Polyrhythmic presents The Weight of Last Night’s Dream and Other Expressions, the second solo exhibition by Chicago-based artist Demetrio Maguigad, featuring nine new paintings on view October 9 through October 30, 2026, in Polyrhythmic Gallery 407.

The exhibition centers on Maguigad’s ongoing series The Weight of Last Night’s Dream, which examines the threshold between subconscious and waking experience — the liminal state in which the residue of dreaming continues to exert pressure on conscious life. Across these canvases, Maguigad inverts pictorial gravity: dense chromatic masses hover in the upper registers while warmer forms dissolve below, giving material form to a sensation familiar yet rarely depicted — the weight of what sleep leaves behind.

Maguigad works in acrylic with charcoal and graphite drawn directly into the painted surface. His process is iterative and intuitive: compositions are repeatedly painted over, with earlier states left legible as texture, so that each finished surface retains the history of its own making. The series is presented alongside a selection of automatic paintings — works executed through gesture and immediate response rather than premeditated design — that extend the exhibition’s central inquiry: how form, like life, holds itself together through constant change.

The question is a personal one. In 2024, a near-death experience returned Maguigad to painting after a three-decade career in design and community-centered creative practice. The resulting body of work is guided by the artist’s working belief, “life is love holding itself together.”

Demetrio Maguigad is an artist, designer, composer, and strategist based in Pilsen, Chicago, with ancestral roots from the northern Philippines. His interdisciplinary practice spans painting, publication, music, and civic engagement. The Weight of Last Night’s Dream and Other Expressions opens Polyrhythmic’s Fall 2026 season, which continues with exhibitions by Kyung Soon Cho in November and Sol HM in December.

The opening reception is free and open to the public. Following the reception, the exhibition may be viewed from 10am to 3pm Monday thru Friday by appointment only.