Orbits
Featuring Black Quantum Futurism, Judith Brotman, Sara Drake, Sahana Ramakrishnan, and Nina Sarnelle

May 11 – June 23, 2019
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 11, 12:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. / 2233 S. Throop, #419

Tiger Strikes Asteroid is pleased to announce Orbits, a four-part concurrent exhibition spanning all four locations (Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles) to celebrate our first 10 years as an artist-run organization.

Each exhibition of Orbits draws together the work of four artists from our respective cities to examine their interconnected legacies and the conversations that unfold in placing their work in dialogue with one another. The multigenerational artists included in Orbits were nominated by current TSA members to highlight the work of those that have contributed to their arts communities not only through their own works but also through their support of other artists.

While each TSA location will mount a distinct exhibition, they all share a common goal of bringing these 16 artists to new audiences and placing their work in a different context/conversation. Orbits is a microcosm of what we have been doing as an organization for the past ten years — providing an alternative space for artists to show together, meet, and build relationships

Orbits in Chicago:

In the Chicago presentation of Orbits, Black Quantum Futurism, Judith Brotman, Sara Drake, Sahana Ramakrishnan, and Nina Sarnelle explore themes of communication, transformation, and alternative narratives through a broad range of materials. Black Quantum Futurism presents an installation of mounted clocks that embody alternative temporalities while Sahana Ramakrishnan’s mixed media works depict human/animal transformation and the self as both predator and prey. A video collaboration by Sara Drake and Nina Sarnelle provides instruction for the encryption of messages into whale songs transmitted across the ocean. And Judith Brotman’s sculptural and sound works offer a contemplative experience based on our complex relationship to machines and desire. We are delighted to bring these varied practices into conversation at TSA Chicago.

Artists:

Black Quantum Futurism is a Philadelphia-based interdisciplinary creative practice between Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips that weaves quantum physics, afrofuturism, and Afrodiasporic concepts of time, ritual, and sound to create practical ways to escape negative temporal loops, oppression vortexes, and the digital matrix. Through writing, film, visual art, performance, sound, socially engaged art, and creative research, BQF explores personal, cultural, familial, and communal cycles of experience, and solutions for transforming oppressive linear temporalities into empowering, alternative temporalities. BQF considers how time imprints itself on communities, and how time plays out in the lives oppressed people and the social constructs they are situated within. Repurposing the language and imagery of science and science fiction we uncover counter histories, afro-diasporic mythologies, and futures that challenge exclusionary, mainstream versions of history and the future(s). BQF has created a number of community-based projects, performances, experimental music projects, installations, workshops, books, short films, zines, including the award-winning Community Futures Lab. BQF Collective is a 2018 Velocity Fund Grantee, 2018 Solitude x ZKM Web Resident, 2017 Center for Emerging Visual Artists Fellow, 2017 Pew Fellow, 2016 A Blade of Grass Fellow, and a 2015 artist-in-residence at West Philadelphia Neighborhood Time Exchange. BQF has presented, exhibited, and performed at Red Bull Arts NY, Serpentine Gallery, Philadelphia Art Museum, Open Engagement, MOMA PS1, Bergen Kunsthall, Le Gaite Lyrique, Squeaky Wheel, and more. BQF will be featured in the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial.

Judith Brotman is an interdisciplinary artist and educator from Chicago. Brotman received her BFA and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies. Her work includes mixed media installations and theatrical immersive environments which occupy a space between sculpture and drawing. More recent work incorporates language/text based conceptual projects which are also meditations on the possibility of transformation. Brotman has exhibited extensively in Chicago and throughout the US. Exhibitions include: Asphodel Gallery/Brooklyn, Threewalls, Chicago Cultural Center, Hyde Park Art Center, Gallery 400, Illinois State Museum, INOVA, the DeVos Art Museum, Hampshire College, Smart Museum of Art, SOFA Chicago, The Society of Arts & Crafts, Boston, and The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Brotman has taught at as a Harper Fellow at The University of Chicago and currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Sara Drake is an artist and animator living in LA. She is a former columnist for the contemporary arts blog Bad At Sports and writes infrequently for The Wire magazine. She received her BFA from the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago and is currently a Design Media Arts student at UCLA.

Sahana Ramakrishnan was born in Mumbai, India and raised in Singapore. She traveled to the United States to completer her BFA in Painting at RISD, and has since been living and working in Brooklyn. Sahana’s artworks have been exhibited in the Rubin Museum, Field Projects, Gateway Project Spaces, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, A.I.R. Gallery, Front Art Space, and more. She had previously been an artist-in-residence at Yaddo, NY, a SIP fellow at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, and a Feminist-in Residence program at Gateway Project Spaces. She has additionally been a fellow at the Yale/Norfolk Summer program, and a recipient of the Florence Lief grant from RISD

Nina Sarnelle is an artist and musician living in Los Angeles, with a BA from Oberlin College and an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University. A founding member of the Institute for New Feeling and dadpranks, her work includes intimate participatory performances, large public events, music composition, video and sculpture. In the last couple years her work has been shown at Whitechapel Gallery (London), Hammer Museum (LA), Getty Center (LA), Ballroom Marfa (TX), MoMA (NY), Istanbul Modern (Turkey), Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (Berlin), NADA (Miami), Museum of Art, Architecture & Technology (Lisbon),Fundacion PROA (Buenos Aires), Black Cube (Denver), Southern Exposure (San Francisco), Recess(NY), Akademie Schloss Solitude (Germany), Jardin Essential (Brussels), UNSW Galleries (Sydney),Project 88 (Mumbai), Kevin Space (Vienna),Villa Croce Contemporary Art Museum (Genova), Center for Contemporary Arts (Santa Fe), Mwoods (Beijing), MoCA Cleveland, Human Resources (LA), Borscht Festival (Miami), SPACES (Cleveland), Threewalls (Chicago), Vox Populi (Philadelphia), Miller Gallery(Pittsburgh), and featured in Frieze, Art in America, Vogue Italy, Huffington Post, SFMoMA, CreatorsProject, FlashArt, and Hyperallergic.

Other Orbits exhibitions:

Philadelphia: May 3 – June 15, 2019
Joyce Owens (Chicago), Habib Kheradyar Zamani, Pepon Osorio, Phoebe Grip

New York: May 10 – June 16, 2019
Coco Picard (Chicago), Christian Tedeschi, Leroy Johnson, Carol Bruns

Los Angeles: May 25 – June 16, 2019
Ruyell Ho (Chicago), Anne Bray, Ivanco Talevski, Gregory Coates

Tiger Strikes Asteroid gratefully acknowledges the David and June Kim Foundation for their generous support of Orbits.

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Tags: Black Quantum Futurism, Chicago, Illinois, Judith Brotman, Lower West Side, Nina Sarnelle, Orbits, Orbits: TSA's 10 Year Anniversary Exhibition, Sahana Ramakrishnan, sara drake, Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago