June 24 – October 10, 2025

No Place Like This is an exhibition of works by Minnesota artist Chris Rackley. 

“My sense of home was shaped by shopping malls. From the 1970s through the 90s, my father managed shoe stores for a company that owned retail locations in malls. As new malls were built, the shoe company opened more branches and sent him to run the stores. Our family would follow, moving from mall to mall across South Carolina and Georgia. 

Whenever the malls were open and I was not in school, I stayed there with my father. Between the ages of three and thirteen, I estimate I spent 70 percent of my waking hours inside a mall. Neither customer nor employee, I learned to entertain myself within spaces designed for commerce. Using stockrooms as my home base, I passed the long workdays by transforming the detritus of commercial transactions into material for creative play. I made drawings on the backs of inventory forms and built robots, spaceships, and forts using discarded shipping boxes. As the child of a manager, I was bestowed with a personal backstage pass to the mall. Traveling unhindered between storefronts, backrooms, and hidden hallways, I visited with employees at other stores when they were not busy with customers.

No Place Like This presents a series of works inviting viewers into my memories. The sculptures are handmade recreations of sections of the malls I called home. These miniature architectural fragments, constructed at different scales, also appear in the video works where they are enlarged to monumental size. Like disjointed memories that cannot be fully recalled, the variations in scale between the works, makes it impossible to combine the parts together into a cohesive whole. Although for some the works might elicit sentimentality over a declining cultural phenomenon, I challenge notions of nostalgia by including personal details that allude to my reclusive experience as a child.”  — Chris Rackley

Chris Rackley is a multidisciplinary artist based in Prior Lake, MN who integrates analog and digital media to explore the convergence of collective memory and personal narrative. Rackley’s current work draws upon his boyhood experience and addresses themes of displacement, isolation, and surveillance in the context of crumbling suburban utopias embodied by the structures of shopping malls. 

Rackley earned an MFA in Painting from George Mason University and a BA in Studio Art from Davidson College. He has widely shown his work at institutions including the DeVos Art Museum (Marquette, MI), Boston Cyberarts (Jamaica Plain, MA), Transformer (Washington, DC), and Badischer Kunstverein (Karlsruhe, Germany). Rackley’s solo exhibitions include installations at the Phipps Center for the Arts (Hudson, WI, 2023), Kolman & Reeb Gallery (Minneapolis, 2023), Ridgewater College (Willmar, MN, 2019), and the Rochester Art Center (Rochester, MN, 2015). Rackley is a recipient of a 2024/25 McKnight Fellowship for Visual Artists, funded by the McKnight Foundation and administered by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. His work has been financially supported by a grant from Kolman & Reeb Gallery (2023), a grant from Springboard for the Arts (2020), an Art(ists) On the Verge Fellowship from Northern Lights (2018 - 2019), and grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board (2022 and 2018).

Image credit: Going Outside to Play While Matt Throws Out Empty Boxes (detail), 2023. MDF, foam, acrylic paint, spackling paste, polystyrene, plastic, paper 14.25 x 24.25 x 26.75 inches

This exhibition is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.