Barber
Residence
solo exhibition

September 6 – 28, 2024
Residence is a solo exhibition by painter bARBER depicting his attempt to find home in friends, lovers, place, and strangers.
bARBER is a non-representative figurative painter relying on elements of abstraction to personify the invisible nature of the individuals I paint. Heavily influenced by the music and makeshift bred from the underserved quadrant of Black American culture, he repurposes everyday materials, such as junk mail, packaging, and found objects, to construct artworks from a cultural perspective.
Artist statement
I use abstraction to create moments of pause towards rethinking our hardened notions of identity through non-representational portraiture on paper. I utilize the contemporary art praxis to go about it like how Black people go about life.

X. A. Li
FULL TIME
solo exhibition

“Bataille distinguishes between two types of play, strong and weak. In a society in which utility has become the dominant principle only weak play is deemed acceptable…Strong play, by contrast, cannot be reconciled with the principle of work and production. It puts life itself at risk.” Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals.
FULL-TIME examines the relationship between personhood and labor beginning from several government publications – a worker’s compensation taxonomy enumerating sixty-two discrete body parts and their corresponding entry code, records of workplace injuries, and records of workplace deaths. Through video, sound, custom software, and interactive devices, FULL-TIME explores the brittle bio- and psychopolitics reducing individuals to disembodied statistics. Deliberately misapplying numerous stochastic algorithms and artificial intelligence networks to original footage and bureaucratic datasets, FULL-TIME charts the collapses underway and the unknown states that might follow.
FULL-TIME was created in collaboration with sound artist Estlin Usher as part of audiovisual project Post Consumer Material.
Bio
X. A. Li (b. 1991) is an artist and computer scientist based in Chicago. Using video, sound, text, and software, she creates installations and performances excavating contemporary systems of power by applying dominant technologies in atypical ways. She has exhibited, performed, and given talks across the United States and internationally, including presentations at the International Museum of Surgical Science, Chicago Humanities Festival, Experimental Sound Studio, Public Space One, The Wrong Biennale, CURRENTS New Media Festival, Elastic Arts Foundation, the Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago, Woman Made Gallery, Mana Contemporary, and the Stamps Gallery at the University of Michigan. She holds an M.S. from the Georgia Institute of Technology, where her research focused on generative artificial intelligence, and a B.A. from the University of Chicago.

Evan Stoler
Monotony
solo exhibition

Statement: I want to challenge viewers to question the textures, patterns, and organic entities placed before them as I strip supplies of their commonplace function. With each piece I create or utilize a mechanical process and repeat that process to develop a form or effect. Inspiration for the creations is drawn from various crafts involving textiles, wood, and paper, for example. Light is important because it emphasizes a blurred distinction between familiar reflective surfaces and in some cases creates a paradox of fragility. My work is a testament to the monotony of the daily grind and revealing the beauty in the mundane.
Bio: Evan Stoler (born 1993 NE USA) graduated from Denison University in Ohio with a BA in Studio Art and Biology in 2016. Since then, he has shown collections of work in Chicago, Omaha, and other galleries in the Midwest. Stoler was an A. I. R. Vallauris ceramics resident in France in 2017 and a PADA resident in Portugal in 2022. The Omaha Entertainment and Arts Awards nominated Stoler as “Outstanding Emerging Visual Artist” in 2022. Stoler is currently represented by Anderson O’Brien Fine Arts in Omaha, Nebraska and lives and works in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

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Tags: Barber, Chicago, Evan Stoler, Humbodt Park, Ignition project space, X. A. Li