Chicago Artists Coalition is pleased to present Revolvers Are Meant for Crocodile-skins, a HATCH Projects exhibition featuring works by B. Quinn, John Steck Jr., and Caleb Yono. Revolvers Are Meant for Crocodile-skins is curated by George William Price.

Revolvers Are Meant for Crocodile-skins is an exhibition that addresses medium and embodiment, sense and sensation. Imbued with an ominous perception of human finitude— physical violence, environmental damage, and the ephemeral nature of memory—Quinn, Steck, and Yono bear witness to the passing of time and acknowledge an undetermined but ever- encroaching future. As Jean-Paul Sartre did in his 1945 short fiction, The Age of Reason, these artists ask the viewer to draw their gaze to the past and future, contemplate the passage of time, perceive the brightness of the immaterial, and feel the weight of the uncanny and dense.

Yono’s performative spectre haunts the gallery space. She searches for anonymous human comfort, following paths of desire laid out for them along the rural Wisconsin landscape. Her bathing suit, like the skin of Sartre’s character Marcelle, is like leather—tanned and dehumanized. This raw physical presence is also deeply felt in Quinn’s work, which displays 18,928 clay cookies saturated with a metaphysical materiality. In the manufacture and consumption of these objects, Quinn sets out to understand how the material functions and how it can be controlled, an analogue for a semiotic language. Steck uses photographic paper to quarry simple materials for their textural properties and allegorical possibilities. Elements such as water and earth trace the surface of the paper, leaving a signal transmission that emulates a self-reflexive psychological space.

These artists pose questions about the human condition and its bearing on the natural world. A physical, conceptual, and temporal weight is laid upon the viewer. Like the protagonists in The Age of Reason, we are waiting—melancholic about the passing of time, anxious about our future trajectory—but waiting for what, we are unable to tell.

Artist Talks & Performance

Saturday, November 12, 20161:30 - 4:30 pm

Caleb Yono will perform an excerpt from his durational piece, WRECK, from 1:30 - 2:30, and, afterwards, there will be a panel discussion with the artists B. Quinn, John Steck Jr., and Caleb Yono about their work in HATCH Projects exhibition, Revolvers Are Made for Crocodile-skins. The panel will be moderated by curator of the exhibition, George William Price.

ARTIST BIOS

B. Quinn is an artist whose interdisciplinary practice addresses the constraints of language, the sensibilities of painting, and a combination of research and idiosyncratic making that emphasizes the duality within materials themselves. Quinn was born in Pittsburgh, PA, and earned her BA from Chatham College for Women, later receiving her BFA and MFA in painting and drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has participated in exhibitions and projects internationally, as well as within the U.S.—most recently in the Charlotte, North Carolina Union Studio project Cherry Pie, which brought together artworks investigating feminism and issues related to gender, body image, roles, and sexuality.

John Steck Jr. is a visual artist from Chicago who received his BFA at the Massachusetts College of Art & Design and his MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute. He has exhibited across fifteen states as well as in Iceland, Hungary, and Tokyo. Steck has completed artist residencies in both Ireland and Iceland and was a finalist for the 2014-2015 and 2015-2016 Fulbright Fellowship. His work can be found in the Midwestern Photographers Project at the Museum of Contemporary Photography and in the Permanent Art Collection of the DePaul Art Museum. Steck is current faculty at both Loyola University Chicago and Waubonsee Community College.

Caleb Yono is an interdisciplinary artist working to mediate discursive signs and effects of identity, class, and sexuality through representations of bodies charged with queer potential and tendencies. Through his practice, Yono hopes to create relational ecologies of image and desire that elicit an estrangement of what is expected of the human through the shaping and rearranging of his own discursive mask. The result of Yono’s work is a network of interdisciplinary gestures aimed at asserting "queer feeling structures” as momentary displacements of a harmful normative society. He received his MFA in painting and drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015.

CURATOR BIO

George William Price is an arts administrator and curator invested in artistic and political expressions that engender alternative, avuncular, and non-hierarchical histories. Price currently works as Video Data Bank's Development and Marketing Manager, where he leads VDB’s promotional and development efforts, manages the submissions and acquisitions process, and is responsible for the organization's external community relations. Price has curated and administered numerous exhibitions and moving image programs for institutions such as Conversations at the Edge, Chicago Urban Art Society, Rapid Pulse International Performance Festival, and University of the Arts London. He has also worked for a number of arts organizations in both the USA and UK including Matt’s Gallery, London; Electronic Arts Intermix, New York City; and PAHC / studio, Chicago.