Sara Black, Jessie Mott, Claire Pentecost | The Persistence of the Unsorted | A LAB^4 Exhibition

Arts + Literature Laboratory presents The Persistence of the Unsorted by Sara Black, Jessie Mott, and Claire Pentecost, an exhibition organized by the community curation project, LAB^4, from Tuesday, July 8 through Friday, August 29, 2025.

A reception for all current exhibitions will be held on Thursday, July 17, from 6:00pm to 8:00pm.

A motley collection of makeshift beings wanders through a museum in search of a home. Lost, excluded, imperfect and unfinished, these creatures of indeterminate constitution persevere. They persist in a world almost beyond repair, a realm where all they have is what they can scavenge from a failed paradigm. Survival depends on solidarity across differences of kind, persuasion and species. Haunted by boundaries, conceptual and material, the unsorted carry on in the exuberance of impure existence.

Sara Black

Sara Black’s artwork uses conscious processes of building or horticulture as a time-based method; diseased wood, ecosystem-specific trees/plants, inherited building materials or other exhausted objects as material; and creates works that expose the complex ways in which things and people are suspended in worlds together. Her work interrogates the fallacy of individualism to imagine entangled and survivable futures. Sara collaborates with artist Amber Ginsburg, political theorist Sam Frost, and digital artist Marc Downie. She is a member of Deep Time Chicago, the woodworking collective Project Fielding serving femme and nonbinary woodworkers, the Anthropocene Commons and the... Read More

Jessie Mott

Jessie Mott is a Chicago-based visual artist whose work spans an array of media, including drawing, painting, and collaborative projects. Mott’s portraits examine sexuality, power and vulnerability inherent in the permeable boundaries of human/animal, corporeal/fantastical and gender categories.

Mott's work has been exhibited widely, including Goldfinch in Chicago, IL, with Diane Christiansen at the Arts Club of Chicago and Hawthorn Contemporary in Milwaukee, WI; with queer scholar and writer Chantal Nadeau at the Epiphany Center for the Arts in Chicago, IL; and collaborative animations with artist and writer Steve Reinke, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, VIDEOEX International Experimental Film & Video Festival in Zürich and the Whitney Biennial.

Claire Pentecost

Claire Pentecost is an artist and writer who researches the living matters of the unified multi-dimensional being that animates our planet. Pentecost’s work is driven by research and inspired by questions of form. Pentecost has exhibited work at dOCUMENTA (13); 13th Istanbul Biennial; White Chapel Gallery; MCA Chicago; Times Museum (Guangzhou); Higher Pictures Generation (NYC), and others. She is a founding member of Deep Time Chicago, a collective exploring cultural change in response to ecological crisis, and the Anthropocene Commons, an international research network. With Brian Holmes she directs Watershed Art & Ecology, an experimental cultural space in Chicago.

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Arts + Literature Laboratory is located at 111 S. Livingston Street #100, Madison, Wisconsin, 53703.

Our galleries are open Tuesday through Friday 10am-5pm and Saturday noon to 5pm, and other programs take place throughout the week. Please check the events calendar and education section for details.

CALENDAR

Sara Black, Jessie Mott, Claire Pentecost | The Persistence of the Unsorted | A LAB^4 Exhibition

Sara Black

Jessie Mott

Claire Pentecost

PLAN YOUR VISIT

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