The unreal world - Chicago Reader

It’s no secret we live in a world full of simulations—a teeming ecosystem of Disneylands, AI influencers, and Kylie Jenner x Meta glasses content. In such a jungle, it feels impossible to experience art in a way that isn’t an endless rehearsal of its own disappearance. Blessedly, there are artists valiantly working to preserve the seductive power of art in the face of a total lack of truth, including Chicago-based painter Kate Hefferan and Milwaukee-based sculptor Brit Krohmer.

Hefferan’s paintings, particularly the smallest of them, are immensely compelling. The gauzy compositions demonstrate clear attention to the painted surface and make visible the unreliability of photographic representation, like Gerhard Richter’s blurred works did six decades ago. But unlike Richter, they portray their own oneiric worlds so convincingly that they’re instantly nostalgic, as if replaying something we all experienced before waking this morning.

The just-over-A4-size How to leave (2026) presents a bundle of loose notes, the top sheet reading “Put some of my mom’s ashes in with me.” Its crop and cloudiness intimate that we’re glancing down at the scattered contents of a console just after rubbing our eyes, and its tragic scrawled directive is so specific and tender a wish it seems essential. Yet the blur and the narrative also make us aware of the artist’s power of suggestion—the painting is the stunning surface and the staged spectacle.

Meanwhile, Krohmer’s metallic Thrushplate (2026), a flat wall-mounted fiberglass sculpture perforated by eight circular holes, could be an enlarged paleolithic adze or a discarded part of some industrial production apparatus. The thrumming of both possibilities is palpable, but neither requires its original referent. Instead, the work derives power from its ability to conjure competing fictions.

“The shroud the slip the surface the stain,” the title of the pair’s duo show at LVL3, points directly at what Hefferan and Krohmer’s art does so potently: heighten our appreciation of the strange power of appearances. Hefferan’s hazy compositions and Krohmer’s pseudo-relics simulate real worlds that never really existed, and need not to. It doesn’t matter if they’re true—it only matters if they can enchant us.

“The shroud the slip the surface the stain”
Through 8/16: Sun 1–4 PM or by appointment, LVL3, 1542 N. Milwaukee, 3rd fl.

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