Vesna Jovanovic: Carnival

By ESME GRAHAM December 12th, 2025

Carnival, an exhibition of recent work by Chicago-based artist Vesna Jovanovic, sees the fun inside our bodies. Stretching down a long lime-green floored hallway in the Hyde Park Art Center, the exhibition has the feeling of a hall of mirrors inside a fun house—if those mirrors could perform ultrasounds. Jovanovic’s process includes pouring diluted ink onto a type of synthetic paper made of polypropylene, resulting in eerie bodily shapes. The forms are reminiscent of three-dimensional renderings of the inside of an esophagus, an intestine, an organ. In Curtain Call, for example, the ink dries into a cavernous stomach-like shape, in Sour Gummy Challenge it seems to form four ventricles. These forms are incidental, as Jovanovic allows this fleshy red color to drip and dry where it may. She then paints atop them, letting the resulting shapes guide her interpretation.

Sour Gummy Challenge, 2023, ink and acrylic pen on polypropylene, 60 x 40 inches, image provided by the artist

Jovanovic sees the site of the carnival—particularly the medieval French carnival—as an equalizing one. There, signifiers of gender, sexuality, and class are obscured or transcended.  This leveling impulse is particularly potent in these anthropomorphic images, as all human bodies contain these fleshy spaces. The carnival is also, most importantly, a site of play. Hanky Streamer, for example, depicts a series of colorful knotted handkerchiefs that emerge from a dark orifice and trail down the frame, conjuring childhood scenes of magicians pulling them out of pockets or mouths. 

Hanky Streamer, 2023, ink and acrylic pen on polypropylene, 48 x 36 inches, image provided by the artist

Touch and sensation is foregrounded in Jovanovic’s amorphous, bodily forms. A blue and pink gummy worm covered in sour powder peeks out of a cavern in Pucker Up. Per the title, the sour candy on the exposed fleshy cranny elicits an inherent feeling of discomfort in the viewer, as if the gummy had been laid on their own tongue. Jovanovic also explores erotic sensation, as in front of a red-and-white striped big top background, a hole cut out in the bottom of Glory Hole perverts the classic face-in-hole board and invites the viewer to interact with this transgressive sexual space. Ball gags and butt plugs emerge from already suggestive fissures and tunnels. Outside of social mores, these taboo objects of pleasure can be incorporated frankly into the body.

Glory Hole, 2025, ink, vinyl paint, and acrylic on polypropylene with cutout hole, 36 x 24 inches, image provided by the artist

In the spirit of the carnival, Jovanovic evokes the mischievous energy of a jester. This impulse is illustrated quite literally in Trickster, in which two empty eyes stare out from an amorphous form, a bell dangling jauntily as if from a cap. Similarly, a bell hangs off the Joker, a literal “wild card” that is outside of the limitations of the four suits, who has taken on an identity in popular culture as Batman’s anarchic grinning archnemesis, who also operates outside of societal norms. There is a sense of underlying darkness in this fun house, as carnivals were where revelry and debauchery could rapidly devolve into depravity. In Pandora’s Box, while streamers and balloons spring out of a brown and purple striped box, a snake’s head and forked tongue crawl out from the bottom, an omen of the possible dangers of all this temptation.

Pandora's Box, 2025, ink, vinyl paint, and acrylic pen on polypropylene, 60 x 40 inches, image provided by the artist

Vesna Jovanovic 

Carnival

Hyde Park Art Center

October 11 2025 - February 15 2026