HATCH Projects exhibition, Kissing in Heaven, brings to mind a perfect experience, a suspect fantasy that nevertheless sustains many of life’s efforts. The works on display focus on this tension between desire for the ideal and the material limitations which obstruct it.

Andy Roche uses video and lightboxes to examine both the comedy and the anxiety of the life cycle. Snow Yunxue Fu uses digital media in gesturing towards a higher reality, while utilizing technology and artifice to achieve that vision. Hideous Beast (Josh Ippel and Charlie Roderick) defy the rarefied status of art by performing and documenting the installation of the entire exhibition themselves. This direct handling of the artworks suggests how physical, tactile, and intimate processes counteract the purity of the ideal. Kissing in Heaven is curated by Allison Lacher, HATCH Projects Curatorial Resident.

Artist Bios

Andy Roche is an artist and filmmaker from Dubuque, IA, currently living in Chicago. His work has been exhibited in galleries and presented at film centers including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Kala Art Center, Berkeley, S8 Gallery, London, Roots & Culture Contemporary Art Center, Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois-Chicago, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival, among many others. Recently, his fiction has been published in Rough Beast Magazine, Berlin.

Snow Yunxue Fu is an artist who lives and works in Chicago. Her work approaches the subject of the Sublime using topographical computer rendered animation installation. She exams and interprets the world around her through virtual reality, where she draws a parallel to the realm of multi-dimensionality and the spiritual.

Fu has exhibited her work nationally and internationally including Chicago Filmmakers, Kunsthalle Detroit Museum of Contemporary Art, MoMA PopRally Online Screening, NURTUREart Gallery in Brooklyn NY, TEMP Art Space in New York, The Gallery C Space in Beijing, Prak-Sis New Media Festival in Chicago, Currents: Santa Fe International New Media Festival, Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago, West Village Art Gallery in Chengdu China, SIMULTAN Festival in Romania, and 9:16 Film Festival in Australia.

Fu is currently teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in both the Film, Video, New Media, and Animation Department and the Continuing Studies Department.

Hideous Beast is a collaboration between Josh Ippel and Charlie Roderick. Since 2004 they have worked organizing structured participatory events, publishing how-to manuals and most recently creating interactive sculptures and installations that examine survival culture.

Currently Hideous Beast operates out of Chicago, IL. Primarily working with non-commercial art spaces, they have exhibited work with a variety of artist-run spaces, galleries, museums and festivals nationally and internationally.

Curator Bio

Allison Lacher is an artist, educator, curator, and community arts advocate. She serves as the Visual Arts Gallery Manager at the University of Illinois Springfield (UIS); has previously held positions with the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh and the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art in Salt Lake City, and has been a grant panelist for the Illinois Arts Council Agency (IACA). She has exhibited extensively and is a previous recipient of the IACA Artist Fellowship Award. In 2013 she co-founded DEMO Project, an alternative contemporary exhibition venue, in partnership with UIS affiliates. Collaboration, alternative projects, and community engagement are at the forefront of her exhibition programming initiatives.

Programming

Kissing in Heaven: Artist ForumChicago Artists Coalition217 N Carpenter St.Saturday, May 912:00 – 4:00pm

Artists Snow Yunxue Fu, Andy Roche, and collaborative Hideous Beast present Kissing in Heaven: Artist Forum. The event will offer expanded insights into exhibited works through workshops, phone calls, exchanges and discussion. Kissing in Heaven is a HATCH Projects exhibition curated by Allison Lacher at the Chicago Artists Coalition.

12:00-2:00pm: Hideous Beast, Workshop

2:00-3:00pm: Andy Roche, Call 312-806-3240 Immediately

3:00-4:00pm: Snow Yunxue Fu, Sight, Seem, Slight