Work by Mauricio López F., Gabriel Moreno, and Pablo Lazala Ruiz, curated by Serena JV Easton
*Artists and Curator are part of the 2025 CAC Residency Cohort
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Zombie gathers the practices of Mauricio López F., Gabriel Moreno, and Pablo Lazala Ruiz, tracing systems of extraction across borders, languages, and industries. Through objects dislocated from place: tools rebranded, images redubbed, machinery left to break down, the work returns again and again to the worker: the body that labors, rests, and is called back to labor before rest is complete. This exhibition sits inside the exhausted systems that are already obsolete but refuse to finish dying, creating the working dead: zombie here not a metaphor, but a diagnosis.
ARTIST AND CURATOR BIOS
Mauricio López F. is an interdisciplinary artist from Santiago, Chile, currently based in Chicago, USA. Emerging from Chile’s early hardcore punk scene, he later studied Musical Composition at Escuela Moderna de Música and earned a Bachelor’s degree in Aesthetics from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, where he focused on the Chilean avant-garde. He recently completed an MFA in Sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) on a merit full scholarship. His practice explores the entanglement of visuality, sound, and motion through unexpected social synchronizations. López F. has received several recognitions, including a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and a fellowship from The Arts Club of Chicago. He has been an artist-in-residence at the Chicago Artists Coalition, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, and, most recently, Monira Foundation. He was also named one of Newcity's Breakout Artists for 2026. His work has been presented throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia, including at Centro Cultural GAM, EXPO Chicago, Chicago Architecture Biennial, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Gallery 400, Kobun Gallery (Japan), and the Ars Electronica Festival (Austria).
Gabriel Moreno (b. 1992) is an artist working in sculpture, drawing, and collage. He believes sculpture is a language of “touch”: a poetic operation where two things meet and change one another. His work has explored American histories of meat packing, refrigerator manufacturing, and logging as ways into studying industry, fantasy, preservation, and its failures. Moreno’s primary investigation is the paradoxical destruction implicit in modern development and production. Refrigerators are sometimes used to house precious contents. Other times they are cut down into molds for casting. He relies on the immediacy of objects to hold together material operations of maintenance, presentation, splintering, and proliferation. Industrial artifacts and social propositions alike, these objects speak to the fantasy of defying entropy while admitting the impossibility of existing outside it.
Pablo Lazala Ruiz (b. 1992, Bogotá, Colombia) is a multidisciplinary artist, exhibition designer, and educator based in Chicago. He holds an MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), along with degrees in Architecture and Fine Arts from Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá). He recently participated in the SOMA Summer residency (Mexico City, 2026). His sculptural and installation-based practice examines the conditions that shape public and private space, probing ideals of progress, homogenizing structures, and the invisible systems of the built environment. Working with the rituals, (im)materialities, and temporalities of construction, he dismantles architectural rhetorics and creates spaces and stories grounded in concealment, camouflage, and impermanence. He has exhibited projects from his artistic and curatorial practice at venues including the National Museum of Mexican Art (Chicago), the Museo de Arte Miguel Urrutia (MAMU, Bogotá), Espacio Odeón (Bogotá), Galería SantaFe (Bogotá), Galería ArteCámara / Cámara de Comercio de Chapinero (Bogotá), Espacio Más Allá (Bogotá), The Wrong Biennale (Online/Bogotá), Elastic Arts (Chicago), Galería SGR (Bogotá), Liberia Central Contemporánea (Bogotá), Compound Yellow (Chicago), and the Jim Shields Gallery through the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.
Serena JV Elston is a transdisciplinary sculptor and curator contemplating the body and its relationship to structures of power. Her research-based practice explores ecology, posthumanism, disability, and embodiment through a post-colonial lens. Her work asks if an institution can disable bodies, can bodies disable institutions. Grappling with disability as identity and condition, she depicts figures in states of decomposition and incompleteness. In her work, the body is never singular; it extends beyond flesh to encompass the institutional, the architectural, and the ideological. She renders bodies as precarious material forms that are vulnerable, interdependent, and impermanent. Serena interrogates the illusion of immortality alongside the certainty of death, asserting that all bodies, whether organic or constructed, require care to endure. Institutions that appear eternal are, in truth, as fragile as flesh. Through sculptural inquiry, she exposes systems of power as contingent structures sustained by our unconscious participation and vulnerability. By materializing their instability, she invites viewers to recognize the impermanence of these systems as clearly as we recognize our own mortality.
ABOUT CHICAGO ARTISTS COALITION
Founded in 1974, CAC began as a small group of artists advocating for rights, support, and visibility. Currently located in West Town, CAC is a non-profit organization that supports contemporary Chicago artists and curators by offering a residency program, exhibitions, professional development and resources that enable them to live, work and thrive in the city.
Chicago Artists Coalition’s mission and programs are funded by City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, Driehaus Foundation, Field Foundation of Illinois, Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, Illinois Arts Council, Terry and Donna King, Nancy Herring and John Balfe, Statsinger Cohen Foundation, and the generosity of our board members and supporters.
