A cavalcade of sensations assaulted me the moment I entered Twelve Ten gallery: hollow-bodied ragdolls met my eyes, and all I could hear were the vaguely organic noises emanating from a video installation in the corner. (Something like a repeated retching sound backgrounded by zombie-like atonal snippets. Blergh.) My usual question upon entering an exhibit—do I like this?—was absent, along with the rest of my base mental faculties, and replaced by a needy, estranged twin—what the hell is going on here? Twelve Ten’s diligent gallery attendant and founder, Joshua Johnson, would provide more than enough information to clue me in on the show’s nuances, but the cacophonous introduction I received can’t be put out of mind: any look back at “Brain Worms” must acknowledge that its fundamental pitch is hysterical.

         Twelve Ten’s space is smaller than most, likely due to its location in affluent Edgewater, but this is no constraint upon the remarkably economical exhibits it hosts. “Brain Worms” couples the work of Keith Tilford and Pieter Schoolwerth, a pair whose euphonious names fail to betray their utter antipathy for classification. (I imagine them as obstinate as Donald Judd, refusing to call his steel works “sculpture.”) Calling Schoolwerth a painter wouldn’t be quite right, as that label implies a greater deal of…well, painting. And Tilford, who in simpler times would be dubbed a comic artist, has engaged in too many serious forays into artificial intelligence’s creative power for that label to approximate his output. This is a show of two artists, sure, but first and foremost, programming nerds and philosophers. 

        Schoolwerth, a St. Louis-born technocrat, has in the past expressed interest in the way “certain people come off so differently when you e-mail or text with them, or how their personality appears on digital platforms as opposed to when you speak with them in person.” Ditto for his paintings, whose serial-killer psyche bears no resemblance to the staid scholar who writes his artist’s statements. His process is circuitous and, in part, incomprehensible to Luddites like myself who believe that the best painting takes place when paintbrush meets canvas. Forget the means, the end speaks for itself: a flat layer (produced using an Inkjet printer) consisting of mutilated, pathetic bags of computer-generated flesh, over which Schoolwerth has limned some bubbling flourishes.

         I don’t know what these paintings do. Schoolwerth’s self-assessment, which hails each one as “an analog sculpture that lurks beneath capitalism’s seductive, lifestyle-producing illusion of dematerialization” doesn’t get past the first hump: after constructing his idols to anti-consumerism, he sold them to the highest bidder. Schoolwerth’s facture is kin to Francis Bacon’s—loopy, sensuous, chock-full of self-loathing. But discontent with Bacon’s misanthropy—it often feels as if Bacon wanted to kill his subjects—Schoolwerth wants to kill painting itself. (And, while he’s at it, to make a fine penny for himself.)

        Schoolwerth’s apocalyptic profiteering would be easy to dismiss if it didn’t look so damn good. He’s a neoclassicist at heart, employing precise compositional tools and borrowing reliable cynosures from the movement’s masterpieces: Schoolwerth’s two featured canvases include a white-skinned kingpin who bears resemblance to the facilitator of Jacques-Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii and a writhing supine figure redolent of Brook Watson in John Singleton Copley’s masterwork, Watson and the Shark. Schoolwerth knows they look good, and like an academic weapon failing tests to be transgressive, he uglies them up as much as he can. It seems this motive also inspired him to work with animator Phil Vanderhyden and sound designer Aaron Halloway to make the phantasmagoric installations (based on his paintings) which greeted me upon entering the gallery. I want to dislike Schoolwerth, but that’d be giving him what he wants—for now, I’ll listen to the awed part of myself, letting his paintings’ everything-all-at-once pulse wash over me as their arrangement leaves me shell-shocked.

        Though Keith Tilford shares many of Schoolwerth’s interests—primarily, the way technology encodes the humanity of its users and creators—retinally, the two are ships passing in the night. Tilford is a product of the nineties and a self-styled “Marvel Kid” who first dabbled in making comics himself three years ago with the oddball narrative Chronosis—more of a philosophical manifesto than a one-thing-after-the-next story. In it, a primordial figure dons a “panoply of masks”—layers and layers of appearances with nothing real at the center. (It’s similar to Baudrillard’s simulacrum, only that Tilford is lucid and didactic—virtues foreign to abstruse Baudrillard.) This world of things but no things-in-themselves is neatly conjured by his installation at Twelve Ten. It comprises a series of spindly, organic blobs, each of which is accompanied by many AI recompositions. While Tilford’s drawings undoubtedly inhabit a world other than ours (you know, the kind with speech bubbles and text boxes), his supernatural sinews are brought down to earth by the glossy AI renderings. In being reified, the drawings become dead shells of their former selves. The magic is gone. It’s refreshing to see AI being dragged through the mud like this. What’s usually presented as an impartial, generative wellspring is shown here in clown makeup: uninspired and outmoded, just another assembly line in a world already obsessed with production. Tilford runs the risk of stating the obvious—it’s become dogma among the laity (myself included) that generative AI fundamentally lacks “humanity,” and for this reason will never rise to the level of its creators—but seeing his drawings next to their AI counterparts made the gap between human creativity and the machine learning algorithms which imitate it appear more cavernous than toying with ChatGPT ever could.

        All in all, an impressive show by two artists of opposing temperaments—one nattering away while the other throws punches and kicks. The upshot leaves you constantly on guard, unsure if you should be wowed or disgusted. Sure, we can expect more revelatory insights from Schoolwerth and Tilford down the line, but the real star of the show is Joshua Johnson, who, in his first months of owning a gallery, and with a fraction of the square footage held by the Richard Grays of the Chicago art world, is employing first principles to red-hot effect. Keep an eye on Twelve Ten.

        Charles Venkatesh Young is a Chicago-based journalist of the arts interested in fusing art theory with bodily experience. He has contributed to the New Art Examiner, Chicago Reader, Newcity, and Whitehot Magazine.