Chicago City Wire

Chicago Artists Coalition is pleased to present Deep Cuts, a duo exhibition featuring new works by current HATCH 2021-2022 artists-in-residence Helen Lee and Nat Pyper, and curated by Joan Roach. The exhibition will have an opening day on Friday October, 1 2021 from 5-8pm.

Lee and Pyper’s studio practices cut into the B-sides of their respective cultural and personal catalogues. In their exhibition the artists disassemble, cut , stab, transform, re-print, duplicate, and put back together aural echoes of joy and suffering. Their practices are united through action, each clipping wings or zines, as a means of re-imagining, re-contextualizing, and sometimes making love to the “archive.” As Lee unearths and commemorates vulnerable moments from her lived experience, she dives further into memoriam, where she shares a collection of stories of Asian and Black lives lost due to hate. In a similar gesture against violence, Pyper pricks at the veil of queer punk anarcho-zine history. Their transgressive, clipped apart, stretched, and reprinted cut-ups bare it all, and often out of sight images see the light of day. The two artists handle the complex conversations around sex and death with a sense of reverence. They push through reticence to offer up their catharsis in its stead. 

BOLT

A Form By Which To Be Possessed

Chicago Artists Coalition is pleased to present, A Form By Which To Be Possessed, a solo exhibition of new works by the BOLT artist-in-residence, Maryam Taghavi. The exhibition will have an opening day on Friday October 1, 2021 from 5-8pm.

In this exhibition, Taghavi’s multitude of paintings exploit a single character: a sigil, an occult letter-form believed to cast a spell upon its viewer. The sigil derives from a book of talismans, The Secrets of Qasemi, by the 15th-century Persian poet and scholar, Hussein Va’ez Kashefi, in which the power of flight is promised to its viewer.

As a letter-form, the sigil operates outside the ordinary systems of language and meaning-making, making it open to unexpected possibilities. Taghavi is driven by the sigil’s transgressive qualities to transform it into numerous shapes and arrangements that make up new spells to cast. Similar to the sigil, each painting functions as an interface to behold the flight: an escape from reality, an exhilarating state of suspension, and a reach for the metaphysical powers however temporary the touch may be.