Don't Die

Rachael Bos, Maeve Coughlin, Maggie Dunlap, Allan Gardner, Brad Phillips, Valentina Vaccarella

Vanity can be cool. A good friend of mine is a body builder. He treats his body like a work of art and I think this partial dissociation of the spiritual, mental, and physical is healthy. But at a certain point, being a bodybuilder is fake. Bodybuilders form their bodies not according to health or strength but according to the way it looks. Tyson Fury is probably one of the toughest and strongest men alive but he looks fat. Anti-aging routines portray a fake liveliness that compensates for a real fear of death. Vanity in that sense is so fake it’s real.

When you go in the supermarket to buy a steak, can you say for sure what that steak actually is? Something about a puck of red goo shrink-wrapped to a foam pad is fake, but the cow was real and so is the strength it provides. When you eat a cow you should feel its death transform into your life while you consume it. You should feel grateful. Maybe the pleasure of eating steak is a kind of evolved gratitude.

Everyone senses that the world is fake but was probably real in the past. The pharmaceutical industry harvests the mass dissatisfaction with our lacking culture by feeding people socially acceptable heroin. Pills like OxyContin, Darvon, and Percocet have powerful psychosomatic consequences but look like candy. People lack faith in the world and so they are numbed with fake pleasure.

Vanity is an avoidance of death as an inevitability. Eating is the persistence of death in life. Getting numb high is an impermanent death, a kind of fake freedom from the suffering of life. But life is not mere survival. There are three kinds of living: wanting to die, not wanting to die, and not wanting to die but accepting that you will. There are two kinds of death: one that’s guaranteed, and one that’s optional. The optional death is death in life. Are you dead in life?

—Grant Tyler

Rachael Bos (b. 1999, Salt Lake City UT) is a Chicago based artist who primarily makes oil paintings and graphite drawings of cropped images of athletes. Rachael received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2021. Her work has recently been shown at Sulk Chicago (Chicago IL), Mickey Gallery (Chicago IL), Apparatus Projects (Chicago IL), Galerie Rolando Anselmi (Rome, Italy), The Material Room (Richmond, VA), Hans Gallery (Chicago IL), and Elysian Hydraulics (Ogden UT).

Maeve Coughlin (b. 1996, Cambridge, Massachusetts) lives and works in Chicago. IL. She received a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2020. Much of her work explores the poetic possibilities of the materials she has at hand. Recent exhibitions include Green Belt, Jargon Projects, Chicago, IL; Cinetosis, Rudimento, Quito, Ecuador; Companion, My Perfect Environment, Chicago, IL.

Maggie Dunlap (b. 1995, Washington, D.C., USA) lives and works in Brooklyn NY. Dunlap received her MA in Critical Practice from the Royal College of Art (2021), having previously completed her BFA in Visual & Critical Studies at the School of Visual Arts in New York (2019). Recent exhibitions include True Crime, Screw Gallery, Leeds, UK (2022); The Opioid Crisis Lookbook, Paris, FR (2020); Make it Look Like an Accident, SVA Flatiron Gallery, New York, NY (2019); Ways Out, Flatiron Project Space, New York, USA (2019); One Night Stand, Euridice Gallery, Brooklyn, USA (2018); When Darkness Loves Us, New York, USA (2018); and No Vacancy, Squat Gallery, Brooklyn, USA (2016). Her work and writing has been featured in international publications including Kaleidoscope, Heavy Traffic, The Editorial Magazine, Autre, Young Artists in Conversations, Sleek and Snuff Magazine. In 2019 Dunlap received the SVA Alumni Society Scholarship.

Allan Gardner (b. 1992, Glasgow) is a Scottish artist based in Leeds, UK, he studied at Leeds College of Art and the Royal College of Art. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including projects exhibited with the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), Science Museum (London), Tate St. Ives (Cornwall), No Gallery (NYC), Hannah Barry Gallery (London), Annka Kultys Gallery (London), Cite Des Arts Internationale (Paris), The Art House (Wakefield) and many more. His writing has been published by Kaleidoscope, Dazed, Sleek, Mousse, Clot, The Quietus and many more. In 2021, he founded Screw Gallery in Leeds, with a curatorial focus on the intersection of art and subculture.

Brad Phillips (b. 1974) is an artist and writer based in Manhattan NY. He is best known for his work around subjects like addiction, mental illness, and the more obscure aspects of human sexuality. His first book of short stories, Essays and Fictions, was published in 2019.

Valentina Vaccarella (b. 1993, New York) is an artist who lives and works in Manhattan, NY. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include Bless this Life, No Gallery (New York, 2022); Show World Order, Other Subjects (New York, 2020). Selected group exhibitions have taken place at Bright Lights, Big City & No Fun – Shoot The Lobster – New York, NY (2022); 100 Sculptures (NYC) – Anonymous Gallery – New York, NY (2021); “Daisies” - Pleasewait Gallery - Paris (2022); Don’t Trust Me I’m Homeless – Ed Varie – New York, NY (2019). Her work has also been included in the Spring Break Art Show, New York (2019) and the literary social practice Hard To Read (Pillow Talk) – New York, NY (2019).