Modern to postmodern to post-postmodern, each movement in culture and specifically the arts feels stuck in a never-ending cycle of self-referential rejection and eventual adoption before the cycle picks up again to cannibalize the canon. The perpetual motion machine of style is an expected tradition at this point; experimentalism bounded by context that limits novelty bears the question: Will anything ever be truly new? Volume Gallery’s first show in its new space at 1700 West Hubbard toys with that question as they enter their latest era. Their showroom, now three times larger, is all but a continuation of their unique flavor that paves the road ahead with an understanding of the path that made their sculptural fixation possible. On view through March 28, “The Heresy of Legacy” examines artists working in the avant-garde of their time who have and will serve as stylistic key lines of the built environment. Full review here.

Multiple examples of such objects can be found in the group show The Heresy of Legacy, currently on view at Volume Gallery, which recently decamped to a new and larger location a few blocks from their old place in West Town. The exhibition title is a bit on the nose, but the experimental chairs are delightful. A 2003 riff by the late master woodworker Garry Knox Bennett jams Gerrit Rietveld’s “Zig Zag” with an old-school ladder back by literally inserting a miniature ladder into its seat back. Matt Olson/OOIEE takes apart an imitation Marcel Breuer “Cesca” then puts it together again, upside down and backwards, yet somehow still functional. Norman Kelley shows what happens when a roll-top desk and an armchair have a baby. Full article here.

“This fair is so conducive to conversations,” says Claire Warner of Volume Gallery from Chicago, as she stands in the gallery’s cabana suite, one of the prized spaces arranged around the hotel swimming pool. The gallery has shown at Felix since its launch in 2018; Warner says it was immediately apparent that the founders “were creating these situations where you can have conversations and have opportunities for community building”. Full article here.