Claire Pentecost at The Mildred Complex(ity) Project Space

August 15 – September 21, 2025

Nested Interiors

“And yet it is living nests that could introduce a phenomenology of the actual nest, of the nest found in natural surroundings, and which becomes for a moment the center—the term is no exaggeration—of an entire universe, the evidence of a cosmic situation.”

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p.94

“… Michelet suggests a house built by and for the body, taking form from the inside like a shell, in an intimacy that works physically. The form of the nest is commanded by the inside. “On the inside,” he continues, “the instrument that prescribes a circular form for the nest is nothing else but the body of the bird. It is by constantly turning round and round and pressing back the wall on every side, that it succeeds in forming this circle.”

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p.101

I began with a collection of nests and a stack of old canvases, including a few that my mother, a painter, had started and rejected. Painting allows me to focus intently, and this heals the fractured mind (a result of too much digitized information coming at me through screens). Studying avian architecture improvises a container for my own scattered interiority.

Claire Pentecost is an artist and writer who researches the living matters of the unified multi-dimensional being that animates the critical zone of our planet. Pentecost’s work is driven by research and inspired by questions of form. She advocates for the role of the amateur in the production and interpretation of knowledge, while a longstanding interest in nature and artificiality predicates her recent responses to anthropogenic climate change. Her soil-erg project considered the material of soil as the basis for a new economic system. 

Pentecost is a founding member of Deep Time Chicago, a collective exploring cultural change in response to ecological crisis, and the Anthropocene Commons, an international research network. Pentecost has exhibited work at dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany; 13th Istanbul Biennial; White Chapel Gallery, London; 3rd Mongolian Land Art Biennial; Sursock Museum, Beirut; Times Museum; Guangzhou; MCA Chicago; MSU Broad Museum; Museum of Contemporary Photography; DePaul Art Museum; Corcoran Museum; Milwaukee Art Museum; Transmediale 05; and many others. She is represented by Higher Pictures Generation, New York, and is Professor Emeritus at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she taught for 25 years. 

With Brian Holmes, Claire Pentecost facilitates Watershed Art & Ecology, an experimental cultural space in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago.