Near Eternity: Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford

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.

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. Between three and five sculptures will be installed within the domestic modernist interior of the McCormick House to produce a site-responsive “re-interior” that accentuates the structure’s vulnerabilities—aging materials, entropy, and the persistence of technological obsolescence. Outdoors, three companion works operate as public statuary that 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 Wilder Park.

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, the Eames splint, standing desks, and children’s IKEA chairs. He disrupts/renders visibly haptic—pitted 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, buildings, and networks.

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.

Public Art Preview will take place May 2nd & 3rd during Art in Wilder Park