Infinity Mirror
Odette Stout & Ále Campos
Opening Reception: Friday,March 7th, 2025| 6-9pm | Free-To-Attend
Friday,March 7th, 2025 – Sunday, April 13, 2025
Presented in Black Box
About the Exhibition
Infinity Mirror brings together the two distinctive and poetic worlds of frequent collaborators and Chicago-based artists, Odette Stout and Ále Campos (aka Celeste). Both are multidisciplinary performance makers and experimental drag artists with hands and hearts steeped in the universes of performance art and underground drag and fashion nightlife.
Their closely knit practices are exemplified in this exhibition by two respective video works that expand on drag performance as a tool to open and examine the psyche like slices of an orange, or an uncurling lily. The Dream Continues & a muse over a muse illustrate the ways in which the camera eye can suggest the power of queering vision, harnessing technological looking as a strategy for self-creation, multiplying realities, and telling stories.
Campos’ a muse over a muse employs masks and masking, between drag and the green screen, to explore self-construction and the act of inventing oneself as a muse. a muse over a muse features fragments from an original text, recorded and placed within a soundscape composed, performed and produced by Will Mitchell.
Odette Stout’s The Dream Continues is a fashion collection made from garments and fabrics with past lives, delivered as a drag runway in a Chicago warehouse after the end of the world. Stout integrates mixed-reality software into fashion performances that are as much about the performers’ internal experience as the audience’s, telling stories of imagined queer community futures.
On Friday, April 11, the exhibition will conclude with a closing, live performance titled Siren, an augmented reality ritual performance featuring live sound by Spacey Lacey.
About the Artists
Odette Stout is a reality artist and drag performer whose experimental costumes are a staple in Chicago underground nightlife. They stage intermedia performances that cast collaborating artists as otherworldly living artworks, called on to help tell stories from spaces where self-creation is a survival art practice. Stout’s runway events synthesize fashion, digital installation, dance, drag and poetry and are designed to catalyze embodied experiences of an ever-present possibility of transformation.
Stout teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Exhibitions and partners include The Sculpture Center, CURRENTS, Ars Electronica, Co-Prosperity, MOCA Cleveland, Kinsey Institute, Chicago Artists’ Coalition, 3Arts.
Ále Campos (b. 1994, Los Angeles, California) is a multidisciplinary artist and performance maker whose elastic studio practice is anchored in the vernacular of drag and their persona, ‘Celeste’. They generate live performance works that are often rhapsodic and mediated by technology, often involving or unfolding into the mediums of sculpture, sound, text, video and installation. Drag is a queered method through which they consider performance making.Campos received a BA from Bennington College (2016) and an MFA in Performance at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago (2022). Some places their work has been show at include Elastic Arts, SITE/less, Hyde Park Arts Center (Chicago, IL), BMOCA (Boulder, CO, SS Gallerie (CDMX), Pamplemousse Gallery (Richmond, VA), Crab Shack x Fjord (Philadelphia, PA). They were a 2023 BOLT artist-in-residence at the Chicago Artists’ Coalition and were named one of the ten New City 2023 Breakout Artists of Chicago. They currently hold the title of resident performer & co-producer of Rumors, a monthly event that showcases some of the city’s premiere performers and DJ’s.
