1431 W. Hubbard St., Ste. 201, Chicago, IL 60642
By advance appointment only. Please email contact@chicagoartistscoalition.org
12.19
In the mud and slush of opinion and tradition, the body becomes landscape and I become a transparent eyeball
Opening: Friday, Nov. 15, 2019 / 5-8pm
Holly Cahill Kushala Vora
Alexis Brocchi
In the mud and slush of opinion and tradition,
the body becomes landscape and I become a transparent eyeball
Holly Cahill and Kushala Vora
Curated by Alexis Brocchi
Nov. 15 - Dec. 19, 2019
Reception: Nov. 15, 2019, 5-8 pm.
Chicago Artists Coalition is pleased to present: In the mud and slush of opinion and tradition, the body becomes landscape and I become a transparent eyeball, a HATCH exhibition featuring work by artists-in-residence, Holly Cahill and Kushala Vora. The exhibition opens on Friday, November 15, 2019 with a reception from 5-8 pm.
With a common intensity to explore the way we see all things in the environment, close and far away, this exhibition is—at the root of it— about perceptions. Your perception, mine, theirs, and ours. Human developed ideas and culture often cloud the experience and influences of the natural world we all inhabit. The show’s title, made up of phrases pulled from the analyzation of Thoreau’s writings within A Philosophy of Walking by Frédéric Gos, hints at our mission to expose, blur, and converge the binary oppositions between nature and culture.
In the exhibition, In the mud and slush of opinion and tradition, the body becomes landscape and I become a transparent eyeball, Holly Cahill and Kushala Vora work in multidisciplinary ways to reclaim the senses, bodily and cerebral. Through small gestures each artist recovers nature, recovers biology, and recovers our ways of seeing in the face of present systems and structures. One common gesture is fiber-focused material explorations. With the desire to embed details and information in each weaving or stitch, the artists allow for a slowing down of the process of observation and create the possibility to cultivate a second sight.1 Cahill’s work is exploring other forms of consciousness and experiences of ecological effects through her studies and interpretations of the bird species, the starling. In this study, Cahill uses drawing, sculptural beings, and collage to explore patterns and ideas. In contrast, Vora’s work aims to expose the colonial influence on the dissemination of information in education systems while contemplating the fundamental acts of learning to name, compare, and valuate - cultivating our perceptions. Vora utilizes ethnographic footage, photography, film, drawings, and collected materials to remove the hierarchy of self and objects in the shared environment. Both artists rely on the fact that land and its inhabitants are the starting point —and— what we experience, we become.
1 Tactics for Not Knowing: Preparing for the Unexpected. By Emma Cocker.
Image: Kushala Vora, Can I be a tree in a forest in spirit...far from here, 2019, Hand-spun wool, cotton, plain and open weave, rust, terracotta, 28 x 44 in.
About Curators
Alexis Brocchi is a curator, arts organizer, and artist based in Chicago. By conducting research as a creative practice, she explores accessibility of information and the search for knowledge through nontraditional methods. The connecting thread of her practice is a desire to investigate systems of ideas and how they affect the world we inhabit. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Arts Administration and Art History from Columbia College Chicago. Brocchi is currently the Exhibitor Relations Manager at EXPO CHICAGO and Assistant Director at The Overlook. Most recently, she curated As gesture and co-curated EXPO CHICAGO's 2019 Override | A Billboard Project in collaboration with Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE).
About Artists
Holly Cahill is a Chicago-based visual artist (b.1976) working between painting, fibers, sculpture, and collage. Her process-oriented, sculptural abstractions gather impressions of natural phenomena that explore themes of biodiversity, transformation, and sensorial experience. Considering fabric’s foundational role in painting, she works with materials expansively combining strategies drawn from painting alongside various textile traditions such as quilting, shibori, and garment construction. As curator Dominic Molon remarks in New American Paintings, Cahill emphasizes “the medium’s fundamentally cloth based nature” to “question where a painting, a rug, a tapestry, and other textile based objects begin and end.”
Cahill received her MFA from the University of Cincinnati (2004) and a BFA from Syracuse University (1998). Most recently, her work has been included in exhibitions at Secrist|Beach, Hyde Park Art Center, 65GRAND, Epiphany Center for the Arts (Chicago, IL), Phillip J. Steele Gallery at Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design (Lakewood, CO), Eckert Art Gallery at Millersville University (Millersville, PA), and nationalmuseum (Berlin, Germany). She has been awarded residencies throughout the United States and Canada at Ragdale (Lake Forest, IL), Chicago Artists Coalition (Chicago, IL), Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), Banff Centre (Banff, Canada), and Ox-Bow (Saugatuck, MI), among others. Her work has been featured in several publications including LUXE Interiors + Design, New American Paintings, Chicago Tribune, and Inside\Within.
She is a former director and current member of Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago: an artist-run, non-profit, cooperative exhibition space. Cahill has curated exhibitions, often in collaboration with others, at venues such as Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Weinberg Newton Gallery, Mana Contemporary, The Glass Curtain Gallery at Columbia College (Chicago, IL), Satellite Art Show (Miami, FL), and Scotty Enterprises (Berlin, Germany).
Headshot: Tom Van Eynde
Image: Holly Cahill, Keystone, 2023, terra cotta, 7 ¼ x 6 ½ x 2 ¼ inches Draping from the wall: Mirrored path of many returns, 2023, natural dyes made from foraged weeping willow branches, dandelions, alder cones, bark, and oak galls; found and discarded chrysanthemums; collected onion and avocado skins; sourced madder, logwood, marigold, and cochineal, with iron mordant on cotton, silk, linen, and terra cotta pole, 175 x 36 ½ inches On the table and floor: Small Acts / Terrestrial Matters, 2023, terra cotta vessels with compost, plates and bowls with dried weeping willow branches and leaves, dandelions, bark, alder cones, oak galls, dried rose petals, and compost. Additional compost and more foraged and collected natural materials were added throughout the exhibition, Dimensions variable (photo by Tom Van Eynde)
(updated 2025)
Kushala Vora (b. Panchgani, India) is an interdisciplinary artist based out of Chicago and Panchgani. Kushala’s work explore the implications of the standardization of Time and Space on her body. She uses her voice to counter the often dehumanizing effects of our global societal polarization through an investigation of her cultivated habits. She does this by exploring the history of systems in education such as writing in notebooks and sitting on chairs, in relation to evidence of accumulation and change. Kushala received a MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She holds a post-graduate diploma in Modern and Contemporary Indian Art History and Curatorial Studies from Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Mumbai and a BFA from Tufts University/ The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her work has been exhibited at Museum of Fine Art, Nagoya, Japan; Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit; Mana Contemporary, Chicago; Harvard University, Cambridge among other places. She has been an artist-in-residence at Vermont Studio Center, ACRE Residency, and Søndre Green Farm.
