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.

Artist Bios

Elana Adler is an interdisciplinary artist whose work primarily focuses on questions of perception, signaling, and existence from both epistemological and ontological ways of thinking. Her process is iterative and illustrates the transition of thought through the transformation of object. Combining digital with analog craft techniques, she manipulates material in order to translate abstract concepts of space and time.

Nora Chin is a multi-disciplinary artist living and working in Chicago. She is interested in collective adolescent experiences and popular culture. Specifically, she in concerned with the adult experience of adolescence, or how we as adults unpack our coming of age. She focuses on nostalgic objects and expressions of tween and teen experiences made by adults in TV and movies. Her work has recently been featured at Tusk, Compound Yellow (via Limited Time Engagement), LVL3, the Logan Square Arts Festival, and Fernwey.

Haerim Lee (Rim Lee)’s artist practice is community-driven. Through photography, painting, and public mural, she attempts to create a dialogue with the community in a particular place. She researches the history of an architectural site—such as the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Chicago, Cabrini Green, and Gary Indiana— and use it as a raw material in her studio practice.

She is a South Korean artist living and working in Chicago. She graduated from the MFA Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Painting and Drawing Department. She had solo shows at Gallery Noone (2017) and Kasia Kay Art Project (2012) in Chicago, and Youngeun Museum of Contemporary Art (2012) in South Korea. She participated in groupshows including The Strange Fields of This City (2018), a HATCH Projects exhibition, The Art as Being Dangerous (2018) at the Hyde Park Art Center, The Body (2010) as a part of the Chicago Humanities Festival, Creature Comfort (2015), Compassion Show (2017), To Listen. To Speak. To Act. (2017) at the School of Art Institute of Chicago. She recently was awarded the Downtown Gary Public Art Competition from the Legacy Foundation (2017). She is currently a resident artist in Hatch Projects Residency at the Chicago Artists Coalition and a Center Center Program Artist at the Hyde Park Art Center.

Wen Liu was born in Shanghai, China and is currently based in Chicago. Wen Liu graduated with MDes in Fashion, Body & Garment from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. Her art covers multiple disciplines, drawing from her background in wearable art, fiber, and sculpture.

She recently received the DCASE 2018 Individual Artists Program Grant and fellowship from Vermont Studio Center Residency, Vermont. She just finished a residency at MASS MoCA, Massachusetts. Her work has been exhibited in the National Grand Theater in Beijing, China, Between Art Lab, Shanghai, China, Manifold Gallery in Chicago, US, and most recently a group exhibition as a part of the the HATCH Residency in Chicago Artists Coalition.

Michael Moore is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago, IL. He holds a BFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a MA in Visual and Critical Studies also, from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work explores relationships between mind and body, being and form, human and nonhuman animals and objects. Through paintings, drawings and found object sculptures, he celebrates difference and likeness by allowing the animal and object to exchange places freely.

Alejandro Waskavich is a Chicago-based, self-taught artist born and raised in Mexico City. His current work explores the body movement, sports fandom, perception, and the reproduction of art. He has exhibited his work at NEXT Chicago, the International Print Center in New York, Site:Brooklyn Gallery, Chicago Artists Coalition, and the Hyde Park Art Center. Alejandro is a 2018 CENTER Program Artist at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago and a 2018 HATCH Artist in Residence at the Chicago Artists Coalition.

Curator Bio

Sabrina Greig is a Chicago-based art critic and curator from New York City. At the intersection of social activism and Art History, her curatorial practice uses exhibition spaces to showcase experiences that are unique to Diasporic communities on the margins. She graduated with a B.A from Carleton College and M.A in Art History from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) with a focus on representations of the Black diaspora in pop culture, fine art, and urban space. She is a 2017-2018 resident curator in the Chicago Artists Coalition’s HATCH Projects program. She has curated exhibitions at ACRE Projects, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Haitian American Museum of Chicago. She has published essays in Arts.Black, Contemporary And, Sixty Inches from the Center, Bad at Sports, Chicago Artist Writers and has been featured in the Chicago Tribune, Hyperallergic and The Observer.