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Meet Curatorial Residents
Happy Collaborations was a curatorial collective that existed from 2008-2013 to provide exhibition opportunities for performance, installation and media works, including (but not limited to) solo exhibitions, public programming and private event planning. Members Anna Trier and Meredith Weber served as Hatch curators in 2012-13.
Anna Trier is currently the Associate Director of Links Hall where she created and runs the CoMISSION summer intensive, residency, and fellowship programs that incubate and present new works of live art in the city of Chicago. She also runs Links Hall’s touring program, curatorial residency, and co-produces Links Hall’s presenting season. Outside of Links Hall she has curated and co-curated programing for ACRE, The Chicago Artists Coalition, Columbia College Chicago, Rapid Pulse International Performance Festival, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Chicago Cultural Center. Anna served as a curator on the National Performance Network’s Asian Exchange Program from 2014-2017. Trier graduated from Columbia College Chicago with a BFA in Studio Art and Art History in 2009 and from the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance at Wesleyan University in 2014.
Jessica Cochran is a Chicago-based curator and arts administrator currently affiliated with the Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago. She has organized exhibitions for the Contemporary Arts Council, Poetry Foundation, Art Chicago/NEXT and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in addition to numerous alternative spaces. Her written work has appeared in Curating Now, Newcity, CS and Proximity, in addition to numerous exhibition catalogs. She is currently working on two independent curatorial initiatives: Timeline Projects and the Abundant Archive, and has taught both arts administration and art history at Columbia College Chicago and Dominican University. Learn more about __’s HATCH exhibitions Twelve Variations: HATCH Residents in Context and Live/Work.
MK Meador is a writer and curator living in Chicago. After relocating to Chicago in 2007 from her hometown of Nashville, TN, she took up work as a freelance art handler and worked with collections in auction houses, museums and art galleries across the city. As a writer, she contributed to Newcity and Proximity before jumping on board as editor for the now-defunct online arts journal, Chicago Art Magazine. In 2012, as the event manager for Floating World Gallery, Meador produced dozens of arts events, including the "Unfolding Space" installation that received coverage in Time Out Chicago, Curbed Chicago and Gapers Block. As a freelance curator, Meador seeks non-traditional project spaces. She has curated shows for the Chicago Art Loop Alliance, Chapel Projects and the NALL Foundation. Learn more about __’s HATCH exhibitions The Terrestrial, The Celestial, and The Imagined Inbetween and Natural Fallacy.
Meet Artist Residents
Amber Ginsburg creates site-generated projects that insert historical scenarios into present day situations, as well as engaging present day histories to imagine alternative futures. Her background in craft orients her projects towards the continuities and ruptures in material, social, and utopic histories. While always interested in history, more recently, Amber is drawn to imagined futures. Looking to feminist strategies, including collective action and equity politics, she works with long-term and ongoing collaborators to engage multiple communities, creating large-scale sculptural forms and that allow audiences a role in thinking through the work. Following specific material lineages—be it a tree species, porcelain, or wool--she maps our varied and porous relationships. Working in concert with objects, she is interested in how materials can extend and reframe our thinking to include the politics of complexity. Amber teaches in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago and shows extensively locally, nationally, and internationally.
Image: Amber Ginsburg, Sara Black and Charlie Vinz, Le Musée du Grand Dehors (The Museum of the Great Outdoors), 2018, Thailand Biennale, Than Bok Koranee National Forest, View from the Carbon interior, including the rubber tree and the outside Park/Museum.
(updated 2019)
Chaz Evans makes performances, installations, and software that investigate emerging and historical technology. Often satirical in tone, Evans's work pits technologies against their perceived or intended purpose. Exhibitions include Chicago Artists Coalition; Evanston Art Center; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Peeler Art Center, Greencastle, Indiana; Tower Fine Arts Center, Brockport, New York. His teaching experience includes instructor at the School of the Art Institute Chicago; part-time assistant professor of art and art history: digital and new media art at DePauw University. Presentations include Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Processing Chicago. Evans earned an MFA in 2012 from the University of Illinois at Chicago and an MA in 2011 from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a BA in 2006 from North Park University, Chicago. Learn more about Chaz Evans’s HATCH exhibition pARTicipatory.
Hoyun Son is an artist working in various media including text, public performance, wearable sculptures, interactive installation, and everyday life to explore how we communicate and relate to others. Son believes that as human beings we grow through trust and sharing. She also believes the artist’s role in society is someone who facilitates collective creative potential and shared visions, and stimulates the imagination beyond the limit of fixed identities. Born in Korea, Son has a background in social welfare and information and library science. Hoyun Son has performed and exhibited nationally and internationally at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts, Wilmington; Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City, New York; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas; KINOKINO, Sandnes, Norway; and Art Space Hue, Seoul, Korea. Chicago exhibitions include Chicago Cultural Center, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago Artists Coalition, and the Southside Hub of Production (SHoP). Son is also the recipient of various awards and fellowships from the National Endowment of Arts, Illinois Art Council Agency, Skowhegan Painting and Sculpture, MacDowell Colony in USA, and Sandness Kommune in Norway. Hoyun Son moved to USA in 2001 to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she earned her BFA and MFA. Learn more about Hoyun Son’s HATCH exhibition pARTicipatory.
Butcher (b. 1982) is interested in a process of consuming, dissecting and processing a panoply of representations of individualism and safety. These constructs are idealized through various medias as well as personal and congenital histories. Those dispositions are equally prescribed to the physical and emotional.
"I look at my hand and see my face I will not rest until every American can do the same." Jack Whitten
Image: Better Days Will Haunt You, 2018 Medium: Graphite on Paper
Jessica Bardsley is an artist and PhD Candidate in the Film and Visual Studies program at Harvard University, where she is also a Film Study Center Fellow. Her academic work explores the relationship between fluid conceptions of materiality, process philosophy, and contemporary art and cinema. Her films have screened across the U.S. and internationally at venues such as CPH:DOX, Visions du Réel, European Media Arts Festival, Kassel Dokfest, RIDM, True/False, and Flaherty NYC. She is the recipient of various awards, including a Princess Grace Award, Grand Prize at 25FPS, the Eileen Maitland Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, and Best Short Film at Punto de Vista. She received an MFA and an MA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her films are distributed through Light Cone.
Image: Still from Goodbye Thelma, 2019,13:30 min, 16:9, sound, 16mm and video
(updated 2019)
Kasia Houlihan is a Chicago-based artist who works in a variety of media in an effort to get at the experience of relating. With photography, drawing, video, sculpture and language all in her arsenal, she chips away at the concepts of closeness, communication and connectivity. "The notion of 'closeness'—as an indication of emotional attachment, as well as physical proximity or a state of becoming, of 'almost but not quite'—provides me with constant fodder for investigation in multiple media. In an ongoing examination of the experience of relating, I approach the subject matter from all possible angles. This tactic has led me to count photography, drawing, video, audio, sculpture and, most recently, text and artist books all as part of my arsenal thus far in examining ideas involving the interpersonal, synchronicity and closeness. In turn, my research and source material reflect this range of approaches. I draw from song lyrics, crossword puzzle clues, puns and overheard conversations as much as I look at poetry, literature, film and art history for inspiration. "I’m interested in the moment we slip into step with a stranger on the street or align our breath with the person lying next to us. I want to understand how we absorb those around us, soaking up their speech patterns and bad manners. I hope to reveal the complexity of gifts—of both giving and receiving—especially when they come in the form of dedicated words pressed between the pages of a book. I want to push myself to take risks that make me wriggle in my own skin. "I want to wriggle with you." Houlihan has exhibited at such venues as EXPO Chicago, Gallery 400, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; Echo Park Film Center, Los Angeles; and the de la Cruz Collection Contemporary Art Space, Miami. Houlihan received an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Learn more about Kasia Houlihan’s HATCH exhibitions Release Show and Stand So Close To Me.
Kristin Nason's work functions as a data set in an ongoing investigation of what it means to be a squishy being in a world with hard edges. Through physical engagement with common objects and materials, she explores the capacities and limitations of the body in relation to its environment. The work exists as a series of interrelated games situated at the interface of the self and a crash-test world. Nason received her BFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2001, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011. Learn more about Kristin Nason’s HATCH exhibition Twelve Variations: HATCH Residents in Context.
Kristina Felix makes artworks that explore the creative potential of language, labor and found narratives. Felix has lived and worked abroad in Peru and Bolivia as a J. William Fulbright Research Scholar in sculpture, learning Andean back-strap weaving and Quechua while making sculptures and performances out of the materials and information available in the rural Andean communities that surrounded her studio. Felix received an MFA in transmedia from the University of Texas at Austin in 2010, and a BFA in studio art from Columbia College Chicago in 2004. Learn more about Kristina Felix’s HATCH exhibition Twelve Variations: HATCH Residents in Context.
Latham Zearfoss produces time-based images and objects about selfhood and otherness. Often collaborative, these works ask: how do we come to know ourselves as social human subjects? Across media, the work is anchored in the belief that identity is a cumulative, political effect, inherited through a kind of collective bargaining. These themes find evocative, sensual resonances through dramatic shifts in color and light, reverberating soundscapes populated by disembodied voices, queerly uncanny iterations of the not-noticed and everyday, and “soft borders” - spatial markings of undetermined significance that invite participation, transgression, even penetration.
Latham Zearfoss works in Chicago, where they produce time-based images, objects and experiences about selfhood and otherness. Outside of the studio, they contribute to collective motions toward joy and reflection through social projects such as a queer dance party (Chances Dances), a critical space for white allyship (Make Yourself Useful), and an itinerant conference on socially-engaged art (Open Engagement). Latham graduated from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a BFA in 2008 and the University of Illinois at Chicago with an MFA in 2011. They have exhibited their work, screened their videos, and DJed internationally and all over the U.S.
Artist photo: Harry Culy
Image: Latham Zearfoss, Moving, Even Still; 2019, Cardboard, spray paint, tape, wheat-paste installation from ships in the night at the Engine Room in Wellington, New Zealand; 32 x 7 x 3 ft
Matthew Schlagbaum focuses his attention on our cultural obsession with happiness, and the unstable specifics of how it is depicted and obtained. His work takes as its starting point the genuine desire to exist within spaces of positivity and exuberance, but illustrates what happens when these yearnings don’t fully synchronize with the lived experience. Through various techniques that alter the view of images and materials, Schlagbaum creates a longing within the viewer, allowing them to know what it is they are looking at while simultaneously denying them the full visual satisfaction. Exhibitions include the Contemporary Art Center, Las Vegas, Nevada; DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, IL; Atlantic Center For The Arts, New Smyrna Beach, FL; Beige, Memphis, TN; Glass Curtain Gallery, Chicago, IL; and Brevard Art Museum, Melbourne, Florida. Schlagbaum earned his MFA in fiber and material studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and his BFA in sculpture and extended media from the University of South Florida. He also holds a BA in psychology from the University of South Florida. Learn more about Matthew Schlagbaum’s HATCH exhibition Natural Fallacy.
Mothergirl (Katy Albert and Sophia Hamilton) is a performance duo whose work has taken the form of installation, durational event, and guided audience interaction. Mothergirl’s characters, and the worlds they inhabit, exhibit a strategically refracted or misrepresented view of current political and philosophical discourse, creating a space where viewers are challenged to think critically about their own relationships with feminism, consumerism, and representational visuality. Learn more about Mothergirl’s HATCH exhibitions pARTicipatory and Feeling is Mutual.
Nicholas Sagan ::.::..:::...:..:::..:: interdisciplinary and new media artist ::.::..:::...:::.:.:..:::..:: "A paradox is a strange thing. Since it is generally defined as a 'contradictory set of premises,' it seems that there are different ways of interpreting the construction of the premises. It must be kept in mind that contradictory and complementary are not mutually exclusive qualities. It also so happens that the two pursuits of art and science thrive on the paradox. "Regardless of how either of these methods deals with any potential or damning paradox, the end goal is one in the same: to gain insight into the workings of reality and the many shapes it takes. To engage in either of these disciplines full-heartedly with regard to the pursuit and dissemination of true knowledge is to actively participate in the construction of reality. But there is a trick: Everyone who comes into contact with these additions must trust them to be true, at least so far as to want to verify them against their own experiences. So how does the artist or scientist go about constructing trustworthy elements of reality? How do we define what is real in light of this constantly fluctuating in-and-out flow of knowledge and information—two very separate things—and how do we engage a healthy skepticism about our world and the things we are told and learn? "It is the intention of my work to explore these questions using parallels found in both art and science. Artistic processes can borrow some of the visual and theoretical languages found in observational astronomy and quantum physics to construct new interpretations of old data. Those commonalities also lead to the development of new forms and ideas, some of which can be replicated whereas others are completely unique to a time and place. This dual-forked path of art and science is the focusing principle of my work. As theory and practice continue to cross-pollinate, especially through these disciplines, I find a richness and potential of resources and ideas that keeps art making interesting." Learn more about Nicholas Sagan’s HATCH exhibitions The Terrestrial, The Celestial, and The Imagined Inbetween and Natural Fallacy.
Born in Sacramento and now living and working in Chicago, Noelle Allen has exhibited her artwork across the United States and abroad in Italy and Germany. Allen’s art has been positively reviewed in the Chicago Tribune, Art Ltd. Magazine, and Chicago Social, to name a few, and has had catalogues of her work published by the University of Pennsylvania and Paula Cooper Gallery. Allen has been awarded a number of grants through Dominican University where she is an associate professor of sculpture. She has been a visiting artist at Indiana Wesleyan University, Mills College, and DePauw University. Allen holds a BA from Smith College and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Learn more about Noelle Allen’s HATCH exhibitions The Terrestrial, The Celestial, and The Imagined Inbetween and Natural Fallacy.
Rebecca Hamlin Green is a ceramic and installation artist who is fascinated by wildlife and the breadth of patterns, cycles and modulations of natural and domestic systems. Her work has received national and international attention through group and solo exhibitions in Nova Scotia, Belgium, Korea, Portland, Berkeley, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Lexington, KY. She has recently installed solo exhibitions at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, the University of Alabama in Huntsville and the University of Arizona in Tucson, where she earned her MFA in 3D Studies in 2012.
Image: Heritage Hen, 2018, Media: Fired and unfired clay, lace, fabric, pearls, feathers, hair, found object, Dimensions: 16 x 17 x 13 inches
Ryan Peter Miller's body of work objectifies paint, playing with ideas of representation in objection to conventional hegemony of the image. The ideas that define the discipline of painting are as malleable as the material itself. Painting has always been in service of the evolving needs of its cultural context. Where once the medium was in service to the image, the image now serves the vehicle. When the image need not be applied, it is enough for paint to represent itself. Among others, Miller's credits include residencies at Vermont Studio Center and Chicago Artists Coalition, a Scottsdale Public Art Grant, and the exhibition of his work internationally in Beijing, Berlin, Chicago and Los Angeles. Ryan Peter Miller received his BFA in painting from the University of Georgia, and an MFA in painting from Arizona State University. He works as a painter in Chicago and as a visiting assistant professor at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Learn more about Ryan Peter Miller’s HATCH exhibitions Release Show and Stand So Close To Me.
Theodore Darst is an artist based in America. His videos, prints, and interactive digital environments have been exhibited at numerous venues including 319 Scholes, New York; bubblebyte.org; Public Works, Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Museum of the Moving Image, New York. Darst was a 2013 HATCH Projects resident artist at the Chicago Artists Coalition and is a 2016 MFA candidate at Bard College. Learn more about Theodore Darst’s HATCH exhibition Natural Fallacy.
Victoria Eleanor Bradford is a Louisiana-born, Chicago-based choreographer and visual artist whose structured improvisations take shape as experimental dinner parties, site-specific dance films, football training manuals used as choreographic instruction, and dancers translating words into a kind of gibberish performance language. Bradford prefers to work in collaboration with other artists or her audience, viewing choreography as social event, as research, and as a means to pose questions about one’s place in society and the role of our personal narratives. By mining the body’s vernacular, her work reframes the symbolic gestures that allow for our theatrical engagement of the everyday. Her most recent exhibitions include: "Running Begins Elsewhere, Twelve Variations" at the Chicago Artists Coalition; "I’d Rather Dance with You than Talk with You, Uptown 5" at Open House Chicago; and "DINNER DANCE," both at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and at the home of Tom and Jeannie Cottingham, Charlotte, North Carolina. Bradford holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BFA from the University of Notre Dame. Learn more about __’s HATCH exhibitions Twelve Variations: HATCH Residents in Context and Live/Work.
