residency, High Concept Labs, dfbrl8r Performance Art Gallery, Mana Contemporary, Stanford University, and Mills College and a Transmission Art Fellow at Wave Farm. An active recording artist, Kohl has arranged strings and recorded with Makaya McCraven, Circuit des Yeux, claire rousay, and Steve Hauschildt, among others.

Kohl has been featured in Pitchfork, The Quietus, The Chicago Tribune, The Wire Magazine, and Downbeat Magazine, and on NPR, NTS Radio, Kunstradio, BBC Radio 6 Music, Dublab, and WFMU. Recent releases include The Ceiling Reposes on American Dreams Records and Normal Sounds, on Moon Glyph; recent duo releases include with Whitney Johnson on Drag City and Zander Raymond on unjenesaisquoi. She tours nationally and internationally.