Adrienne Elyse Meyers pursues the haunted and unanswerable, communing with fleeting figures and uncertain spaces. Growing up in the woods of rural East Texas has provided her with grounding in the silent, the spiritual, and the strange, which continues through her work. Sources including literature and personal experience are woven into her practice.
Chichan Kuang makes “dumb” art that is against interpretation. Art making has long been considered as a language in the visual form. The analogy of it goes that a language needs to be deciphered to be understood; therefore, the artist deploys symbolism in an artwork to give a grand message or narrative to the viewer. Chichan challenges this “smart” art making convention by creating an absurd yet confusing situation to suspend logic and to elicit an immersive experience.
Derek Ernster is a multidisciplinary artist interested in creating thick narratives from the banal bits and pieces of everyday life. The work is an accumulative process that allows objects, images, and characters to be represented through multiple formats and mediums simultaneously. The result is a repetitive, theatrical, and excessively embodied comedy with a dry insistence on reality.
Elise Putnam examines the ways in which institutions shape identity politics. As an artist and educator, Putnam is committed to expanding access to the arts to people of all ages, abilities, and backgrounds. Putnam makes large-scale drawings, inflatable sculptures, performative spectacle, and community workshops that encourage viewers to reflect on their positions within shared physical and cultural spaces.
Frances Lee makes diagrammatic paintings and wearable sculpture. She is interested in the social production and impact of personal anxieties. Using investigations into historical and contemporary forms of the modern state’s iconography she considers group belonging through uniforms, textiles, and flags. Through this work, Lee creates formal proposals or responses to how women participate in the workplace and political life.
Frances Mendes Levitin’s art-making practice incorporates scavenged materials into immersive installations and performances. Materials are recovered from her local environment and instrumentalized into audio-visual sculpture, projection, and sonic information. By re-engineering the materials, she finds, Levitin disregards consumer value systems and aims to elevate a material’s secondary and tertiary lives.
Takashi Shallow’s projects span across multiple mediums and cultures. For a long time now, it has been impossible for anyone or anything to adhere to a single domain. Literary Critic Miri Nakamura writes, “Numerous scholars have in fact pointed to the colonial condition as a kind of schizophrenia […] the colonial condition is to be always torn between the new ideologies upheld by the colonizer and the memories and the history that belong to one’s past.” The hierarchy present in this nationalistic narrative is also present in the arrangement of mediums within contemporary art. Shallow’s installations are explorations of simultaneous ancestral and material domains.
Zespo navigates between multiple cultural spaces. From his upbringing as a Mexican-American on the southwest side of Chicago, building rapport with local graffiti writers, to his training in academic painting, his work aims to bring together the different languages and codes he’s gained. Through a juxtaposition, he makes the complexities of identity visible to the audience.
