Chance Operations: Monoprints, Make Ready, Test Prints, and Artist Proofs

A group exhibition curated by Elizabeth Isakson-Dado

Signal Return, Detroit, Michigan, September 18-December 19, 2025

Chance Operations, or aleatorism, is a method of composing artwork that leaves a

portion of the design decision to chance. Letting go of control in the act of art making can

create new connections within a work, causing an image to be seen differently or a text to be

read in a new context.

As an exhibition, Chance Operations celebrates the anti-edition, an exploration of the

range printmaking can take when we eschew the perfect, painstakingly repeatable image and

honor the parts of the process many artists try to hide - the states, the proofs, the mechanical

press malfunctions, the fingerprints- and see the layers as a new composition, greater than a

sum of their parts.

Artists:

Melissa Dettloff (Detroit), Francisco Ramirez / Bureau Of Print (Milwaukee) Rachel Delmotte (Detroit),

Fatherless (Rockford, IL / London, UK), Maddy Underwood (Nashville / Athens, GA), Stacey Malasky

(Detroit), Angela Davis Fegan / Too Much Press (Chicago), Daniel MacAdam / Crosshair (Chicago),

Chris Fritton / The Itinerant Printer (Buffalo), and Arsenal Handicraft (Madison Heights, MI).

Curated by

Elizabeth Isakson-Dado / The Aquarius House