Garry Noland, Plan-O-Gram, No. 18, 2026

Material is pleased to present Loot Box: New/Recent Works On/Of Paper, Kansas City-based artist Garry Noland.

The exhibition centers on the Plan-O-Gram series, combining acrylic, latex, baking soda, spray paint, and non-skid tape on paper. Materials sourced from hardware stores, supermarkets, and the residue of daily life. In Noland's hands, the industrial and the domestic become equal players in a formal language that is rigorous without being rigid, systematic without foreclosing surprise.

The title Loot Box evokes accumulation, randomness, and the surprise of contents unknown until opened: a fitting frame for a practice built on chance arrangements and the discovery of meaning through proximity. Each work proposes an answer and immediately complicates it, layering collaged printed matter beneath brushed and sprayed surfaces so that the past is never fully buried, only renegotiated.

Noland's process is openly attentive to chance. He speaks of rough patches, glitches, and mistakes not as aberrations to be corrected but as events to be read: moments where the material asserts its own logic and the artist must decide whether to follow. The resulting works carry this history of negotiation visibly. Edges are sites of meaning. Seams do not close. The surface remains a record of decisions made and unmade.

This is a painting that thinks about what it means to be next to something: in a composition, in a room, in a world. Noland's long-standing commitment to a multi-disciplinary practice, encompassing drawing, printmaking, collage, and object-making, informs the density of these works even when the gesture appears simple. Nothing here is incidental. Everything has been placed, however lightly, with the understanding that placement is already an argument.

The exhibition takes its cue from Noland's own articulation of art's role: to find the mundane in the grand and the grand in the mundane. Loot Box is neither modest nor monumental. It occupies the charged, uncomfortable space between those two conditions, which is precisely where the most interesting looking happens.

Material Exhibitions is a not-for-profit artist-run project space that is located in the storefront, adjacent to my studio. Since 2019, Material has hosted between 3 and 5 Solo Exhibitions per year.

It is a space where a body of work by an emerging or mid-career artist can be thought through from inception through exhibition, and finally into the afterlife it will have in its various forms of documentation.

I have deep gratitude to people who support artists by collecting their work, as well as my fellow Artist Run Project Spaces around Chicago. I am also grateful to my spouse, Mark, and my kids, Ivy and Basil, who have helped in countless unseen ways to keep this space going.

The Material/Artist split is 30/70, during the run of an exhibition, and for the few objects that remain in our Works Available section.

The artists, curators, and material work together in a cycle of mutual charity. My hope is that their ideas and creations expand our community and deepen the appreciation of the artist and their work.

With gratitude,
Jean Alexander Frater

Material Exhibitions
2025 West Belmont Ave, storefront
Chicago, IL 606183