Spontaneous Remarks

Chicago Artists Coalition is pleased to present Spontaneous Remarks, a HATCH exhibition with work by Marie Baldwin, Kate Conlon, Bobby Gonzales, Olivia Petrides, Erin Smego, and Matthew Wead.

Spontaneous Remarks embraces chance-based and sequential programming processes as a strategy in opening up dialogue around what a curatorial framework could look like. Revealing a snapshot of the group’s unconscious reality, the show draws on elements from the Surrealist parlor game, Exquisite Corpse. The game requires participants to write/draw on a sheet of paper, fold to conceal their contribution, and then pass to the next person. In continuing with the elements of objective chance, play, and spontaneity, the artists have been paired up at random to cumulatively present their works over the course of three consecutive openings. Challenging the static notion of exhibition-making, this process aims to highlight the ways in which relationships between artworks evolve and become increasingly complex over a continuum of time and space.

The Surrealists understood reality as something that was rooted in the unconscious mind. Although the artworks are formally disparate, with media that include: sculpture, textile, painting, and photography, the exhibition aims to expose hidden possibilities that are underpinned by a shared unconscious reality. Rather than impose one overarching thematic connection between works, relationships are formed in an un-premeditated way. This approach allows for seemingly uncanny, absurd, and sometimes strikingly cohesive connections through occurrences between form, color, texture, and thematics. With concepts ranging from the deconstruction of fashion trends and pop culture icons to the grandeur of nature and scientific investigation, the six artists’ works converge in this moment to weave together a narrative that defies the predetermined modes of canonized exhibition-making and takes pleasure in aleatoric composition.

Spontaneous Remarks is curated by Courtney Cintron.