sounds better with you: Guest curated by Iris Colburn and Gabriel Garza

Born in 1967, Chris Austin studied mechanics at Ferris State University; a background that is evident in his meticulous art making process. Thoughtfully composed works emerge from methodical planning that manifests through research, sketching, and assembling source materials. Austin alternates between painting on canvas and hand-cut cardboard imbuing his work with a fresh viewpoint. Austin’s mechanical interest is further evidenced in 2-dimensional works in which he uses subject matter to break the linear border of the substrate. His painting practice is grounded in realism with a nod to folk art. Chris layers elements within his paintings - intentionally overlooking volume and shadow and instead focusing on “the composition [and] the colors”. His minimalist approach encourages narratives to emerge that are left open for personal interpretation and musing. Recent exhibitions include Into Action at Resolution Studios in Chicago and With a Little Help From My Friends guest curated by Megan Foy and Julian Van Der Moere. “Art is expressing yourself. I know how to make good art.”

Raven Chacon is a composer, performer and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, Chacon has exhibited, performed, or had works performed at LACMA, The Renaissance Society, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Borealis Festival, SITE Santa Fe, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival, and Swiss Institute Contemporary Art New York. As a member of Postcommodity from 2009-2018, he co-created artworks presented at the Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, Carnegie International 57, as well as the 2-mile long land art installation Repellent Fence.
A recording artist over the span of 24 years, Chacon has appeared on more than eighty releases on various national and international labels. In 2022, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his composition Voiceless Mass. His 2020 Manifest Destiny opera Sweet Land, co-composed with Du Yun, received critical acclaim from The LA Times, The New York Times, and The New Yorker, and was named 2021 Opera of the Year by the Music Critics Association of North America.
Since 2004, he has mentored over 300 high school Native composers in the writing of new string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprenticeship Project (NACAP). Chacon is the recipient of the United States Artists fellowship in Music, The Creative Capital award in Visual Arts, The Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship, the American Academy’s Berlin Prize for Music Composition, the Bemis Center’s Ree Kaneko Award, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award (2022), the Pew Fellow-in-Residence (2022), and is a 2023 MacArthur Fellow.
His solo artworks are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum and National Museum of the American Indian, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Getty Research Institute, the University of New Mexico Art Museum, and various private collections.

Born in 1996, Joey Center was raised in the suburbs of Chicago and was a Chicago Studio artist until 2024. Center’s creative practice was primarily driven by the exploration of his various interests – guitars, classic cars, idyllic landscapes, and space travel. Working from both memory and carefully selected source imagery, his curious graphite drawings are both dreamlike and detailed. Particularly fascinated by iconic cars from pop culture, he cited the Back to the Future DeLorean, KITT from Knight Rider, and James Bond’s Aston Martin as influences. An avid fan of 90s rock and metal, Center played the guitar since he was seven; he usually practiced on a favorite Epiphone Les Paul or his late father’s red Ibanez.

Born in Evanston in 1991, Marcus Imani Kennedy now lives in Chicago. An avid fan of a wide range of music (especially Brazilian jazz, R&B, reggae, bossa nova, hip hop, and classic rock), he always listens to favorite radio stations while working in the studio. Kennedy often finds inspiration in the work of other artists, sometimes borrowing an initial approach but transforming and reimagining it through his distinct creative vision. His extensive, ongoing series of vibrant pattern-based works on paper has manifested as hundreds of abstract iterations, endless explorations within a certain set of guiding parameters. These velvety acrylic and oil pastel works reflect a sophisticated, intuitive sense of color and form.
“I came up with my own beautiful style. I get inspired by other artists’ work, like Tim Stone. I make it my own and put music into it. I listen to different music, it flows me. I hear a song on the radio (like 101.9 The Mix) and put the song into the artwork. It could be Chuck Berry, Jimmy Smith, Talking Heads. I do the outlines all the way around in pastel first. Shapes are dancing to the music. Then color just comes to my mind and I add paint. Dark colors and bright colors, a little bit of both. I’m pretty good at mixing colors. Painting takes a while, sometimes it takes a day or two. Sometimes it can take weeks. I use paint and pastel at the same time because it looks beautiful that way.”

Isabelle Frances McGuire (b. 1994, Austin, TX) lives and works in Chicago, IL. Select solo and two-person presentations include, Year Zero, The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2024); The First Machine, What Pipeline, Detroit (2023, with Nolan Simon); Loop, King’s Leap, New York (2023); Bailey Connolly and Isabelle Frances McGuire, Scherben, Berlin (2022); Dresses Without Women, Mickey, Chicago (2021); P**** B**** ARENA, Et al., San Francisco (2020, curated by Good Weather); From The Desk of Lucy Bull, Los Angeles (2020); and I’m a Cliche, Prairie, Chicago (2017).
Recent group exhibitions include A Prose By Any Other Name, Hans Goodrich, Chicago, IL (2025); My Story Gallery, High Art & Sister, Seoul, KR (2024); Artists Space, New York, NY (2024); Descending the Staircase, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL (2023); Multi-User Dungeon (MUD), Petzel, New York, NY (2024, curated by Simon Denny); and Tell Me What You Want, Bel Ami, Los Angeles, CA (2023).

Dave Muller (b. 1964, San Francisco, CA) creates paintings and installations that are rooted in his deep fascination with music, how it infiltrates and shapes our identities and the communal dialogue it generates across cultures. Tapping into shared poetic moments and a collective dialogue, Muller depicts the myriad iconographies of his musical obsessions—album covers and spines, vinyl records, tapes, CDs, bootlegs, B-sides, disco balls, record labels, set lists, rare and popular instruments—sounds of all stripes, musicians, and singers, both beloved and unknown.
Muller appropriates album art in a painterly style that is both whimsical and factual. The paintings are autobiographical and expressive; adoring as well as historically referential. He is careful to include details such as hype stickers, anachronistic price tags, and extinct record shop labels, always attending to age, use, wear, and tear. These paintings tell idiosyncratic stories of politics, subculture, and atmosphere that have morphed through eras and cultures.
Muller’s engagement with a widespread sonic landscape offers fertile ground for portraiture, fandom, revised history, and cultural critique. As both deejay and painter, the artist plays a curatorial role of selection and remix based on playful intersections of imagery, sensibility, and language. Muller often incorporates his paintings into large-scale environments with wall paintings, multi-part installations, and sound.
Dave Muller lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. His work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in the United States and abroad, including solo shows at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, León, Spain; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; and Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MI. His work is represented in the public collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others.

Sun Ra (1914-1993) was a pioneering musician, composer, arranger, and bandleader, a visionary thinker, and one of the architects of Afrofuturism. Corbett vs. Dempsey is honored to exclusively represent the non-music side of the Sun Ra Estate.

Micah Schippa-Wildfong, (b. 1977) BFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Writer, musician, interdisciplinary artist and independent researcher based in Chicago, US. Their work is a vapor that collects in the empty rooms where choreography, performance, film, sculpture, musicology, sociology, psychology, and poetics go to question themselves and undress; made naked in the service of tracing the morphology of social systems.

Lucy Walsh was born in Chicago in 1998. Most inspired by popular culture, her influences span television, fashion, music, fast food, and horror tropes. Particularly drawn to slasher films, she mentions It, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Friday the 13th as favorites. Walsh usually works quickly from memory and imagination, but will also sometimes incorporate elements from reference imagery. Accentuated by meandering lines that form organic shapes and vibrant, whimsical patterns, her paintings and drawings waver between abstraction and representational. Walsh often works in sketchbooks, preferring the portable format, with each representing distinct series of drawings. She also spends time writing fictional mystery/horror stories, citing Stephen King as an inspiration.
“I use pencils for drawing. These pencils I’m obsessed with – Ticonderoga. I’m literally obsessed.  I love Pop Art! Andy Warhol is my favorite.”