Out of Context

Opening reception: Friday, January 4, 2019, 5-8pm

Chicago Artists Coalition is pleased to present Out of Context, a HATCH exhibition with work by Elana Adler, Nora Chin, Haerim Lee, Wen Liu, Michael Moore, and Alejandro Waskavich. 

Out of Context presents artists exploring the presence, absence, and fragmentation of universally-known symbols and signifiers. Through the medium of painting, ceramics, sculpture, and installation, the selection of work takes visual tropes from America’s collective consciousness out of context to reveal the underlying meaning beneath the surface of everyday patterns and shapes. Representational imagery--from floral sculptural relief to silhouettes of human and nonhuman bodily forms--are placed alongside repetitive geometric grids and forms to uncover the power of abstracting the familiar.

The pieces by Elana Adler, Nora Chin, and Alejandro Waskavich document traces of the body through minimalist contours, interactive cubes, and painterly strokes. Adler’s stackable cubes invite the viewer to physically manipulate their orderly configuration, while Chin and Waskavich deconstruct imagery found in America’s mainstream visual culture to invoke feelings of nostalgia and bodily intimacy. The collection of work by Haerim Lee, Wen Liu and Michael D. Moore understand symbolism from a more metaphorical sense, using urban symbols of power structures, cross-hatched fences and borders, and representations of animal skin and shells to symbolize notions of spatial marginalization and otherness.

Together, the artists in Out of Context stretch the limits of meaning to locate new symbolic possibilities. They reveal the destabilizing effects of the loss of symbols and context to interrogate how we, as viewers, making meaning out of art, objects, and the living.    

Out of Context is curated by Sabrina E. Greig.