A Landscape Made Up

Chiara Galimberti, Coley Mixan and Hannah Patterson, Grace Rosario Perkins, Adee Roberson, and Ileana Tejada
Curated by Adia Sykes

A Landscape Made Up features work by five artists examining the themes of community and connection to place. Chiara Galimberti, Coley Mixan in collaboration with Hannah Patterson, Grace Rosario Perkins, Adee Roberson, and Ileana Tejada whose practices span the media of drawing, video, installation, and performance illuminate the necessity of seeking or carving out one’s own space of belonging should they not otherwise exist. Community, then, can become a created, malleable thing that oftentimes requires tending to.

…My search for it had brought me closer to understanding myself and other human beings. The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.
-Maya Angelou, All God’s Children Need Travelling Shoes, 1986

We live in a time when the very concepts of belonging and safety are, for many, called into question. For marginalized peoples this feeling is only heightened given the precarity of this country’s social and political climate. A Landscape Made Up invites viewers to think about the soil into which they send their roots. These five artists cultivate an entire ecology within this exhibition which welcomes those who are most in need of spaces of belonging, communion, and care.

Join us later in October for an activation of the exhibition with body work, meditation, and holistic healing that will be open to members of the community, artists, and cultural producers alike.

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Originally from Italy, Chiara Galimberti is an artist, writer, immigrant, acupuncturist, and solo parent currently residing in Chicago. She earned an MA in Italian Studies from NYU in 2015 and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012, where she was a Soros New American Fellow. Her work tends to be context and place specific rather than self-referential, and can take the form of drawing, installation or collaborative performance. Her clinical focus is on mental health, trauma, CPTSD and queer/trans health. She is committed to making healthcare accessible and in building collaborative healing spaces. Chiara is involved in the Chicago Healing Justice Network, which aims to promote healing justice from an anti-oppression framework. In 2018, she co-organized the Healing Justice Practice Space for the Allied Media Conference in Detroit. She is currently artist in residence with ProjectArt at the Little Village Public Library.

Nikki and Jax, two intrastellar and 7th dimensional vapor-Beings, are focusing their determined efforts of positive vibrations on ranching at the Nikki and Jax Famous Ranch. Through clever deductions, perseverance and dangerous-human laced listening sessions, the two friends (they have been friends for at least 13 billion years now) are attempting to be 3rd/4th dimensional on planet Earth.
Nikki and Jax
is unending ascent
is ex-exhaustive exuberance
is rising tensions
will make u famous, RANCH
perpetual motion fun
always midswing

Joy/Fun is the radical act of creation that moves social justice beyond resistance. Nikki and Jax have downloaded their hyper-fun essences into the physical bodies of Hannah Patterson & Coley Mixan. Patterson & Mixan met in the place (seattle, wa) they told themselves they would meet before they came back to earth for another wiggle around what humans term the “Sun.”

Based in Oakland and New Mexico but having spent most of her life moving between city centers, the Navajo Nation, and the Gila River Indian Community, Grace Rosario Perkins is interested in disassembling her personal narrative and reassembling it as one that layers words, objects, faces, signifiers, and sound built from cultural dissonance, language, and history. Grace has lectured at venues such as the Mills College Painting department, Pomona College, UC Santa Barbara, Occidental College, the San Francisco Public Library, Real Time and Space Oakland, and the Museum of Arts and Design NY. Her lectures centralize land, biography, collaborative practice, and material. She has been an artist-in-residence at Facebook HQ, ACRE, Varda Artists Residency, Sedona Summer Colony, White Leaves, Kala Art Institute, and nominated for the Liquitex Painter’s Residency and Tosa Studio Award at Minnesota Street Project. Her collaborations range in size and practice from her previous work with Black Salt Collective to the recurring work with her father Olen Perkins and an array of artists from her DIY and indigenous communities.

Adee Roberson was born in West Palm Beach, Florida in 1981. Her work weaves sonic and familial archives, with landscape, technicolor, rhythm, form, and spirit. She has exhibited and performed at numerous venues including, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Antenna Gallery, Project Row Houses, Charlie James Gallery, Contemporary Art Center New Orleans, MOCA Los Angeles, and Art Gallery of Windsor, Ontario. She is based Los Angeles, California.

Ileana Tejada is a Mexican-American artist born and raised in Southern California. A former NCAA Division II Track and Field athlete, Tejada’s work progressively deals with female masculinity and the opposition to “marianismo”-the exaggerated sense of traditional femininity. Tejada received her BFA from California State Polytechnic University- Pomona, as well as a BS (Kinesiology, Pedagogy). In 2015 she graduated with a Masters of Fine Art in Painting from San Francisco Art Institute. Tejada is the recipient of the Murphy Cadogan Graduate Fellowship, the Outstanding Graduate Student Award in Painting, and SFAI’s Amir Esfahani Graduate Studio Fellowship. Her work has been exhibited at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, Gallery CB1 in Los Angeles, and published in New American Paintings, No.123, MFA Annual, 2016. She is currently working and living in San Francisco, CA.

Adia Sykes is a Chicago-based curator, arts administrator, and recent graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) with a Masters of Arts from the Department of Arts Administration and Policy. She has a BA in Anthropology from the University of Chicago (2016) with a focus on material culture and museums.

Her current research interests include examining the history and potential of curatorial practice as an advocacy tool for racial equity in the arts and racial and gendered identities explored in the visual and performative practices of emerging artists. Her Masters thesis focused on formations of self-organized networks of support that exist to sustain the practices of historically marginalized artist communities and maps this contemporary ecosystem of support. Her curatorial work has been exhibited at The Sullivan Galleries, Woman Made Gallery, the Chicago Mayor’s Office, and ACRE Projects.

Open Hours: Sundays, Noon-4pm and by appointment

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Tags: A Landscape Madeup, ACRE, ACRE Projects, Adee Roberson, Adia Sykes, Chiara Galimberti, Chicago, Coley Mixan, Grace Rosario Perkins, Hannah Patterson, Ileana Tejada, West Town