In "I’M HERE TO MAKE FRIENDS, part of Happy Collaborationists' 'Nostalgia' series, Aay Preston-Myint digs through eight years of friendships, roommates, lovers, spaces, and collectives to assemble a body of work for a "solo" show using collaboration as its foundation. This body of work explores the conceptual and ideological push-and-pull between ephemeral social practices and material-based, individual artistic practices, and then uses it as fodder for the artistic output itself. As the basis for working together, the artists navigate through the supposedly neutral territory of non-art objects commonly found in the apartment gallery (itself a site of nostalgia) - such as projection screens, pedestals, linens, furniture, and house plants. Infrastructures of domesticity, display, and performance are imagined as the ends, and not just the means, of aesthetic production. A consciously reductive, oblique approach reveals a tenuous grasp on shared experiences and identities, while at the same time providing new platforms (literal and figurative) on which acts of consumption, looking, posing/posturing, projection and reflection take place. More casually, the show could be described as a glorious failed attempt at visionary interior design and party planning. 

Aay Preston-Myint is an artist, printmaker, and educator based in Chicago, IL, and has exhibited nationally and internationally in San Francisco, Minneapolis, New York, London and Tokyo. He loves pie, and is less partial to cake, and similarly enjoys the beach, but not the ocean. He spends most of the day thinking about things like Futurity, Slime, Pageantry, Exploring the Possibility of Radicalizing Contemporary Queer Night Life, Chanting in Unison, Body Hair, Doubt, the Problematics of Aestheticizing Community and other notions of "Projects" vs. "Objects". In addition to his own work in interdisciplinary media, Preston-Myint does collaborative programming with No Coast and Chances Dances, and edits an online journal called Monsters and Dust. He might send you a mixtape sometime if you ask nice.