EXPO Chicago 2025 with Dana Sherwood and William Corwin

Dana Sherwood’s paintings are riotous vegetal fantasies featuring beasts pregnant with human offspring. Some of her subjects we know well from mythology—swans and horses, others emerge from the artist’s imagination: snails, raccoons, octopi. William Corwin’s Artemis sculptures also meld the human with the bestial, but his figures are pock-marked and venous iron casts born of liquid metal formed on one-off sand molds. Both Sherwood and Corwin present their narratives within a framework that simultaneously heightens and embroiders the story: Sherwood coils wreathes of flowers and tendrils around the characters, immediately situating the action within a natural context—in sharp contrast Corwin builds a metal stage on which to present his alien goddesses—both artists seem intent on enshrining their hybrid beings. We may be seduced by the wreaths around Sherwood’s deer and rabbits, but whether these animals are parents of the beings within them, or prisons, or even have eaten their nude human inhabitants is up for discussion. Similarly, the game-like quality of Corwin’s shrine tables are inviting to the touch, but the bulbous serpentine quality of the hunter-goddess, known for her cruel streak, warns us away.