its own pristine devices
Lois Bielefeld and Marzena Ziejka
January 9 - February 28, 2026
Reception: Friday, January 9, 5 to 8 p.m.
Artist Talk: Saturday, January 17, 2 p.m.

Essay: its own pristine devices,  by Caitlin Quintenz

Exhibition inventory and price list

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The United States interstate system spans 46,876 miles of highways. Discreetly tucked alongside the many on and off-ramps are small patches of wild, untended land. These “freeway islands” mostly go unnoticed, but they are intentionally designed and positioned to function as drainage areas. 

 

During travels across the country while attending the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), artist Lois Bielefeld became captivated by these overlooked landscapes. Amid exhaust fumes and concrete expanses, Bielefeld observed thriving pockets of life—miniature biomes existing at the edge of human dominance. Her photographic series, its own pristine devices, documents these spaces at night, when the line between human-made environment and natural habitat blurs. Street lamps resemble moonlight; a fox slips past a semi truck; the ordinary becomes cinematic. The images reveal intimate moments of survival and beauty within heavily trafficked locations.

 

Each image in the series is titled with corresponding ramp number and location, guiding the viewer on a journey through seasons and terrain. Large-scale, unframed prints, with velvety blacks and deep blue skies, quietly reveal private dramas: a glowing young pine tree under tangled vines, giant snowflakes creating storybook wonder, a blossoming thistle almost operatically radiant in its hidden glory. A related video work employs an endoscopic camera to explore other concealed natural spaces.

 

Bielefeld is joined in this exhibition by Chicago based artist, Marzena Ziejka, whose interdisciplinary work cultivates memories of her agricultural roots in Poland. Ziejka builds sculptures out of common plants. Her working materials — a bundle of Oak leaves, a mound of egg shells, pine needles, or Hawthorn branches — stay close to their points of origin while gently morphing into sculptural objects. Ziejka’s reverence for these organic materials parallels Bielefeld’s explorations of the overlooked and in between.

 

Together, the artists blur boundaries between the manufactured and the wild, asking: ‘What counts as nature? What deserves our attention? What thrives in the spaces we pass without seeing?’ Their works offer a hopeful proposition that the more we notice, the more we might value and preserve.

 

Lois Bielefeld - bio

Lois Bielefeld is a queer, series-based artist working in photography, audio, video, and installation. Bielefeld earned an MFA at California Institute of Arts in 2021 and a BFA from New York’s Rochester Institute of Technology in 2002.

 

Their work is in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles Art Museum (California), Milwaukee Art Museum, Rochester Institute of Technology (New York), Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art (New York City), Museum of Wisconsin Art (West Bend, WI), Saint Kate Arts Hotel (Milwaukee, WI), The Warehouse Museum (Milwaukee), The Racine Art Museum (Wisconsin). Bielefeld has shown at the International Center of Photography in New York City, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, de Young Museum in San Francisco, and the Saint Kate Arts Hotel. A limited edition exhibition catalog, “to commit to memory,” is in the collections of Center for Book Arts in New York City, Los Angeles Contemporary Archive in LA, Getty Research Institute Library in LA, the Walker Arts Center Library in Minneapolis, and the Museum of Modern Art Library in NYC. A video, Thank you Jesus for what you are going to do was selected to be a part of The Outwin American Portraiture Today exhibition at The National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C  (2022). Bielefeld won Mary Nohl Fellowships in 2012 and 2018.

 

 

Marzena Ziejka - bio

Born in 1968  in Tarnow, Poland, where she attended the State Art School and later graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow with a Masters in Sociology. She worked for 11 years as a professional weaver of tapestry, then in 2000 she immigrated to the United States where she worked as a painter, graphic designer, and illustrator. In 2010, she returned to weaving and widened her practice to other techniques involving a variety of natural materials. She resides in Chicago and maintains a studio at Mana Contemporary.