Survey 2
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Survey 2, 2021 at Chicago Artists Coalition. Photo: Robert Chase Heishman.
Survey 2 is a group exhibition featuring new works by HATCH 2019-2020 residents, and curated by Fabiola Tosi, Juelle Daley, and Stephanie Koch. The exhibition was presented at Chicago Artists Coalition from March 19, 2021 through April 29, 2021. Exhibiting artists included Katie Chung, Gericault De La Rose, Naomi Elson, Jazmine Harris, Ellen Holtzblatt, Julia Klein, Bryan LeBeuf, Juan Molina Hernández, Solomon Salim Moore, José Santiago Pérez, Joshi Radin, and Unyimeabasi Udoh.
On a planetary level, our world slowed on its axis, stunted by catastrophe, then it moved in spurts throughout the last year. Time disappeared, creating a warped sense of reality devoid of all things linear, thrusting many into a state of stasis, quietude, self-interrogation, and stillness. Survey 2 is a collection of artworks birthed under these circumstances and represents a triumph in rearticulating the fluidity of time and acceptancing impermanence. The exhibition asks the HATCH resident artists to reflect on and share the distinct ways they relate to time: How do you manifest the connection between process and object, both enduring and ephemeral? The artworks on view are symbolic permutations of the individual embedded with the artists’ relationship to the ephemeral.
On a planetary level, our world slowed on its axis, stunted by catastrophe, then it moved in spurts throughout the last year. Time disappeared, creating a warped sense of reality devoid of all things linear, thrusting many into a state of stasis, quietude, self-interrogation, and stillness. Survey 2 is a collection of artworks birthed under these circumstances and represents a triumph in rearticulating the fluidity of time and acceptancing impermanence. The exhibition asks the HATCH resident artists to reflect on and share the distinct ways they relate to time: How do you manifest the connection between process and object, both enduring and ephemeral? The artworks on view are symbolic permutations of the individual embedded with the artists’ relationship to the ephemeral.
Sleeping Aswang, Gericault De La Rose, 2021. Photo: Robert Chase Heishman.
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From left to right: Untitled #1, Untitled #2, Untitled #3, Salim Moore, 2021. Photo: Robert Chase Heishman.
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The work of Salim Moore disrupts historical timelines by implanting the Black figure within Greek mythology to retell stories from antiquity. In doing so, he challenges the ordering of history and pushes to establish Blackness as universal. Black presence embodied in his work obstructs a canon that renders these figures invisible throughout time. Similarly, Gericault De La Rose’s, Sleeping Aswang, represents a critical, historical revision that relates to the colonial relationship between the U.S. and the Philippines. Under the lens of her trans Asian-American identity, her performance takes on the appearance of a manananggal, creating a connection between this mythical creature used by Spanish colonizers to demonize women in the Philippines and the threatening perception of queer and trans bodies in contemporary society.Her performative resistance ‘holds space’ for the despised queer body that reposes in slumber, leaving behind only residues of presence.
Small Puddles, Naomi Elson, 2021. Photo: Robert Chase Heishman.
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Beaming, José Santiago Pérez, 2021. Photo: Robert Chase Heishman.
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Left: Remnants of a Loss Year (White-crowned Sparrow, Black-
capped Chickadee, Red-bellied Woodpecker, Dark-eyed Junco, Palm Warbler), Joshi Radin, 2020-2021. Right: Remnants of a Loss Year, Joshi Radin, 2020-2021. Photo: Robert Chase Heishman.
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Grounded, Julia Klein, 2020. Photo: Robert Chase Heishman.
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Echoes of residue find a foothold in the works of Joshi Radin, whose collection of molted bird feathers are the result of a reverential observation of nature. Through a newfound relationship to stillness, Radin developed a close relationship with her surroundings devoid of crowds. She collected feathers as a gift from a local park’s inhabitants and honored them by reinstalling them into their natural context as an act of care. The cyclical nature of existence that privileges change jettison us to the work of Julia Klein whose sculptural piece Grounded furthers the temporality of objects, their life span, and possibilities for reincarnation through her use and reuse of her previous artworks’ materials dating back over a decade, reassembling these forms to this final end.
So too, is the work Small Puddles by Naomi Elson, who repurposes materials deemed disposable. Fabric, resins, threads, and gloves come to life as an ensemble defying death in a trash heap and an antidote for hyperhidrosis. José Santiago Pérez’s Beaming lengthens time using plastic materials to allude to a permanence that may outlive humanity. Plastic and cerebral plasticity preserve, contain, and stave off lost memories newly reconstituted to live for an eternity, defying loss, decay and disappearance.care.
So too, is the work Small Puddles by Naomi Elson, who repurposes materials deemed disposable. Fabric, resins, threads, and gloves come to life as an ensemble defying death in a trash heap and an antidote for hyperhidrosis. José Santiago Pérez’s Beaming lengthens time using plastic materials to allude to a permanence that may outlive humanity. Plastic and cerebral plasticity preserve, contain, and stave off lost memories newly reconstituted to live for an eternity, defying loss, decay and disappearance.care.
Left: a salvo (safe), 2020. Middle: la sábila de mi madre, 2020. Upper right: sin título (untitled), 2021. Lower right: bendición (blessing), 2020. Juan Molina Hernández. Photo: Robert Chase Heishman.
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Field, Katie Chung, 2020. Photo: Robert Chase Heishman.
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Katie Chung’s Fields uses pins as a point of reference and measurement for the amount of time spent in familial proximity. It brings to life intergenerational dialogue and the fortification of family history. All one thousand pins reflect the intimacy of conversations between the artist’s Korean mother and grandmother. The colorful pinned landscape, like fields of grass, maps time, memory, and emotional closeness. The same is true for the photographic works of Juan Molina Hernández, whose Mexican grandmother takes center stage as the grand matriarch who blesses the familial sphere. Protective elements like plants create comfort and safety in an external world fraught with systemic danger and inequalities. They serve as emotional barricades behind which one can remain protected and possibly spared. Molina Hernández’s photos represent time spent together with family that is healing and restorative.
Left: Sketchbook During a Pandemic (selected pages), Ellen Holtzblatt, 2020-2021. Right: Until the Day Breathe, Ellen Holtzblatt, 2021. Photo: Robert Chase Heishman.
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Untitled (Black Hole), Unyimeabasi Udoh, 2020. Photo: Robert Chase Heishman.
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Ellen Holtzblatt’s Sketchbook During a Pandemic, from selected pages in her sketchbook, documents the art process of working through ideas and responses to the internal and external world. They respond directly to how much life changed in the last year and imprint a timestamp on the ethereal, a changing natural landscape and faces that dare us not to forget them. The large portrait of her 97 year old mother, Until the Day Breathe, testifies the lasting effects of the body devoid of human touch, intimacy, emotional and physical isolation. Jazmine Harris builds abstract landscapes constructed through the repetition of markings steeped in diagrammatic memory and a deeply spiritual process. Time slows and transforms into a meditative state.
Bryan LeBeuf’s Sad Game breaks open assumptions around mental health by offering emotional pathways inside a role-playing game. The sketches will eventually find permanent footing once programmed to become the game’s graphic elements. LeBeuf puts self-determination at the forefront as the game’s choices are plentiful. Players are offered freedom to empathetically explore nuances of the depressive and burnout state. In contrast, Unyimeabasi Udoh’s No Exit Sign makes allusions to choices evaporating, giving way to feelings of being trapped. Udoh writes the visual pun in their parents’ language, Annang, where the word ‘eyio’ means ‘no’. They toy with the viewer's psyche and evoke a sensibility of being ‘closed-in’ without an exit strategy. Their cross-stitch embroidery Untitled (Black Hole) represents a labor-intensive rendering of a short thought over a long period of time, an activity that the artist describes as both meditative and absurd.
Bryan LeBeuf’s Sad Game breaks open assumptions around mental health by offering emotional pathways inside a role-playing game. The sketches will eventually find permanent footing once programmed to become the game’s graphic elements. LeBeuf puts self-determination at the forefront as the game’s choices are plentiful. Players are offered freedom to empathetically explore nuances of the depressive and burnout state. In contrast, Unyimeabasi Udoh’s No Exit Sign makes allusions to choices evaporating, giving way to feelings of being trapped. Udoh writes the visual pun in their parents’ language, Annang, where the word ‘eyio’ means ‘no’. They toy with the viewer's psyche and evoke a sensibility of being ‘closed-in’ without an exit strategy. Their cross-stitch embroidery Untitled (Black Hole) represents a labor-intensive rendering of a short thought over a long period of time, an activity that the artist describes as both meditative and absurd.
No Exit Sign, Unyimeabasi Udoh, 2021. Photo: Robert Chase Heishman.
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Sad Game (variations), Bryan LeBeuf, 2020-2021. Photo: Robert Chase Heishman.
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Left: Untitled (Side A), Jazmine Harris, 2020. Right: Untitled (Side B), Jazmine Harris, 2020. Photo: Robert Chase Heishman.
Works by artists in Survey 2 vacillate between the temporary and the permanent encompassing all spaces in-between. They simultaneously attempt to construct and deconstruct the solidity of permanence, making time supple and complicating our perceptions of temporality as an elusive and intangible shape-shifter. The works in the show negotiate the timelines of the personal, familial and societal narratives, turning on its head the notion of finality or any suggestion of arriving at the end of a continuum. The artists redefine and manifest their own unfettered liminal space resisting societal propensity for linearity.