PATRON presents Let’s Go Exploring!, a two-person exhibition by Chicago-based artists Gregory Bae and Tony Lewis. As studio-mates, colleagues, and peers, Bae and Lewis’s individual practices define an active, acritical engagement with the world around us with a soulful awareness of being present - as individuals and in relation.
Re-tracing various forms of collaboration and exchange, Let’s Go Exploring! posits friendship as one of the most underrated tools in any artist’s practice. The exhibition unites discrete works by both Bae and Lewis developed over a decade-long bond forged during their cohort at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 

This exchange is introduced in the form of a salon-style installation of sketches, drawings, paintings, and ephemera from both artist’s studios. Constructed from a process of revisiting Bae’s archive, largely housed at Lewis’s studio for the past five years, the installation collapses time through references to both unrealized and realized future works, indirect to incomplete thoughts, sketches, and unfinished conversations. A partial visual representation of the artists’ diverse interests, the installation introduces shared cultural connections, including Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes comic strips, a childhood favorite of both Bae and Lewis, but also a material resonant in Lewis’s practice since 2013. Here, the dynamic impulse of the last comic strip catalyzes an active return to two practices, inspired by the artists’ shared, persistent attempts to grasp the gaps of understanding and connection created by time. 

Time, as material and process appears in Bae’s 24-7, 365 (sketch) (2017), a series of paintings on used car tires. Originally part of a kinetic sculpture, 24-7, 365 (2014) in which a tire endlessly turns on a treadmill at a rate that would travel the world’s circumference in a year. Installed on the wall, Bae’s tire series reveals his experimental, assemblage-based approach to painting, shaped through continual testing with nontraditional materials drawn from the American import industry. Car tires, laptop screens, and found paper transition from everyday remnants to painted surfaces, carrying the history of their use along with them. 

Embracing and exploding the physical build up, destruction, and labor of object making, are Lewis’s White Drawings, a body of work he began in the emotional aftermath of Bae’s passing in the summer of 2021. Evident of the persistence and determinism of their making, the drawings result from layers of colored pencil, graphite, and rubber cement. For Lewis, drawing is a form of language. Originating by partially concealing in thick graphite the visual references in Calvin and Hobbes cartoon strips, Lewis’s process expanded into forms of graphite drawings that engaged with the art historical painterly monochrome, as tools to make sense of the world. Lewis’s fluency in linguistic abstraction extends to graphite adaptations of Gregg shorthand (a stenographic system used by court-reporters). This approach to engage decentered viewpoints and languages in the material we experience also unfolds in Bae’s “Ex” drawings: material collages created from the non-linguistic parts of user manuals of machines with which Bae had a connection. The desire to understand elements of daily life by translating them from physical objects to two-dimensional images, and then to illegible content, the works enact a playful pathway to and around language. For Bae and Lewis, the role of the artist is to have agency to pull apart, move around, re-develop, re-imagine the way in which language is used. 

Throughout the exhibition both artists ponder the meaning of existence, clinging to forms of connection, belonging, and the signifiers that mark and shape identity. One Coinciding Moment Felt in Rotation on 6.22.16 San Francisco / 06.23.16 Milano documents the simultaneous sunset and sunrise by Bae and his friend, curator Rossella Farinotti who was half a world and nine time zones apart. Installed here almost ten years to the date of their recording, the two-channel video is a meditation on distances collapsed by the rise of FaceTime video call technologies, with a romantic meditation on the cyclical experiences that unite us all. 

The final gallery concludes with two ongoing sculptural installations, both initially presented as complete works early in the artists’ work together. Bae’s Dirt of Opportunities (#2) (2015/2026), a potted Bonsai tree, native to Korea, whose soiled roots are wrapped in clear plastic bags embossed with the American Eagle, the national symbol applied to U.S. passports. Here, the tree, illuminated by a single botanical grow light, is installed in relation to Lewis’s Untitled 4 (2015- ongoing), a 3,000 sq ft. architectural graphite monochrome drawing of a basketball court in Brussels from 2015. Moved from exhibition to studio, to exhibition Untitled 4 bears the residue of life, the rips, crumples, and rips on the work’s surface accumulate with each presentation and move. Both ongoing projects collapse studio and life, the precariousness of being an artist (or human) in environments that may be inhospitable. Adapted to a variety of architectural environments, the sculptural works are, here, cultivated and maintained. 

The impetus to return to bodies of work from the past decade is not solely reflective, but rather an active pondering, turning over thoughts that, even after hours of discussion, remain unresolved and generative. The fleeting nature of time does not devalue our memories, but urges us to appreciate the quiet moments of the world in which we live and continue seeking meaning in the present and the future. Nothing is ever finished. Let’s go exploring!