Chicago Artists Coalition is pleased to present The Rounds, a duo exhibition featuring new works by current HATCH 2021-2022 artists-in-residence Osée Obaonrin and Nayeon Yang, curated by Yi Cao. The exhibition will have an opening day on January 7, 2022, from 5-8pm.

The Rounds captures the repeated tries, recurring counter-actions, and recursive tensions existing amid the perpetual state of motion in societies, between relationships, and within one’s mental landscape.

Obaonrin develops a personal and self-reflexive form of documentation that pin-prints the origins of friendship encounters, their formations, and dissolutions—threading her way through the cycles of choices, consequences, and interconnectivity. By contrast, Yang turns her eyes to migration, labor, and global circulation. She concurrently stages hybrid spaces and parallel realities through the movements of the various hands of migrant workers and consumers in the exhibition space in Chicago and a store-front gallery in Seoul.

Anchoring this exhibition is a “rock paper scissors” game-inspired, video installation the two artists made together. Through this layered reference, the collaborative piece reflects the human propensity to replicate decisions that result in reward contingencies and to shift responses away from options that formerly led to undesirable outcomes. This tendency displays a plurality of shared elements of the artists’ practices: calculative but intuitive, rigorous but playful.

The exhibition takes us on a journey that extends through screen prints, mirrors, threads, moving images, live streams, and participatory installations around the clock and across the globe, challenging the visitor to consider their own “rounds,” as well as those of others.

Image: Osée Obaonrin and Nayeon Yang, The Rounds (still), 2021, video installation.

This project is supported in part by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, through federal funds provided by the National Endowment for the Arts.