Jeremy Biles
I am an Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where I teach courses on religion, philosophy, and art in the Department of Liberal Arts and the Department of Photography. I am the author of Ecce Monstrum: Georges Bataille and the Sacrifice of Form; co-editor of Negative Ecstasies: Georges Bataille and the Study of Religion; co-author of The Abyss, or Life Is Simple; an editor at the Religious Studies Review; and a founding member of the International Congress for Infrathin Studies, a group investigating the relations between surrealism and religion.
My research and teaching interests include philosophies of surrealism, surrealism and photography, surrealism and the sacred, surrealism as praxis, psychoanalysis, drawing, philosophy of religion, religion and contemporary art, religion and literature, theories of sacrifice, theories of the sacred, and bodybuilding. I am currently working on a surrealist project under the title The Erotics of Everyday Life.
My curatorial work includes a recent pair of exhibitions at Indiana University, while my drawings and sculptural work have appeared in exhibitions in and beyond Chicago. I am also a member of the experimental sound/image/text collaborative GALACTAGOGUE.
Address: Chicago, Illinois, United States
My research and teaching interests include philosophies of surrealism, surrealism and photography, surrealism and the sacred, surrealism as praxis, psychoanalysis, drawing, philosophy of religion, religion and contemporary art, religion and literature, theories of sacrifice, theories of the sacred, and bodybuilding. I am currently working on a surrealist project under the title The Erotics of Everyday Life.
My curatorial work includes a recent pair of exhibitions at Indiana University, while my drawings and sculptural work have appeared in exhibitions in and beyond Chicago. I am also a member of the experimental sound/image/text collaborative GALACTAGOGUE.
Address: Chicago, Illinois, United States
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Chapters in edited volumes by Jeremy Biles
https://touchmenot.indiana.edu/
Curatorial statement: The show concerns Kamadhenu, the sacred cow in Hinduism who shall not shed blood, but be sustained with milk; the brutality of The Eucharist; the sexuality of Christ giving birth to his humanity; Madonna and Child revealing Christ’s mortality; vulnerability in Noli me Tangere; St. Sebastian’s homoeroticism; animality in Greek mythology; the autonomy of the queer body; a capacity for transformation and a devotion to an expanding language of embodiment. Perhaps what is at stake is a loss of empathy. Especially since there are pluralities, complexities and elasticities regarding various bodies.
Participating artists:
Parker Bright
Elijah Burgher
James Kerley
Rohan Khanna
Michael Madrigali
Anwar Mahdi
Ignacio María Manrique
Kaveri Raina
Pfeiffer + Walz
Caleb Yono
In this paper, I develop an autobiographically generated account of drawing as part of an occult practice of the “left” (or sinister) sacred. Marshalling analytic insights from psychoanalysis, religious studies, and the work of Georges Bataille, and with attention to the surrealists’ interest in magic, this account engages the occult as a means for understanding both the medium and the activity of drawing. Revealing occulted elements of a personal practice of drawing—modalities of hiddenness including secrecy, seduction, shame, excrementality, transgression, and eroticism—this paper adumbrates a “heterology” of drawing that envisions drawing as an ambiguous and ambivalent practice eliciting and communicating an experience of the sinister side of the sacred.
Ramsey Alderson lives and works in Chicago. He has recently had two solo shows at Front Room and DoMus in Chicago. He holds a BFA from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago.
Jeremy Biles, PhD, resides in Chicago, where he teaches on religion, philosophy, and art at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago. He is the author of the book Ecce Monstrum: Georges Bataille and the Sacrifice of Form (Fordham University Press, 2007).
Ryan M Pfeiffer + Rebecca Walz are collaborators that live and work in Chicago. Drawing from their research into prehistoric & ancient art, historical erotica, and esoteric traditions, their works synthesize concerns about sex, death, myth, transformation, and alchemy. They view the act of collaboration as the dissolution of individual identities and union of oppositions as a new, harmonized whole.
Collin Pressler is a writer and arts organizer living and working in Chicago. He currently serves as Curator at The International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood, and previously served as Exhibitions Manager at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago.