Sack, mask and stick questions and reevaluates the concept of progress, with architecture as the point of departure through the investigation of the participants’ practices of sculpture and dance. The exhibition explores visionary architectural and artistic initiatives from Chicago’s iconic 1933 world’s fair, A Century of Progress International Exposition, including Howard T. Fisher’s steel house prototype and the legendary ballerina Ruth Page (1899–1991), who called a Fisher steel house home. Here, the Fisher floor plan serves as a motif for the production of new sculpture and performative works, speaking to the dynamics of architecture, the art of craft, and the temporality of the human body. Made at the time of Century of Progress, Page’s Expanding Universe (1932) was a response to sculptures such as Miss Expanding Universe,(1932), a Venusian figure with outstretched arms encased in an abstracted sack; Play Mountain (1933); and Miss Expanding Universe (1932) all by Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988), Fisher, Page, and Noguchi responded to the politics of the time, and their relationship to each other by creating works that mark the spatial connection between sculpture, dance, and architecture. Including performance (mask), sculpture (stick), and architecture (sack) this project explores the relationships between these mediums by erasing their limits not only as a symbolic action but also as a formal practice—referencing the way Page described her collaboration with Noguchi, “sack, mask, and stick.”

Sophie Leddick is an interdisciplinary artist whose work is based in performance, video, and costume. She earned her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), 2018. Leddick has performed and exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, Sullivan Galleries (SAIC), the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, LITHIUM, IMPACT Festival at the Zhou B Art Center, The Arts Club of Chicago, dfbrl8r, and Links Hall in Chicago. Her video work has screened at the Eyes Walk Festival in Greece, Chicago Indie Film Awards, London Lift-Off Film Festival, and the Canadian & International Short Film Festival among others. She is the recipient of the Roads Scholarship for Research from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Edgar Orlaineta graduated with a degree in painting, sculpture, and engraving from the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes and holds an MFA in sculpture from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Orlaineta has received several national and international distinctions such as a Graham Foundation grant in 2010, Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte in 2008, 2012, 2016 and 2021 granted by FONCA, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and the scholarship for Young Creators granted by FONCA among others. His work is in public collections at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) in Mexico City, Caixa Forum in Barcelona, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Wattis Institute in San Francisco, Amparo Museum in Puebla, the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City, the Denver Art Museum in Colorado, and the Museo Universitario del Chopo of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).