Join us on Sunday, February 24 for a soft opening reception for Spontaneous Remarks, featuring works by Bobby Gonzalez and Erin Smego.

Exquisite Style Battle
Challenging mainstream beauty and fashion standards, 6 Stylists will create their own version of fashionable flair. Using recycled textiles and found materials to style abstract sculptural structures, made by artist Erin Smego, stylists will create designs that abstract and embrace the full spectrum of gender, size, and ability. Channeling the surrealist game of exquisite corpse, first round stylists will hand off their designs to a previously blind-folded second stylist to complete the design. Audience members will be invited to vote in on their favorite look.

Stylists:
Marie Baldwin
Cassie Steffek
Adia Sykes
Aija Moreno
Sabrina Greig
Aimee Rusch
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This event is part of, “It may have a spontaneous origin”, a HATCH exhibition with work by Marie Baldwin, Kate Conlon, Bobby Gonzales, Olivia Petrides, Erin Smego, and Matthew Wead, opening on March 1st.

“Spontaneous Remarks,” embraces chance-based and sequential programming processes as a strategy in opening up dialogue around what a curatorial framework could look like. Revealing a snapshot of the group’s unconscious reality, the show draws on elements from the Surrealist parlor game, Exquisite Corpse. The game requires participants to write/draw on a sheet of paper, fold to conceal their contribution, and then pass to the next person. In continuing with the elements of objective chance, play, and spontaneity, the artists have been paired up at random to cumulatively present their works over the course of three consecutive openings. Challenging the static notion of exhibition-making, this process aims to highlight the ways in which relationships between artworks evolve and become increasingly complex over a continuum of time and space.

The Surrealists understood reality as something that was rooted in the unconscious mind. Although the artworks are formally disparate, with media that include: sculpture, textile, painting, and photography, the exhibition aims to expose hidden possibilities that are underpinned by a shared unconscious reality. Rather than impose one overarching thematic connection between works, relationships are formed in an un-premeditated way. This approach allows for seemingly uncanny, absurd, and sometimes strikingly cohesive connections through occurrences between form, color, texture, and thematics. With concepts ranging from the deconstruction of fashion trends and pop culture icons to the grandeur of nature and scientific investigation, the six artists’ works converge in this moment to weave together a narrative that defies the predetermined modes of canonized exhibition-making and takes pleasure in aleatoric composition.

Curated by Courtney Cintron.

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Tags: Adia Sykes, Aija Moreno, Aimee Rusch, Bobby Gonzales, Bobby Gonzalez, Cassie Steffek, Chicago, Chicago Artists' Coalition, Courtney Cintron, Erin Smego, Kate Conlon, Marie Baldwin, Matthew Wead, Olivia Petrides, Sabrina Greig, Spontaneous Remarks/ Exquisite Style Battle