Urban Drama

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Urban Drama
June 13 - July 25, 2026

Volume Gallery
1700 W Hubbard St.
Chicago, IL 60622

Press Release

Volume Gallery announces Urban Drama, Joe Feddersen’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, opening June 13, 2026, from 3 to 6 p.m.

Working across woven linen baskets, blown and fused glass, and printmaking, Joe Feddersen, a member of the Colville Confederated Tribes based in Omak, Washington, brings together ancestral modalities with contemporary iconography to create work that reflects his lived experience. The multi-disciplinary artist speaks from a Plateau perspective—one that honors our inseparable connection with the landscape.

Feddersen’s visual language is exemplified by stylized outlines—abstractions of everyday figures rendered graphic, like signs. At first glance, his work might seem traditional, and in some ways, his approach is a continuation of ancestral artistic innovations, just as Plateau people wove slanted triangles to depict mountains or painted pictographs on stone, Feddersen uses the same economy of form to depict the scenery he observes today. Parking lots, power lines, and tire tracks appear alongside bear tracks, eagles, and snakes—each given equal visual weight, each acknowledged as a character in our environment. Nature and society are shown entwined—creating indexical and unromanticized portraits of the American landscape as it actually is, shaped by industrialization, land use, and ongoing human presence.

His precise linen baskets, a continuation of centuries-old Plateau “sally bag” designs, are renderings of our world—its conflicts, infrastructures, and ironies. Feddersen’s compositions are taken directly from the landscape: aerial views of parking lots, the sinuous path of a snake, the diamond geometry of high-voltage towers. The towers carry particular resonance for Feddersen, who understands them as monuments to dispossession—invasive structures on Indigenous land lost to bad-faith deals and flooding when dams were built. One recent basket, Wild Peaks, takes its name from an SUV tire brand, its tread abstracted into repetitive forms that read like a mountain range; the imagery’s double meaning is a wry commentary on the idealized vision of the American West that consumer culture sells back to us. Additional recent pieces show protesters and ICE agents, urgent depictions of ongoing conflict and resistance. Protesters drawn with heads of affinity animals document gatherings in the small town of Omak, the cast of characters acting as a pictorial record of a moment in history.

Feddersen’s glass vessels are blown and then sandblasted with the artist’s signature symbology—trucks, bicycles, and animals are layered over subtler, weaving-like patterns etched beneath. Feddersen’s large-scale Charmed glass installations combine several ideas: a petroglyph wall, a wind chime, and a charm bracelet. Hundreds of clear fused-glass pendants, ranging from four to ten inches each, hang suspended across the wall, casting shifting shadows that animate the space around them. Feddersen’s Charmed pieces portray a teeming crowd of moments from our surroundings, in this latest iteration, cars and trucks mingle with protesters and buffalo.

With a long-time background as a printmaker, Feddersen thinks in layers across his practice. His Urban Drama monoprints are painterly and energetic, incorporating spray paint and collage. High-voltage towers are reduced to pure geometry, explored through reversals of positive and negative space and Pop-like repetition. Feddersen’s decades of experience in the medium are evident in the assured, direct, and indirect application of color and labyrinthine pattern.

At the heart of Feddersen’s practice is a commitment to observing, documenting, and storytelling. Viewing making as an act of reciprocity with the earth, he documents a landscape shaped by history, industry, and survival. With a finely tuned sense of humor, his work reminds us that the marks we leave on the land are all part of the same ongoing story.

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June 13 - July 25, 2006