Chicago Artists Coalition is pleased to announce “Works in Progress”, a group exhibition to showcase the pieces our BOLT 2023-24 artist residents have been working on.

The exhibition highlights works by:

Alexis de Chaunac, Abraham Cone, ebere agwuncha, Olya Salimova, Ále Campos, and Salvador Andrade

The night will also include a performance, “Origins”, at 6:30pm, by Olya Salimova and Ále Campos, featuring Spencer Gale and Juliette Morris.

This is your chance to catch a sneak peak of what is to come in our 2024 exhibition lineup.

Image: Salvador Andrade, “Doble mirada”, 120 x 100 cm. (approx. 47.25 x 39.4 in.), Oil on Canvas

This event is free and open to the public.

Alexis de Chaunac (b. New York, NY, 1991) is a Mexican-French visual artist working between painting, drawing, collage and installation. He received a BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 2014 and recently completed his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is a recipient of the Dedalus Foundation Fellowship and the Fundación Jumex de Arte Contemporáneo grant. His works have been exhibited in galleries and museums including Sargent’s Daughters in New York (2019), Carrillo Gil Art Museum in Mexico City (2017) and Pinacoteca Diego Rivera in Veracruz (2015). He has been featured and given interviews to publications such as Whitewall, Whitehot Magazine and Artsy’s Editorial. He currently lives and works in Chicago, IL.

Alexis de Chaunac approaches his work like an archeologist, uncovering layers of our collective experience. His body of work is the result of his personal connection to his Mexican and French heritage, as well as his interwoven cultural histories. De Chaunac recently found inspiration in the forms of Milagros — charm-like metal objects that can be used for healing purposes and as votive offerings. These magical objects, also referred to as ex-votos, were used to ward off disease, pain, and misfortune. De Chaunac’s works often confront the viewer with the immediacy of life-size organs – lungs, feet, eyes, hands, hearts – all laid out bare. The forms operate both individually and in communication with one another, creating a hieroglyphic lexicon waiting to be deciphered. Having lived in and through a pandemic, he feels that the depiction of the body’s internal forms takes on a new relevancy and vulnerability.

Abraham Cone (b. 1998, MI) works out of the poetic tension between the ground of painting and the ground under his feet, moving conceptually and physically between floor and wall. Human touch is channeled into canvas through intimate caresses of brush. Abraham besets forms in pattern, and figures lightly graze one another amidst synchronized movement. Materials are often gathered through gift economies, becoming works which are more than the sum of their parts. Image-making is Abraham’s conduit for joining people with places in reciprocity—conjuring relational space through pictorial space.

Familial relations with land by way of farming beget Abraham’s interest in agrarian rituals. Fields, woods, and lakes are sites for solitude, platonic fellowship, and homoerotic encounter: in life as in image. Color becomes permeable by way of optical-mixing, softly melding figure with ground in luminosity. Large-format paintings produce more than optical encounters: physical encounters. Abraham vaporously builds atmosphere layer upon layer with soft gestures according to his heart.

ebere agwuncha (b. 1997, Chicago) is a Nigerian American, Chicago based transdisciplinary artist and educator. Their work seeks to reach the natural depths of memory that hands carry through contemporary craft practices. ebere is preparing for the end of the world via architecture(s) of preservation, ritual, meditation, domesticity, and intimacy. She currently utilizes various techniques including woodworking, ceramics, woven natural fibers, photography, interactive sound, installation, sculpture, and moving image.

ebere holds a Bachelors of Industrial Design from Iowa State University. their work has been shown and supported by ACRE Residency, CAC BOLT Residency, Comfort Station, Chicago Art Department, 3Arts Make a Wave Award, Chuquimarca Projects, in care of Black women, The Buxton Initiative, Plates Journal, Rukus Magazine and others. ebere has taught with the SAIC Sculpture Department and currently teaches with the UChicagoArts, Arts + Public Life Design Apprenticeship Program.

In 2021, ebere started ccia (creating care-filled igbo architecture(s)): an ongoing research based series celebrating the intersections of architecture, design, craft, and art in the Igbo sphere and beyond.

Olya Salimova is an artist born and raised in Russia but now living in US. She considers how her body has crossed borders and become a transplant. Transformation and hybridity are the ideas and methods that guide her art practice.

Salimova holds her BFA degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with her previous degree in philology and English, and an MBA. Her multivalent life and work experiences – from translation to project management and from bodybuilding to arts – manifest themselves in experimentations with many materials, techniques and approaches.

Salimova exhibited her work in multiple group exhibitions and online. Her solo show Beesworks took place at SITE Galleries, Chicago, IL, in September, 2021.

Ále Campos (b. Los Angeles, California) is a multidisciplinary artist and performer whose elastic studio practice is anchored by drag and their persona, Celeste. Their performances, often mediated by technologies (cameras, green screens, live-streams, projections), test the directions of the gaze and the scales of hyper-visibility, stretching the boundaries of the stage. Their live work naturally unfolds into sculpture, video and print-media at the hand of exploring ephemera and the after-life of performance. Drag is at once their material but also their scaffolding for performance making, guiding their efforts in returning to formative experiences re-constructing familial archives and cultural mythologies. Through this they strive to unearth intersectionalities through time whilst navigating a queer, future-thinking state of becoming. Their work harnesses the potential of melodrama, vulnerability and camp and vibrates between the traditions of performance and drag.

They are an active, participating member of the drag and nightlife community in Chicago and are currently a resident performer / co-producer of Rumors, a monthly event that showcases some of the city’s premiere performers and DJ’s.

They received a BA from Bennington College (2016) and an MFA in Performance at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago (2022). Their work has been shown at the Hyde Park Arts Center, NO NATION, Comfort Station, Heaven Gallery, Ruschwoman (Chicago, IL), Lanemeyer Projects (Denver, CO), Collar Works (Troy, NY), September Gallery, The 405 Project (Hudson, NY), Kunsthalle Darmstadt (Germany). They attended ACRE Residency and are a recipient of the 2022 James Nelson Fellowship Award at SAIC and the City of Hudson’s Tourism Board Grant (2021).

Salvador Andrade Arévalo was born in Jalisco, Mexico, and raised in the Chicagoland area. He is a trained printmaker that works primarily in painting, drawing, and installation.

As a fourth generation migrant laborer, he contends with the erasure and commodification of his family’s culture, history, and traditions due to economic duress imposed by neoliberal policies and draconian immigration policies. His work draws potency from ancestral influences connected to intergenerational knowledge, folklore, hand crafts, syncretic belief systems, and vernacular traditions.

He received both his BA (’10) and MFA (’22) from Yale University in Painting & Printmaking. He also holds an MPhil in Latin American Studies from the University of Cambridge (’12), with a thesis that focuses on 19th century Mexican lithography.

He has held residencies and fellowships with Spudnik Press, Fulbright (Mexico City), SOMA Summer, Yale University Art Gallery, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and Chicago Artists Coalition (BOLT). In addition, his artwork is included in the permanent collections of the National Museum of Mexican Art and the Willis Tower.

Image: Shot of ebere agwuncha’s studio by Ashley Baranczyk

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Tags: Abraham Cone, Ále Campos, Alexis de Chaunac, Chicago, Chicago Artists' Coalition, ebere agwuncha, Olya Salimova, Salvador Andrade, West Town, Works in Progress