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Meet Curatorial Residents
Allison Lacher is an artist and curator based in Springfield, IL. Her work orbits collaboration, site-responsiveness and installation. She is the Exhibitions Manager at the University of Illinois Visual Arts Gallery and she is a founding member of the artist-owned gallery Monaco in St. Louis, MO. In 2013 she Co-founded DEMO Project, a space for contemporary art in Springfield, and served as Co-director of the space until its demolition in 2018. She has been awarded residencies with ACRE, Spiro Arts, The Luminary, Signal Fire on US/Mexico borderlands, and was a full fellowship resident with Vermont Studio Center. She was a HATCH Projects curatorial resident and is a previous recipient of the Illinois Arts Council Fellowship Award. Her work has been featured in ‘From Here to There’ published by Princeton Architectural Press, NewCity Magazine, Temporary Art Review and FLOORR Magazine, among others.
Image: Subdivision (Phase 1), exhibition and curatorial project in collaboration with Jeff Robinson; wood, digital images, vinyl; Dimensions variable, 2017.
(updated 2019)
Jaxon Pallas is an artist, archivist, curator, and educator primarily concerned with projects at the intersection of the personal, the popular, and the political. He organizes shows as curator for the City Colleges of Chicago under the name Pedestrian Project. His other projects include the Teen Creative Agency at MCA Chicago and the Institute for Encyclopedic Amalgamation. He earned a MFA from the University of Chicago and BA degrees from Rice University. Learn more about Jaxon Pallas’s HATCH exhibitions As Stars At Daybreak, Batten Down the Hatches, and Reference Rot.
La Keisha Leek is a writer, arts administrator and curator who graduated with a BA in Art History from Columbia College Chicago. Her interests are architecture, race, performance, and site-specific projects that investigate the ways bodies and objects offer up themselves, adapt to and negotiate their presence within spaces. She has used exhibitions as a way to negotiate the presence of language in space contributing texts to The Fifth Dimension at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, and groun(d) at the Arts Incubator in Washington Park, and recently curated the exhibition How to Make A Hood at the Arts Incubator, with concurrent documentation of the show in the 2014 Albert P. Weisman Award exhibition at Columbia College Chicago's Arcade Gallery. Learn more about La Keisha Leek’s HATCH exhibitions The Dissemination of Blind Light, Halfway to Equilibrium, and Closer Still.
Meet Artist Residents
alejandro t. acierto is a Chicago based artist and musician mostly working in time-based media. He has exhibited solo shows in Chicago, Madison, Denver, and Berlin and also shown in group shows in New York, LA, and San Francisco. He has presented performance works at Brooklyn International Performance Art Festival (BIPAF), the Center for Performance Research Brooklyn, and Constellation/Links Hall. He has completed residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Banff Centre, and at High Concept Laboratories in Chicago. Acierto is also member of contemporary chamber music collective Ensemble Dal Niente and can be heard on Carrier, Albany, New Focus, Avant Media, Parlour Tapes+ Records, and Prom Night Records. He received his undergraduate degree from DePaul University, a Master of Music from Manhattan School of Music and an MFA in New Media Arts from University Illinois at Chicago. Learn more about Alejandro T. Acierto’s HATCH exhibitions Secular Studies and Nitty Gritty.
Ali Aschman creates hand-made worlds exploring emotional states. Hybridity, transformation, alienation and guilt are recurring themes. She is interested in the brutality people inflict on one another, physically and emotionally, and the impulses they suppress. Aschman earned a BA from the University of Cape Town and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is a Luminarts Visual Arts Fellow, an Illinois Arts Council Agency grant recipient, and a recent artist-in-residence at Spudnik Press, the Rensing Center, the League Residency at Vyt and Elsewhere Museum. Learn more about Ali Aschman’s HATCH exhibitions Dicker, Lurk & Skew and Secular Studies.
Andrew Rosinski (b. 1987, Traverse City, Michigan, USA), is a visual artist, curator, and writer who received his BA from Columbia College in Film & Video with a concentration in post-production and documentary & ethnographic film. In 2009, he founded Dinca, a contemporary visual arts blog surveying the most noteworthy & innovative artworks that exist in physical, digital, & time-based spaces. In 2012, he founded Vision Quest, a contemporary moving image & media arts festival. In 2014, he was awarded a Propeller Grant, a program by the Andy Warhol Foundation For The Visual Arts as part of its initiative to promote informal and independently organized visual arts activities across the United States. His artwork — moving image, painting & drawing, sculpture & objects, text, digital media — has exhibited at the Museum of the Moving Image, NYC; the Serpentine Gallery Marathon, London/Internet; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Doc Films at the University of Chicago; Threewalls’ 12th Annual Gala; the Ann Arbor Film Festival; Galeria Ze dos Bois, Lisbon, Portugal; The Wrong – New Digital Art Biennale;bubblebyte.org; the Off and Free Film Festival, Seoul, South Korea; the Axiom Center for New and Experimental Media; and at Brown University’s Granoff Center for the Creative Arts. He currently lives and works in Chicago, Illinois, where he is an artist in residence at the Chicago Artists Coalition and resident participating in the Propeller Fund Pilot Program Studio Residency at Mana Contemporary Chicago. Learn more about Andrew Rosinski’s HATCH exhibitions The Dissemination of Blind Light and Closer Still.
Andy Roche is an artist and filmmaker originally from Dubuque, Iowa. He has an MFA from SAIC and a BFA from the University of Iowa. In recent years his projects have been concerned with: braided breads, folk art knot-boards, cursive handwriting and life-like snakes / collaborations self-described as irreconcilable / low-stakes gambling in nature / Bas Jan Ader and "Redemption Song" / chained dogs near unreachable dangling sausages / scarf design for Morris dancers / space-rock fantasy novels / you know, what's going on in his life right now. Learn more about Andy Roche’s HATCH exhibitions You Are Looking Good, A Real Good Looker and Kissing in Heaven.
Blair Bogin makes video, takes photo, writes and performs. Through various forms of documentary, she explores the urge to differentiate oneself with the paradoxical longing to intimately fuse with others. This oscillation from a sense of singularity to a more pluralistic view is met with modes of madness, play and poetic absurdity. Blair is founder and host of Wax Long Storytelling, a full moon performance event in Chicago, Illinois. Additionally, she conducts Circle for Square, a pop-up community art space at the Logan Square Famers Market. She is currently pursuing MFA studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Learn more about Blair Bogin’s HATCH exhibitions Nitty Gritty and Secular Studies.
Casey Smallwood creates lens-based performances in order to study and articulate an as-yet inarticulate space navigated by the performer. The viewer’s relationship with the performer relies heavily on cinematography, carrying its own wavering perspectives between viewer and narrator that give and take away the idea of viewer agency. Smallwood’s work has been included in exhibitions including the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; College Art Association’s ARTspace Media Lounge, New York; Angels Gate Cultural Center, San Pedro; El Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales, The Institute of Superior Arts (ISA) and The National Salon of Contemporary Cuban Art, Havana, Cuba. She was a resident at the Banff Centre’s thematic residency Our Literal Speed in 2013. Her work was highlighted in Sarah Trigg’s book, Studio Life, and most recently was featured in an episode of Made Up With Danny Volk. Casey Smallwood received an MFA from the University of Chicago in Visual Arts and a BFA from Missouri State University in Photography. Learn more about Casey Smallwood’s HATCH exhibitions As Stars At Daybreak and Batten Down the Hatches.
Danny Volk explores the nature and nuance of social structures and interpersonal relationships through broadscale, time-based projects and events often documented serially in various media. While referencing and drawing influence from sociological theory and the semiotics of theater and drama, Volk’s work intervenes in the personal lives of others and restructures accepted modes of interaction between social entities. Conversation, dialogue, mediation, humor, and negotiation are factors and forms in the work.
Image: The News Gallery Volume 1, 2019
(Hosted by SPACES in Cleveland, Ohio from January 25 through March 22, 2019. Participation was open to artists who submitted exhibition proposals during the 2017-18 open calls and were not offered space in to realize their visions.TNG is interested in recognizing the inherent energy with which these proposals were submitted, redirecting their intended trajectory, and providing an alternative exhibition opportunity within the space. With the artists’ consent, TNG published application materials for 32 artist proposals over the course of 8 weeks)
(updated 2019)
Much of my research and artist practice concentrates on a critique of image construction through strategies of image making. Beginning with a photographic investigation of urban space in my native Philadelphia I have increasingly honed in on topics of class and race construction. My most recent work has shifted from conventional strategies of representation, be it the use of the camera lens or traditional collage, to sculptural practice and large-scale installation of grid based printed works. In both cases I have deployed the found object as a strategy to further investigate the constructed image, focusing on the “image” of urban racial construction and the site of its consumption. Learn more about Esau McGhee’s HATCH exhibitions Halfway to Equilibrium and The Dissemination of Blind Light.
Hideous Beast is a collaboration between Josh Ippel and Charlie Roderick. Since 2004 they have worked organizing structured participatory events, publishing how-to manuals and most recently creating 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. Learn more about Hideous Beast’s HATCH exhibitions Kissing in Heaven and You Are Looking Good, A Real Good Looker.
Hui-min Tsen is a photo-based, interdisciplinary artist whose work contemplates the spatial and mental landscapes residing in the gap between Here and There. In projects ranging from walking tours to boat building to works on paper, she uses research and observation to interweave stories of history and the collective imagination with our everyday experience of place and the unknown. Tsen received a BFA from the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, and an MFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has exhibited and published with the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago Artist's Coalition, MDW Fair, and Sector 2337, among others. Her book, The Pedway of Today was published by Green Lantern Press in 2013. She currently teaches at Loyola University.
Image: (1951), 2019, Medium: Inkjet print, Dimensions: 16x16in
(updated 2019)
Hyounsang Yoo explores relationships between history and ideas of production of reality through photography, video, installation and sculpture. His work has been exhibited in the Bridge Art Fair, NY; EXPO Chicago; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among others. He has received several awards including the Snider Prize Museum of Contemporary Photography; Chicago, International Photography Awards, PhotoSpiva and Selected Artists Belt, Korea. Yoo received his BFA and MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute Chicago, where he is an instructor in the Contemporary Practice and Photography departments. Learn more about Hyounsang Yoo’s HATCH exhibitions Dicker, Lurk & Skew and Secular Studies.
In her interdisciplinary practice, Jessica Caponigro creates physical objects, installations, and multiples, as well as writes and facilitates participatory actions. Her work blends accessible and egalitarian concepts with ritual and performance, exploring ideas of restriction and reproduction. Her research includes how those in power have used storytelling and reproducible media to control history, and how marginalized communities have used independent publishing to tell their own stories and fight back against oppressive systems. Before its dissolution, she was a founding member of the non-anonymous W.I.T.C.H. Chicago. She frequently facilitates workshops and speaks on panels, recently at Harvard University, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the University of Kentucky, Oberlin College, and NYU Florence. She currently lives and works in Boston, where she operates Snake Hair Press, an independent publisher of zines, multiples, and artist books.
Image: Flower Procession, 2018, documentation or participatory performance.
(updated 2019)
Utilizing, pushing, and undoing conventional processes behind photographic image making, Weber reconsiders the fundamental aspects of the medium, namely paper, light, and chemicals. Weber holds an MFA from Columbia College Chicago and a BA from Dominican University. She currently teaches at Waubonsee Community College and the Chicago Photography Center, and is the Production Coordinator for Filter Photo. Learn more about Julie Weber’s HATCH exhibitions The Dissemination of Blind Light and Closer Still.
Kayla Anderson participates in the art world as an interdisciplinary artist, a critical writer, a sometimes-curator, a precarious administrator, and an aspiring educator. Their visual practice is time-based, spanning video (single channel, and multi-channel installation), interactive virtual environments (video games), as well as performance, installation, and publication. Their work explores the ways that subjectivity shapes, and is shaped by, technology. Growing up under the influence of US working-class capitalism, they value art as an arena for non-strategic modes of thinking, feeling, and communing with others. Through art, they practice ways of being with the world: uncovering its curiosities and rubbing up against its contradictions. Their work has been shown at Currents International New Media Festival (Santa Fe), HTMlles Festival (Montreal), Australian Centre for the Moving Image ART+FILM Festival (Melbourne), MELT: Festival of Queer Arts and Culture (Brisbane); as well as galleries and itenerant spaces throughout the US. They have juried exhibitions of contemporary media art for Woman Made Gallery, IEEE Vis Arts Program, and SIGGRAPH. They received their MFA from Northwestern University, and is a Visual Arts Fellow of the Luminarts Cultural Foundation.
Secondary Image: Kayla Anderson Stay With the Body, single channel video, 16:42, 2019. An off-screen narrator searches for accidental fragments of photographer’s bodies on Google street view panorama, certain that their visual evaporation will help her solve her own childhood fantasies of disembodiment.
I am interested in the idiosyncrasies that structure normalcy, and how we makeshift our understanding of the world on a daily basis in order to psychologically and physically navigate it. I try to examine this by organizing my materials through my peculiarities but inside of borrowed organizational structures. I use everyday materials to push the uncanny result of these combinations in the hope that a recognition of these inconsistencies might challenge preconceived notions of symbol and meaning. Kelly Lloyd graduated from Oberlin College in 2008 and is pursuing a concurrent M.F.A. in Painting and Drawing and M.A. in Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Learn more about Kelly Lloyd’s HATCH exhibitions The Dissemination of Blind Light and Closer Still.
LeRoy Bach is a Chicago-based musician, composer, instigator. His practice includes site-specific presentations, live-music installations, public meditations, and the development of a personal musical poetics. Bach was a 2013 artist-in-residence at the University of Chicago (Arts and Public Life). In 2014 he was artist-in-residence at The Headlands Center for the Arts, Arizona State University, and the Djerassi Artist Program. He is currently in residence at the Smart Museum (University of Chicago), working in conjunction with the museum’s permanent sculpture collection. Bach has also worked extensively with Wilco, Theaster Gates, and he maintains an ongoing collaboration with Tortoise member Dan Bitney. Learn more about LeRoy Bach’s HATCH exhibitions Dicker, Lurk & Skew and Secular Studies.
Maya Mackrandilal is a transdisciplinary artist, writer, and arts administrator based in Los Angeles. Her work infiltrates the cultural vernacular with radical imaginations of the future. She performs as Hindu goddesses incarnated within the dominant culture, queering the intersections of its deepest fears and desires. The work produced is a collapse of history, where traditional South Asian aesthetics and symbolism collides with signifiers of race, class, and popular culture within Western tropes. This troubling of cultural boundaries continues in her collage and sculptural work, breaking apart classical and neoclassical aesthetic forms to reveal the abundance obscured by the white surface, a surface produced by erasure. She is shepherdess of #NEWGLOBALMATRIARCHY, a nomadic collaborative performance platform that manifests liberatory spaces for women/non-binary people of color. She received her BA from the University of Virginia and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Image: ANTI/body 9 (Kalifia as Libertas), 2018, Mixed Media, Dimensions: 26 x 14 x 12 inches
(updated 2019)
Rachel E. Foster is an artist, writer, and printmaker living in Chicago. She has an MFA from the California College of the Arts and a BFA from Columbia College Chicago. Her work has been shown at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Southern Exposure, and Western Exhibitions, amongst others. Learn more about Rachel E. Foster’s HATCH exhibitions Reference Rot and Batten Down the Hatches.
Rafael E. Vera received his BFA and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he was a recipient of the Edward L. Ryerson Fellowship Award and the George L. and Roman Siegel Fellowship Award. In 2013, he received the 3Arts Ragdale Residency Fellowship. He currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Northeastern Illinois University. Recent exhibitions and publications include New American Paintings, issue 107; Pillow Talk, Seerveld Gallery, Palos Heights, IL; Nothing Concrete, Bert Green Fine Art, Chicago; 21st Evanston Biennial, Evanston, IL; and Double Tangent, Cara and Cabezas, Kansas City, MO. 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. Learn more about Rafael E. Vera’s HATCH exhibitions Rough Idle and You Are Looking Good, A Real Good Looker.
Ryan Thompson lives and works in Chicago, IL where he is an artist and Associate Professor of Art & Design at Trinity Christian College. His ongoing Department of Natural History projects engage a range of complex and peculiar relationships between humans and the natural world. Recent projects are featured in Cabinet Magazine, Making the Geologic Now (Punctum Books), Format P Magazine: ‘Earth Works!’, Reframing Photography (Routledge), and his forthcoming book, Bad Luck, Hot Rocks (The Ice Plant, 2014). His work has been exhibited at venues including: EYEBEAM (New York), Gallery Analix Forever (Geneva), Links Hall (Chicago), Evanston Art Center (Chicago), Root Division (San Francisco), Mila Kunstgalerie (Berlin), and Lease Agreement (Baltimore, MD). Learn more about Ryan Thompson’s HATCH exhibitions Reference Rot and Batten Down the Hatches.
Snow Yunxue Fu is a Chinese-born and US-based artist, curator, and faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago, exploring the aesthetic and philosophical experience of the digital sublime through a wide range of experimental digital media. With a background in painting, Fu remains the youngest painter represented at the National Art Museum of China, and sees her transition to new media as a natural extension of her conceptual research. She merges historical painterly and post-photographic explorations into the significance and definitive nature of the sublime, using topographical computer-rendered images and installations. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, including the Venice Architecture Biennial, Shenzhen Independent Animation Biennial, Thoma Art House, Current Museum of Art, NADA Art Fair, TRANSFER Download, Pingyao International Photography Festival, Barcelona Loop Festival, The Wrong Biennial, Expo Chicago, and the Hong Kong Art Center.
Image: Karst, 2019, Multi-level Virtual Reality Project, still image from Level 1.
(updated 2019)
If height is power, what is baseness? What happens when the base is elevated or venerated? Architecture’s relation to affect has been a deep concern of my practice. The peripheral, yet structurally necessary space of the corner has served as a key site for working through overlapping concerns with punishment/ shame (standing in the corner) and religious ritual. I regard my studio as 'The Pervert Kitchen', taking permission and pleasure in a practice of sculptural and material investigations in concert with the task of representation, aiming to harness the experiences of shame as an energy of revolt, reclaiming sites previously associated with a sense of violation or misuse as new forms of veneration. Stevie Hanley has exhibited extensively in Berlin where he lived for six years, notably at September Gallery, Kunsthaus Bethanien, The Center for Endless Progress, and the Schwules Museum. Hanley has also exhibited in Istanbul (Artist Fair Tüyup, 2009 and 2010), Jerusalem (Artist House Jerusalem 2012), New York City (La Mama Galeria, 2013), and Chicago (Flat Space 2014), with upcoming shows in Mexico City (Lodos Contemporary) and Chicago (Julius Caesar). Learn more about Stevie Hanley’s HATCH exhibitions The Dissemination of Blind Light and Halfway to Equilibrium.
[jef]Frey Michael Austin (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist, composer and performer based in Chicago. Their visual artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and they have performed in such spaces as The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, The Art Institute of Chicago, Green Line Performing Arts Center, Steppenwolf Theatre, Chicago Cultural Center, Arts Incubator and The Smart Museum of Art. They design and build unique altarpieces for both private and public spaces of worship, most recently completing a new central bimah for the historic KAM Isaiah Reform synagogue of Hyde Park-Kenwood. They also compose and produce music for film and for collaborative, multidisciplinary performance projects GABE, Growing Concerns Poetry Collective and Daisy Days.
Frey studied at Columbia College Chicago and the Burren College of Art in Ireland before receiving their BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Image: [everything here will be a memory], enamel, acrylic, and resin on copper-tinted glass mirror, 36” x 36’’
Headshot: Ash Dye
