Visual Art Culture of Chicago and Beyond
The works on view serve to memorialize the many lives lost, allowing space and resources to mourn those individuals, and to process both the dark histories of the United States as well as the bold acts of resistance. Hopefully the exhibition moves visitors beyond rage or grief or empathy into action.
Though the aesthetics of each artists’ work are contradictory, they are united by their undeniable feat of endurance.
In Chavis’ work, Black queerness cannot be contained to neat and orderly portraits.
Ailes and Lopez’s installations, images and sculptures function as a cosmos of life—worlds where the viewer is placed in a disordered exercise of cognitive sense-making between rather than sense-making of.
As the kitchen appliance referenced in the exhibition title signals, these artists seem to share an interest in—and perhaps anxiety about—domestic spaces and the rituals that occur there.
“Composed Under Compression” feels like playful, gleeful, and quick-witted recovery theater.
Pacheco makes abstracted sculptural work and masterful functional objects, experimenting with both soda and wood kilns.
One can either assimilate or rebel but, as the film ambiguously argues, more often one will have to do a little of both.
Something is coming to an end. And in Frey’s work, that end is vital.
On view is a new series of drawings, in which Young attempts to recreate a photograph from memory of his great grandfather standing with a horse, a continuation of a larger project, in which Young is learning how to ride a horse so he can recreate his great grandfather’s migration by horse, from North Carolina to Pennsylvania.
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