Colleen Plumb with writings by Katherine Kassouf Cummings | January 10 - February 22, 2021

Invisible Visible

Invisible Visible is a site-specific installation in the FlexSpace, to be seen and heard from outside on the street, through the storefront window of the gallery. The installation formed through conversation between Colleen Plumb, an artist, and Katherine Kassouf Cummings, a writer; between images and words; between the individual and society. Expressed through photography, sculpture, video, and writing, this collaboration invites an examination of our relationship with the invisible that exists all around us. With this installation, we are invited to join an act of witnessing the lives of chickens and workers, together subjected to the suffering created by our industrial food system.

Visit “Events and Talks” on our website for a video recording of Colleen and Katherine speaking about their work.

Click below to listen to Katherine Kassouf Cummings reading her writings for "Invisible Visible”

Colleen Plumb makes photographs, videos, and installations investigating systems that perpetuate power imbalance. Her work is held in several permanent collections and has been widely published and exhibited. Plumb’s first photography monograph, Animals Are Outside Today (Radius, 2011), critically documents humans’ ambivalent dispositions towards animals. Plumb’s recent photography book, Thirty Times a Minute (Radius, 2020), examines the plight of captive elephants. Plumb lives in Chicago and has taught photography and video at Columbia College Chicago since 1999.

Katherine Kassouf Cummings is a daughter, a sister, a friend, a teacher, an ecological citizen, and a writer. She co-edited the book What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be? (University of Chicago Press, 2021). She serves as Managing Editor at the Center for Humans and Nature. When not at her desk, Katherine shares her passion for movement and women's health as a Pilates instructor.