Anyone stepping into the Beverly Arts Center (BAC) during Video for Early Nights finds themselves drifting into a world where images do not simply play. They breathe. Screens flicker like living canvases. Sounds curl around corners. Shadows and color move with a rhythm that feels equal parts cinema, sculpture and lucid dream.
The exhibition, held at the Beverly Arts Center at 2407 W. 111th St. in Chicago, unfolds at the perfect moment in the year, when daylight slips away early and video art seems to glow with its own inner fire.
Curator Nathan Peck, an Evergreen Park native and Department Chair of Art and Design at Saint Xavier University, says the timing helps shape the show’s atmosphere.
“Video is working its way into a lot of shows, and that is a good thing,” he said. “Late fall and early winter are the perfect time for a video art show. With nightfall arriving sooner, the complexity of video art designs really stands out.”
Peck contributes work of his own, a series rooted in what he describes as dream machines, charting the surreal progression from inception to delusion. His pieces blend video, music, painting and sculpture in ways that feel handcrafted yet electric, grounded yet drifting just outside the familiar.
Across the gallery, visitors encounter a constellation of six artists, each shaping video into a different kind of experience.
Matthew Bulter, the intermedia artist from Iowa, takes digital storytelling apart and rebuilds it with emerging AI tools, blending human gesture and algorithmic logic into something both mechanical and oddly poetic.
Longtime collaborator and designer Justine Light brings a deeply personal energy into the space. For Video for Early Nights, she and Peck create four new video pieces together, drawing on her three decades in theater and opera design. Light’s career carries her from Chicago to San Francisco, New York, Baltimore, Paris, London, Bali and Prague before she finally settles in Washington, D.C., where she earns two Helen Hayes nominations and a Mary Goldwater Award for her designs.
“Each place allowed me to experience new styles of performing and designing and to incorporate it into my creations,” Light says. Known for her imaginative approach to historical fashion, she describes her work as often coloring outside the lines. While she thrives on collaboration, Light continuously searches for fresh ways to tell stories, whether through fashion shows, live performance or video art.
Saint Xavier University Art Professor and documentarian Nat Soti, of Chicago, explores the meeting point of graphic design and video. His pieces flow like visual essays, remixing identity, technology and rhythm.
Poland-born and Chicago-based artist and sculptor Edyta Stepien merges motion graphics with sculptural form, crafting work that feels at once organic and engineered. A faculty member in the art department at Saint Xavier University, she describes video art as a language without words and a different way of learning.
Interdisciplinary artist Juliann Wang contributes performance-rooted video works layered with movement, sound and shimmering imagery. Her pieces invite viewers to slow down and enter moments shaped by nature, philosophy and quiet emotional resonance.
Together, the six artists transform the BAC into something like a gentle, glowing dreamscape. It becomes a place where viewers are encouraged to drift, listen, tilt their heads, follow movement and question the sensations pulling at them.
The exhibition runs through the end of the year. The opening reception was held on Friday, December 6 and welcomed art lovers, curious wanderers and anyone ready to let moving images lead them somewhere slightly beyond the ordinary.
