Aerial Parts is a site-specific installation by ASC for Buddy, at the Chicago Cultural Center. The work can be seen from the street at all hours and attempts to queer the familiar form of a window display, inspired by local apothecaries that have long been sites of care and conversation. Aerial Parts (a botanical term for all components of a plant exposed aboveground) showcases a larger-than-life abstraction of a 1991 Polly Pocket toy container recontextualized in recycled paper alongside plaster, biological resin, and medicinal herbs.

Corresponding hand-held meditative artworks from the artist’s “hardwares” series were also available through the Buddy retail space within the Cultural Center. Throughout the course of the exhibition, the artist’s profits from objects purchased through the Buddy display benefited The People’s Medicine Reclamation Project. 

Documentation by Ryan Edmund