Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford: Near Eternity

Near Eternity is a site-responsive exhibition unfolding across the McCormick House and the surrounding grounds of Wilder Park at the Elmhurst Art Museum. Through a series of sculptures, the artist considers the lifespans and fragilities of designed systems—biological, architectural, capital, and digital—asking how permanence and decay are mediated by natural and technological infrastructures. Together with threads of 3D scanning and sculptural translation of works from the museum’s collection, these references draw out parallels between botanical resilience, the myth of architectural immortality, and the digital networks that underwrite contemporary life.

Using sculpture as a tool to examine design and the larger systems in which objects circulate, the artist borrows familiar forms such as the Barcelona Chair designed by Mies van der Rohe and Lillian Reich, the Eames splint designed by Charles and Ray Eames, standing desks, and children’s IKEA chairs. Hulsebos-Spofford tranforms the sleek objects with a cartoon-like soft approach, pitting the surface with fingerprints that polka dot the form with texture. In their altered states, these icons of modern design become part of a digital–analog matrix, collapsing distinctions between furniture, sculpture, artifact, and interior architecture. Near Eternity ultimately proposes sculpture as a method for re-sensing designed environments, revealing how endurance and obsolescence are co-produced across bodies and buildings.

All of the sculptures are created through a hybrid process combining 3D scanning, digital printing, casting, and hand sculpting to materialize the interplay of organic forms and manufactured objects. Four new sculptures installed within the domestic modernist interior of the McCormick House create a “re-interior” that accentuates the architecture’s vulnerabilities—aging materials, entropy, and the persistence of technological obsolescence. Outdoors in Wilder Park (adjacent to the Museum), three companion public sculptures embed themes of reproduction and the information age into forms typically associated with civic permanence (the public monument), extending the exhibition’s inquiry into the landscape of public parks.

About the Artist

Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford is a visual artist and assistant professor of sculpture at Indiana University Northwest. The sculptor primarily makes work to address themes of reproduction, value and digital culture with humor. He is also a co-director and co-founder of the collective Floating Museum, which curated the 2023 Chicago Architecture Biennial and has created international public installations. His work has been shown at the Art Institute of Chicago, Malmo Konstmuseum, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, American Academy of Arts and Letters, The UCSD Art Gallery, and The Hyde Park Art Center, among other spaces.

Over the course of his 20 year art practice, he has held fellowships at the Sculpture Space, the MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center, the Brown Foundation Program at the Dora Maar House, and the Skowhegan School of Sculpture and Painting. His work has been supported by grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Harpo Foundation, the Propeller Fund, the Chauncey and Marion Deering McCormick Foundation, an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship in Sicily. Reviews of his work have been included in outlets like Sculpture Magazine, Hyperallergic, Artforum, and the Chicago Tribune.

This exhibition is supported in part by Lakeside Bank and through grants from Indiana University Northwest, the IU Presidential Arts and Humanities Program, and the JCS Arts, Health and Education Fund of DuPage Foundation.