Cho Gia Đình: For Family
Thương Hoài Trần
June 10 - July 3, 2024
Exhibition Statement
Cho Gia Đình: For Family is an exhibition by Thương Hoài Trần that utilizes personal photographic archives to explore the narratives of being a Vietnamese American immigrant. The phrase “cho gia đình” directly translates to “for family” in Vietnamese. This exhibition is in honor of the artist’s family while offering a glance into the intimate details of their lives, culture, and experiences in the United States. Celebrating and attempting to recover unspoken histories of family lineage, while speaking to the hardships of displacement and cultural disconnect of growing up in a country they were unfamiliar with.
Pathways Through Printmaking
Instituto Gráfico de Chicago (IGC)
May 6 - May 31, 2024
Exhibition Statement
The Instituto Gráfico de Chicago (IGC) is dedicated to maintaining the critical activist tradition of Latino printmaking that unites communities of struggle around the world. We are inspired by the socio-political art of Mexico's Taller de Grafica Popular (The People's Print Workshop) and use our art as a platform to inform and generate community discourse about urgent social issues. We believe that art is not separate from public life.
IGC advances the legacy and vitality of printmaking by fostering collaboration and solidarity amongst print artists through transnational dialogue and art-making. We also create programming outside formal education settings that celebrates and demystifies printmaking techniques and processes for the public.
To date, IGC has hosted eleven years of Grabadolandia. Grabadolandia creates an atmosphere that inevitably inspires participants to engage in printmaking as a social force. A series of activities that include an international portfolio exchange and community workshops make up the three-day printmaking festival. The collective has also produced five international portfolio projects.
Settling Through the Palm
Mariel Harari
Feb. 19 - March 15, 2024
Exhibition Statement
Settling Through the Palm is a solo exhibition featuring Chicago based artist Mariel Harari.This exhibition addresses how memory lives in us. The exhibition is an immersive landscape that embodies sifting through stored memories to ask what nuance can be recovered under hindsight or bias and how can this uncovering help to process the past and in turn build more agency in the present.
Delicate and Filled with Dynamite
Aaron S. Coleman
Jan. 15 - Feb 9, 2024
Exhibition Statement
Delicate and Filled with Dynamite is about the past, yet it still embodies the present. Aaron S. Coleman’s exhibition is about how wounds from injustice can be transformed into a vehicle to transport those inflicted with scars into a better future, or at least a more hopeful one.
This vessel is constructed with discarded basketball court flooring from the gym at the Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis campus. This basketball court's eventual location was in downtown Indianapolis, and the construction and development of the city's downtown area displaced a massive and vibrant Black population. Coleman rebuilds from the pieces of disruption and displacement while bringing attention to the pervasive acts of racial injustice. The boat is adorned with the remnants of an abandoned playground found on Coleman’s property, a memorandum to childhoods lost.
A Gallery of Galleries
Frank Trankina
Oct. 30 - Dec 1, 2023
Exhibition Statement
"Gallery of Galleries" is a solo exhibition of Frank Trankina’s oil paintings. In this new series, action figures, statuaries, and dolls become viewers of abstract and figurative paintings that tower over the toys in the picture plane, and occupy a variety of gallery spaces. These exhibition halls are a layer removed and shifted in context with their mass produced miniature figures as consumers. What is on display is not only the work on the walls but the viewers themselves. The playful figures in many of these works are a stand in for us as gallery visitors.
Tranifestations Un:cover :: Re:member
Olly Greer
Sept. 29 - Oct. 20, 2023
Exhibition Statement
Tranifestations is a solo exhibition/installation by Olly Greer. Within the space, care is a medium, and trans magic is honored through Olly's menagerie of materials. Their installation saddles joy on top of grief and melts it back into joy through a cycle of un:covering and re:membering. This work is made by trans hands for trans folx, while all are welcome to come feel the glow and take time to be enveloped by this inward turning space titled on a very gay axis.
Holding Heavy Objects
Maddie May
June 5 - June 23, 2023
Exhibition Statement
"Holding Heavy Objects" magnifies the emotional residue of Midwest lower-class households as seen through everyday items. Objects take on life, expressing intimacy, domesticity, turmoil, and discomfort.
Ideas of childhood and personal memories act as starting points that speak to forced cycles of addiction and fear. The works in this exhibition consider what remains in the aftermath of domestic grief and violence.
Lies, Legends and Lines on Land
Salvador Jimenez-Flores and KC Weldon
May 1 - May 26, 2023
Exhibition Statement
Salvador Jiménez-Flores and KC Weldon critique the idea of borders, barriers, and lines drawn in the sand through ceramics. Having different yet similar rural upbringings, the two artists challenge stereotypes, question histories, and comment on social/political climate through their work. Using stories informed by their own cultural identities, both artists create work that reflects on the power dynamics of religion, race, gender. Jimenez-Flores draws from his hometown in Mexico and experience as an immigrant, while Weldon pulls from her childhood below the bible belt and experience growing up in a rural church community.
UNADRESSED
Nichole Maury
February 27 - March 24, 2023
Exhibition Statement
In Unaddressed, Nichole Maury’s prints and drawings are excavations into memory and an early personal history defined by residential instability. Childhood retreats into puzzles, coloring books, and academic exercises contribute to a visual toolset used to uncover and reconstruct history and home.
Our Garden Remains
Selva Aparicio
Nov. 7- Nov. 25, 2022
Exhibition Statement
Our Garden Remains is a solo exhibition by interdisciplinary artist Selva Aparicio that focuses on the ephemerality of life and the temporality of its vessels. Inspired by the lifecycles of living things and the rituals that inform birth, death, celebration, and mourning, Aparicio pushes back against the often-unyielding delineations between these phases to offer opportunities for more intricate explorations of purpose and longevity. Like codas in their own performances, the discarded materials she features shed light on the intricacies of time and the power of remembrance both individual and collective to offer alternative endings that transcend time and place.
"Our Garden Remains" invites viewers to consider the durability of memory and its ability to evolve in concert with its surroundings. The installation presents a tapestry of flowers and decorations collected from the garbage of cemeteries. Once intimate tributes gathered with care and imbued with the love, grief, and reverence of their curators, they quickly fade to anonymity, embodiments of the very fragility that necessitated their gathering. The pinwheels, teddy bears, and other nonorganic tokens dotted throughout amplify these inextricable messages of mourning and celebration that together resonate more deeply than could any one piece alone. Like the notes of a great coda, these tributes resonate, fade, and blend together to bring closure to a sweeping movement of moments. I miss you. Happy birthday, mom. Forever in our hearts.
Where She Comes From
Ashwini Bhat, Janhavi Khemka, Neha Puri Dhir, Falaks Vasa and Kushala Vora
Curated by Pia Singh
Oct. 3-28, 2022
Exhibition Statement
"Where She Comes From" traces the corporeal experience of five femme artists from India, with varying degrees of connection to America. Questioning the material and ideological place from 'where' they take their stand, works on view explore the nature of being in-between two, embodying the ‘both/and’ while acknowledging the fractured, precarious nature of state and social hegemonies.
Collectively navigating spatiotemporal relationships in relation to identity, the artists research culminates in forms of writing, sculpture, photography, textile, performance and video, creating a bio-psycho-social terrain where viewers are asked to step away from anthropologizing the (former) third-world female figure. As the effects of environmental racism and colonialism continue to unjustifiably impact bodies of color, how can we bear witness through the metaphysical, mythological, spiritual, and ecological frameworks s/he relates to? Could s/he be a site beyond gender, a diviner between past and future? Is s/he an embodiment of radical hope and dissonance, or a site between the speculative and the scientific?
See, Shade, Shape
Monika Plioplyte
Aug. 22-Sept. 25, 2022
Exhibition Statement
Monika Plioplyte is presenting a collection of drawings, prints, and collages -- a body of work that began developing during Covid lockdown in 2020 as a way to respond to recurring but blurry fragmented bits of her dreaming mind that were defying all narrative logic, trying to make sense of the bizarre and uncertain pandemic reality. Daily, she began to obsessively create patterns out of inkblots by folding paper over and over again. The resulting drawings became a material for mixed media collage works which were arrayed around and created on her studio floor. Thinking about symbols, the body, the striking symmetry of inkblots, and the various interpretations they conjure has led Plioplyte to playfully invent her own interlanguage that communicates through an accidental code, whether it's the unexpected expressions of inkblot, or her own body as a sigil. Her daily walking meditation around these pieces on her studio floor connected to her ongoing interest in ancient labyrinths that were believed to trap malevolent spirits or act as defined paths for ritual dances; which resulted in her own type of labyrinth-like installation.
The poem incorporated in this exhibition is from the publication "The Inkblot Record" by Dan Farrell published by Coach House Books in the 2000s. Monika discovered this poem around the same time she began creating the inkblot drawings and has turned to this poem frequently over the past few years for inspiration.
