EXPO CHICAGO
24-27 April 2025
Expo Chicago 2024
11 -14 April
Booth
Anne Siems
Jodi Hays
John Salvest
Maysey Craddock
Red Grooms
David Lusk Gallery returns to EXPO CHICAGO with a selection of works that grapple with material and meaning. Featuring new and recent work by Jodi Hays, Maysey Craddock, Red Grooms, John Salvest, and Anne Siems, the presentation explores how the objects we collect and the landscapes we inhabit become reflections of larger cultural systems economic, environmental, emotional, and historic. Each artist in the booth uses layered materials as a form of inquiry. Cardboard, paper bags, pennies and dimes, dollar bills, raw canvas, and fine line these are not simply surfaces to paint on, but carriers of information, vessels of labor, and sites for transformation.
Anne Siems, inspired by her childhood in the woodlands of Germany, draws on memory to craft intricate, dreamlike scenes. Her works operate as meditative journeys into the subconscious—inviting reflection on identity, nature, and transformation. In recent drawings, created in a moment of personal retreat, Siems turns inward with delicate lines and symbolic details, offering both a personal and political call for resilience. Her work evokes the power of art as both refuge and resistance.
Jodi Hays uses reclaimed cardboard, dyed and bleached in batches before being reassembled into quilt-like compositions. Merging abstraction with memory, Hays echoes traditions of Southern resourcefulness and craft—signage, mending, quilting and positions her work in conversation with both domestic labor and modernist painting. The result is a visual language that honors place, time, and material history.
John Salvest approaches salvage from a conceptual angle, using collected materials romance novels, postage stamps, cigarette butts, and shredded art-world business cards to examine how culture embeds itself in the things we discard.
Whether arranging 1,500 paperbacks into a monolithic ode to love and consumerism or assembling cryptic language from ephemera, Salvest invites viewers to look beneath the surface. His work is witty, incisive, and sharply aware of how value emotional, monetary, or otherwise is constructed and manipulated.
Maysey Craddock’s process begins with photographing the transient moments in nature, particularly Gulf Shore coastlines undergoing ruin and reinvention.
Conceptually concerned with humankind’s impact on the environment, Craddock's formal interest lies in abstraction, breaking down imagery into integral lines and colors, with particular attention to empty spaces.
Using found paper painted with gouache and stitched together, her pieces evoke a sense of impact and transport viewers to the shoreline, refreshing cyclical patterns of nature and our interaction with it.
Red Grooms, a celebrated master of satire and spectacle, brings his signature style to a new series of works centered on the American dollar. In these works on paper, handdrawn bills distill pop culture, politics, and cartoonish absurdity into a single image. His linework conveys personality and commentary each figure, symbol, and flourish highlighting the complex relationship between art and commerce.
Anne Siems
Lagoon, 2024
acrylic on panel
60 x 84 in
Anne Siems
Posse II, 2025
mixed media on paper
30 x 22 in
Anne Siems
Howl, 2025
mixed media on paper
30 x 22 in
Anne Siems
Queen, 2025
mixed media on paper
30 x 22 in
Artwork List
In Order of Appearance
Jodi Hays
Fringe, 2024
dyed cardboard and textiles on panel
24 x 18 in
Jodi Hays
The Blessed, 2024
dyed cardboard on panel
24 x 18 in
Jodi Hays
Mothers of Millions, 2025
108 x 20 in
John Salvest Peace, Officer, 2016
vintage wooden police batons
48 x 42 x 2 in
John Salvest
4 Sale, 2025
pennies and dimes
30 x 46 x 0 25 in
Maysey Craddock
Storm Green Sky, 2024
gouache, flash and thread on found paper
16 x 15 in
Red Grooms
Curling George, 2018
colored pencil on clay board
12 x 16 in
Red Grooms
Fifty Dollars and Change 2018
colored pencil on clay board
12 x 9 in
Red Grooms
Two Crumpled Dollar Bills, 2018
colored pencil on clay board
12 x 9 in