Elastic Arts, 3429 W Diversey #208, Chicago, IL (2025)

10/29/2025

Music in the Garden Festival is BACK this Saturday and Sunday! We once again present this wonderful 2-day music festival with Chicago-based improvisers and creative musicians, featuring a light and projection installation by Ruby Que throughout the weekend. Curated by Caroline Jesalva + Aaron Kaufman-Levine. Come enjoy a night or two of music, art and community!
Tickets at the door or at link in bio. Music at 7pm each night!

Night 1 (Saturday!) features Emily Beisel, Microplastique, and Purikoko.

7pm Emily Beisel
8pm Microplastique
(Adam Shead, Ben Zucker, Molly Jones, Josh Harlow)
9pm Purikoko
(Ariel Vera, Alex Yoo)

Night 2 (Sunday!) we will have Sandpusher, Mabel Kwan, and BananaAcid!

7pm Sandpusher
Nick Meryhew, Sam Scranton, Andrew Tham
8pm Mabel Kwan
9pm BananaAcid
Aaron Kaufman-Levine, Caroline Jesalva, Erez Dessel, Garrett Frees, Tyler Wagner

10/29/2025

World-building, genre-spanning artists take the stage for Thursday’s Improvised Music Series. Austin-based Atlas Maior present a special duo session synthesizing global music traditions, and All The Wizards Were Here amplifies its grooves through the lens of its sci-fi storytelling. Join us at 8:30pm!

8:30 pm - Atlas Maior Duo
Josh Peters - oud, lutar
Joshua Thomson - alto saxophone, flutes

9:30 pm - All The Wizards Were Here
Chandler Browne - tap, vocals
Tommy Carroll - drums
Evea - vocals
Lyn Rye - bass
Ben Zucker - keyboards, trumpet

10/28/2025

Join us this Wednesday for FUGUE STATE as it returns for Phase 2 of the new art and cinema festival that recently premiered at Chicago’s Comfort Station, NYC’s Film-Maker’s Coop, and Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, returns with another program embracing radical expression in time-based media.

Glenn Sonnie Wooden is one of the most provocative radical thinkers and artists in the Chicago art scene. His works Guillotine and Godspeed, both previously curated by Fugue State founder, M. Woods, directly confront a real more real than real, operating within the slippage of a media’s capturing of Blackness, as critic and practitioner of the convex mirror of digital communication. Wooden presents raw hyperreality, sometimes through the most vulnerable self-reflection and exposure, documenting abjectness and trying to hold space for tenderness, while appearing and disappearing into the media himself as guide and interlocutor of this beloved hellscape. Wooden’s latest film, THUNDER, and the accompanying short film program, center “the relationships we have with our lovers, parents, places, and any sort of connection that we find endearing and enduring.”
Wooden’s THUNDER, as described by the artist, is about a man who is experiencing the loss of his lover, finding himself lost and teetering on the edge of his own mortality. Lost and seeking guidance on the proper way to be a man, he slips into a world of contradictions and taboos. Using found footage and documentary filmmaking the protagonist aims to get to the root of what it means to be a “man” again.

In addition to Wooden’s THUNDER, the local filmmakers Patricia Aquino, Grace K. Schuler, Jard Lere, and Anusha Alamgir will be screening short films hand selected by Wooden. Wednesday! Doors at 7:30pm

10/26/2025

In conjunction with Experimental Sound Studio and the CLEAT Series we’re back with our series of artist-led introduction workshops exploring Spatial Audio this Tuesday!

The workshops are approximately 2 hours and will begin with a demonstration and discussion of each individual artist’s approach to multichannel sound. In the second half of the workshops, participants will have an opportunity to experiment with multichannel sound techniques on the 16-channel CLEAT system installed at Elastic.

This week we feature Sam Clapp, a musician, filmmaker, and arts worker living in Chicago. In this session, he will present his “Bliss Point” series of short films as a means to ponder the creative possibilities of the 16.1 CLEAT sound system for audiovisual projects.

No prior experience with multichannel sound necessary! You will need to bring your own laptop to actively participate in the second half of each workshop, however you are also welcome to simply listen and observe without a laptop.

The workshops are FREE but space is limited. Come to one, or come to all! The next four Tuesday’s at 7:30pm

Artist Guests

October 28: Sam Clapp
November 4: Scott Rubin
November 11: Kate In
November 18: Hugo Flores Garcia

This program is supported by the Richard H. Dreihaus Foundation

10/26/2025

Join us for an evening with Najee-Zaid this Monday! Their debut album Transiting the Celestial encompasses their lived experiences and artistry through music within the Experimental, Jazz, and Ambient genres of which they are currently associated. With a focus on steeping in the now, Najee-Zaid aims to express a range of experiences from grief to liberation through a Q***r Afro-Diasporic Spiritual lens in the form of a music album. Recorded in part (Oct. 2024) here at Elastic, Najee-Zaid remounts the live version of this project to pay homage to the experimental performance legacy of Chicago.

The overall tone and nature of this project is anti-oppressive, anti-white supremacist, and anti-extractive as it builds reciprocal relationships with nature, people, and all involved while centering rest for BIPOC and QPOC identities. Experimentally, the performance aspect is not even near the focus of this project. The artists and their nature based relationships remain centered as a way to decentralize hierarchical power dynamics and human-centeredness.

Therefore they aim to transmute the symptoms of what the late Bell Hooks would call the “White-Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy” through rest, including: Grind culture/productivity,internalized misogyny/misogynoir, internalized homophobia, restlessness. Our bodies are sacred. Our lineages are worthy of protection. Re-indigenization takes rest.

Gratitude to our performers:

Najee-Zaid - Vocals, Keys, Electronics
Alejandro Salazar - Drums, Percussion
Paige Brown - Keys, etc.
Eva Supreme - Vocals
Anaiet Soul - Keys, Organ
Carmani Edwards - Bass

Vegan/Vegetarian nourishments to be provided. Monday at 7:30pm!

10/24/2025

Join us Saturday at 12pm for Shake Shook Shaken, a theater/movement workshop series produced by Julie Meckler. The series is designed for people to gently bring body awareness, allowing participants to open up, explore outside of their comfort zone, bond with each other, create and show. By playing with these concepts using our bodies, voices, words, and each other, we will explore our own awareness and sensitivity as artists and people.

Shake Shook Shaken is a dream of what a safe space could allow. A vision of a place for everybody to gather, look at each other, play and create in a non judgmental, trauma-informed way. It’s an invitation, a journey within and out, a surprise. Each workshop is unique. This month Julie leading.

No prior dance or acting experience is necessary, just willingness to move and exhale. This workshop series is for anyone and everyone.

10/23/2025

Join us this Sunday for ‘The Middle’, a concert brings together musical groups of different genres to promote creative collaboration and exploration. Each show features two small ensembles who first perform separately, showcasing their unique sound and style, and then together, combining their musicality to create something entirely new, exploring where they meet in “The Middle.” Audience engagement activities such as reflection prompts and listening guides invite audience members to participate in the performance by exploring how they can apply themes from the show to their own lives. Our upcoming performance will feature two trios: OLEA Ensemble (Marissa Kerbel, Alayne Honaker, and Kate Kilgus) and Janelle Finton’s ‘joygarden’ (Janelle Finton, Caroline Jesalva, and Alvin Santner). The Middle is curated by Priya Fink. We hope you can join us! Sunday at 7:30pm!

10/23/2025

This Saturday AIRMW Arts Initiatives Presents: Bass Dreams minus B! The group is helmed by Aoki on Asuka Bass (it’s the Asuka bass because it’s autographed by past WWE champ Asuka), with Adam Shead on drums, and the brain-boggling duo of Rami Atassi and Terry Tanaka on electric guitars.
Where did it come from? “Bass Dreams minus B was inspired by all my favorite bassists and wrestlers,” Aoki, master of understatement, explains. Specifically: “My top five Dee Murray, Kenny Gradney, Tiran Porter, John Paul Jones, and Malachi Favors !!!!” It’s the dream of the bass player - dial up the groove, lock it in, and then have two master shredders fill every pocket. Not just the hip pockets and the breast pockets - pockets you can’t see - inside pockets, surprise back pockets, lapel pockets. Every gap spied and excavated for maximum satisfaction.
We’re talking jamz, with a z. I was on it being like a 70s private press thing, fusion with a psychedelic hand drawn cover and lots of ringwear, but Tatsu set me straight. I had to head down to the local vinyl hole (shout out to Val’s Halla!) and pick up Little Feat’s live album, Waiting for Columbus (Tatsu said it’s “notorious”). Now I get it. Steal yr freakin face man. Tatsu’s been chasing this flow for decades, a swirly dream come true, not a B to be found but the boogie in your butt.
—Matt Pakulski, FPE Records, 2021” (abridged/edited-Rika Lin, 2025)

10/22/2025

This Thursday’s Improvised Music Series is in collaboration with this year’s Ear Taxi Festival, featuring an ensemble from Mark Nagy and a solo percussion set from Luca Cimarusti.

Cimarusti is a Chicago-based musician who has spent over twenty years operating in experimental rock, punk, and heavy metal. His solo percussion practice focuses on repetition, resonance, and decay. Mark Nagy’s Station 4 is a Chicago ensemble employing texts and vocals, music and dance, to create a multi-sensory experience for its audience. Station 4 wraps its uniquely structured electro-acoustic improvisations around the spoken-word performance art of poet Kao Ra Zen augmented by dancers Tuli Bera, Heather Zimny, Karen Fisher-Doyle, and Mindy Meyers.

8:30 Luca Cimarusti

9:30 Mark Nagy’s Station 4

10/21/2025

Join us Wednesday for a film screening brought to us by Tesseract Cinema. Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow are two of the best portraits of modern pop culture malaise - the way the internet and television melt into your brain, especially when the rest of the world appears to be falling apart. Before those features, Schoenbrun made a documentary about a subject who perfectly captures that unsettled collective unconscious: Slenderman. A Self-Induced Hallucination is comprised entirely of existing footage, assembled in a hypnotizing fashion that proves something as surely as Shoenbrun’s fictional work: It doesn’t really matter if the boogeyman is real, as long as everyone believes in him. All proceeds go to Trans Justice Law Project IL

Doors: 6:30pm

Elastic Arts

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