Chicago Artists Coalition is pleased to present You Are Looking Good, A Real Good Looker. Co-curated by Allison Lacher and Cole Lu, this culminating HATCH Projects exhibition brings together contemporary artists from both Chicago and St. Louis.

The two groups encounter each other as strange reflections, both individually and as cities. A convergence of works and styles, as if in a hall-of-mirrors, suggests the multifaceted feelings of admiration, competition, aversion, and desire experienced when facing one’s own reflection.

Featured Chicago-based HATCH Projects artists are Jeffrey Michael Austin, Hideous Beast, Jessica Caponigro, Snow Yunxue Fu, Andy Roche, and Rafael E. Vera. Featured St. Louis-based artists are Brandon Anschultz, Lyndon Barrois Jr., Michael Byron, Sage Dawson, Lilly Randall, and Deborah Alma Wheeler. The exhibition will travel to Fort Gondo Compound for the Arts in St. Louis later in 2016.

You Are Looking Good, A Real Good Looker runs from January 8 - 28. An opening reception will take place on Friday, January 8 from 6 - 9 pm at Chicago Artists Coalition, 217 N Carpenter St., Chicago, IL.

Opening Night:

Hideous Beast will perform, First Art Work, continuously from 6 - 9 pm during the opening reception.

Gallery Talk:

On Saturday, January 16, from 1 - 3 pm, co-curators Allison Lacher and Cole Lu will lead a discussion with exhibiting artists Jeffrey Michael Austin, Lyndon Barrois Jr., Jessica Caponigro, and Sage Dawson. After the discussion, there will be an open session with other exhibiting artists who will provide a tour and talk about their work with individuals. This event is free and open to the public.

Artist Bios

Brandon Anschultz (b. 1972) lives and works in St. Louis. Solo exhibitions include Below Horizon, at Regards, Chicago; Suddenly Last Summer and Pacer at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; Stick Around for Joy at Laumeier Sculpture Park, St. Louis and Longue Vue House and Garden, New Orleans; and Round at White Flag Projects, St. Louis. Group exhibitions include The Tyranny of Good Taste, La Esquina, Kansas City & Columbia College, Chicago; All That Heaven Allows, Fort Gondo, St. Louis; All Good Things Become Wild and Free, Carthage College, Kenosha, Wisconsin; Die Erklärte Ausstellung at Künstlerhaus Klagenfurt, Klagenfurt, Austria; Violence at the Exhibition Agency, Chicago; Due Diligence Done at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Philadelphia; Jasmine, Plus B at Front Desk Apparatus, New York; Amass at Monte Vista Projects, Los Angeles and Boots Contemporary Art Space, St. Louis. Anschultz attended Washington University in St. Louis and Louisiana Tech University.

Jeffrey Michael Austin is an interdisciplinary artist, musician and educator based in Chicago. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, recently including such venues as Le Carreau de Cergy (Paris), Chicago Artists Coalition, Kunstenfestival Watou (Belgium), The University of North Texas Art Galleries, Lehr Zeitgenössische Kunst (Berlin), The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Fondation Vasarely (Aix-en-Provence), Terrain Exhibitions (Oak Park, IL), The SUB-MISSION, Chicago Art Department and Manifold, a partner of the ACRE Artist Residency. Austin received his BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was recently named a Luminarts Fellow in Visual Arts. He currently works as Deputy Director of The Chicago Perch and as a Teaching Artist with Marwen.

Lyndon Barrois, Jr. received his MFA from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Art as a Chancellor’s graduate fellow, and his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. His work has been included in exhibitions at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, CA; the Mildred Lane Kemper Museum of Art, St. Louis; the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; the Luminary Center for the Arts, St. Louis; Fort Gondo Compound for the Arts, St. Louis; and the Hirvitalo Center for Contemporary Art Pispala, Finland, among others. He is currently an adjunct faculty member in drawing and design at Washington University in St. Louis, and Webster University, respectively.

Hideous Beast is a collaboration between Josh Ippel and Charlie Roderick. Since 2004 they have organized structured participatory events, published how-to manuals and most recently created 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.

Michael Byron is a visual artist whose work is included in the museum collections of the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art - New York City, the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art St. Louis, the St. Louis Art Museum, the Tamayo Museum - Mexico City, and the Museum Boymans-Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, among others.

Byron was born in Rhode Island and received his MFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design in 1981. His inclusion in the Museum of Modern Art’s An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture in 1984 marked the beginning of his international career. After participating in the 1989 Whitney Biennial, he moved to Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where he lived and worked for five years.

Michael Byron joined the faculty of the College of Art at Washington University in St. Louis in 1994 as the first Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Fellow. In December 2014 Byron was named the Kenneth E. Hudson Professor of Art.

Jessica Caponigro Before receiving her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Jessica Caponigro attended Bryn Mawr College where she earned her BA in the History of Art. In her work, Caponigro explores ideas of restriction through repetition, reproduction, and accessible materials. She has taught classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Olive Harvey College, and currently teaches studio and academic classes at Harold Washington College. She has exhibited work at the DePaul Art Museum, Chicago Cultural Center, and the Highland Park Art Center. Her work is in the permanent collections at California State Long Beach and the Joan Flasch Artists’ Books Collection. She is a member of the feminist art collective Tracers, and frequently participates in workshops, most recently at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and NYU Florence.

Sage Dawson is an artist examining dwelling rights, land use, and the identity of spaces. Her work investigates and interprets sites and objects, and documents the production and destruction of space.

Dawson has exhibited work at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston University, the City University of New York, and the International Print Center New York. She is a recent recipient of the Denbo Fellowship at Pyramid Atlantic, a residency at the Luminary Center for the Arts, and was nominated for a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant. Her work has been featured in Elephant Magazine, From Here to There published by Princeton Architectural Press, and reviewed by Lori Waxman for 60 wrd/min art critic and by Laura Mallonee at Hyperallergic. Dawson received her MFA from the University of New Mexico, and a BFA from Missouri State University. She currently teaches at Saint Louis University.

Snow Yunxue Fu (b. 1987) is an artist who lives and works in Chicago. Fu has exhibited her work nationally and internationally including Hong Kong Arts Center, Yellow Peril Gallery, Expo Chicago, Digital Culture Center in Mexico City, Zhou B Art Center in Chicago, Chicago Artist Coalition, 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 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. She obtained a M.F.A. degree from the Film, Video, New Media, and Animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She also obtains a B.F.A. degree in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Southeast Missouri State University, and a B.A. in Fine Art from Sichuan Normal University in China.

Lily Randall was born in St. Louis and received her BFA from Washington University in St. Louis in 2012. She lived in New York City for 3 years, where she helped run a photography program in public housing. She has worked in St. Louis for the past year, making videos in strip malls and shopping centers. She is moving to Vienna in the winter to attend the Academy of Fine Art.

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.

Rafael E. Vera received his BFA and MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2013, he received the 3Arts Ragdale Residency Fellowship. He currently teaches at Loyola University Chicago. Recent exhibitions and publications include New American Paintings, issue 107; Mutual Dealings, Bert Green Fine Art, Chicago; The Moments Between: New Work by Rafael E. Vera, Averill and Bernard Leviton A+D Gallery, Chicago, IL – curated by Jessica Cochran; Pillow Talk: New Sculptures by Rafael E. Vera, Seerveld Gallery, Palos Heights, IL; Double Tangent, Cara and Cabezas, Kansas City, MO – in collaboration with Mara Baker.

His work is commonly installation-based as well as two and three-dimensional and oftentimes collaborative. His latest drawings and sculptures, directly based on his own house, search for those in-between spaces where void and the dividing line interact and coexist. They reference a limbo space that investigates his constant interest for the transition.

Deborah Alma Wheeler has exhibited nationally and internationally and has had several pieces collected by museums including Tom of Finland’s TOM House located in West Hollywood California and The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction Gallery in Bloomington, Indiana. Along with exhibitions, Deborah has presented her work abroad, in 2012 at the University of Oxford and the University College of Dublin in Ireland. By re-appropriating American culture through found objects, she questions social, political and cultural issues about sex, gender identity and marginalized groups. A form of semiotic manipulation occurs through the re-contextualization of objects and their conventional spaces. Thus, creating a poetic metaphor that is both strangely familiar and jarringly awakening. Currently, Deborah lives and works in the St. Louis, Missouri metro area as a contracted artist/fabricator/instructor.

Curator Bios

Allison Lacher is a visual artist and organizer. Working primarily in installation and sculpture, her work explores contemporary culture through a lens of naiveté.

She has exhibited extensively at venues that include Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, UT; PDX Contemporary Art, OR; CUAC Contemporary, UT; Center for Contemporary Art, LA; Future Tenant at Carnegie Mellon University, PA; and Grounds for Sculpture, NJ. She was awarded a fellowship residency with both Spiro Arts and Vermont Studio Center, and was an Artist in Residence with Signal Fire in the Pajarita Wilderness on US/Mexico borderlands. She is a previous recipient of the Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship Award.

Allison Co-Directs DEMO Project, an alternative contemporary art gallery, and serves as the Visual Arts Gallery Manager at the University of Illinois Springfield. She has previously worked for the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh and the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art in Salt Lake City.

Cole Lu received her MFA from the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Art at Washington University in St. Louis. She received her bachelor's degree in linguistics from Ming Chuan University (Taipei, Taiwan) and associate's degree in Japanese from Jinwen University (Taipei, Taiwan). From the start of her career, Lu has worked simultaneously as artist and curator. Her work has been included in exhibitions throughout the United States, UK, Brazil, Mexico and Taiwan. She is known for her varied, multimedia practice, which articulates the subject of a contemporary, fragmented identity. She uses text, photography, sculpture, and video to explore the complex layers of what is lost in the era of digital communication. She is the assistant director at the 501(c)(3) nonprofit arts forum fort gondo compound for the arts.