In an event hosted by Susan Snodgrass, audiences are invited to sift and meander through a visual experience that includes a narrative installation of 35 mm slide projections. Muralla Alta/High Wall forefronts subjective narratives and evokes the particularities of memory by presenting domestic and public architectural scenes. Artists Edra Soto and Daniel Hojnacki collected the photographic imagery for this work.

About the Participants
Daniel Hojnacki’s use of photography is driven by material experimentation investigating the elusive act of memory. His main source is the archived image and the domestic forgotten landscape. Hojnacki uses found photographs and reinterprets memory medical tests into abstracted imagery to convey the confusing and often difficult process of remembering. He uses antiquated techniques and the technology of slide projection in an exploration of the conventional darkroom. Hojnacki’s practice is persistent in creating works that speak to the inherent role photography plays in how our memories are collected and remembered. Hojnacki is an educator for youth in the Chicago area at After School Matters and Marwen Foundation. His work has been shown nationally and internationally including at the Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago, Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, Tormenta Gallery (La Plata, Argentina), ‘Untitled’ Art Space (Vancouver, BC), Johalla Projects Chicago, The Franklin Chicago, and Chicago Art Department. His work has been reviewed and published by Hyperallergic, New City Art, LVL 3 Artist of the week, and Specimen La Revue. He has been awarded the Community Assistance Arts Program Grant (CAAP Grant) and the Albert P Weisman Award, and residencies at Residencia Corazón (Argentina) and the HATCH Projects with the Chicago Artists Coalition.

Susan Snodgrass is a Chicago-based critic and editor of ARTMargins Online. Much of her writing is devoted to alternative models of critical practice and art making, whether exploring new genres of public art or contemporary art in Eastern Europe. She has written for both print and online publications for more than 30 years, most notably for Art in America, for which she served as a corresponding editor (1994–2013). She has contributed articles to numerous other periodicals, including The Seen and Textile: Cloth and Culture, and is the editor of several books and catalogues. Her current curatorial projects focus on the architecture of Ken Isaacs, and have been included in the exhibitions Learning Modern at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Sullivan Galleries (2009–10) and Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, organized by the Walker Art Center (2015). She is a senior lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her blog, In/Site: Reflections on the Art of Place is devoted to art, culture, and urbanism, using Chicago as a vantage point for reflections on the work of contemporary artists, public art, and urban projects that reinvent the spatial environment of the city. In/Site offers a quasi-geographical focus on the topic of art and urbanism, what cultural theorist Rosalyn Deutsche refers to as an “urban-aesthetic”, through essays and reviews that analyze how artists, as creative agents and critical thinkers, reimagine the physical and conceptual spaces that culture can occupy. The impetus for In/Site comes from Snodgrass’s desire to retool her critical writing and to reengage with artists and ideas that are often absent from the mainstream art press. The title, while referring to various site-specific art practices, spins on the idea of site as a physical and geographic space, and on a vision of place (or insight) that is contextual and self-conscious.

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Tags: Chicago, Daniel Hojnacki, Edra Soto, Illinois, Muralla Alta/High Wall, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Susan Snodgrass