Whereabouts

Exhibition Dates: May 24 – July 5, 2025
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 24th, 1 – 4 pm
Exhibition Walk-Through & Conversation: Saturday, June 14th, 1-2 p.m.

“As we have enhanced our power to determine nature, so we have rendered it less able to converse with us.” “We have become experts in analysing what nature can do for us, but lack a language to evoke what it can do to us. The former is important; the ladder is vital.”

Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks, pg. 25

Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago is proud to present Whereabouts, a solo exhibition of the expansive and precarious assemblages by C.C. Ann Chen. Whereabouts brings together a variety of Chen’s cross-disciplinary works that respond to local bodies of water in the Chicago area and form a continuum with her long-term project exploring landscape. Combining an active monumental wall installation composed of cartographic layers of toned paper sutured with painters tape, silver point drawings that shift with oxidation, and multifaceted collages, Chen’s works in this exhibition invite us to consider our shifting orientation to the spaces they conjure from a variety of perspectives. Additionally, ceramic stones Chen commissioned from local artist and curator, Paul Hopkin, act as anchors for a selection of works on paper that unfold dimensionally.

Works in Whereabouts draw inspiration from the way landscapes continually fluctuate and evolve. Chen’s drawn lines, originating from templates cut to the outlines of water ripples, are fluid traces suggesting pathways, boundaries, and edges. A key feature of Chen’s works are their interplay between language and color. Common paint swatches gathered from hardware stores that label color with names such as Old Prairie are found among the intersections of the collage elements and within the work titles, gently tugging at a collective desire for sensorial connection to natural places that have slowly dwindled in size.

While Chen’s collages form configurations that suggest maps from a bird’s eye view, the ceramic stones foster a closer, physical connection to land. Informed by her journaling process of collecting stones encountered on walks along Lake Michigan and its tributaries, these sculptures mimic forms shaped by time’s slow passage and hold space in their crevasses for paper fragments that accumulate in the process of making.

To describe one’s whereabouts requires an ability to communicate the specific features of the place where you can be found. In an era where the language we use to communicate landscape’s many nuances is quickly vanishing, Chen’s gestures emphasize a practice that insists we reckon with this loss and nurture our desire to more fully understand what landscape does to us.

Whereabouts is curated by Tiger Strikes Asteroid member, Holly Cahill.

Artist Bio

C. C. Ann Chen is an artist and educator based in Chicago, IL. Her work stems from architecture and landscape, exploring perceptual translations and misinterpretations of place and time. Projects range from direct observation to site-specific work, engaging each landscape with an open, experiment-based approach. Recent work reflects journeys by sea, to remote places in the North Atlantic and Arctic. Chen uses drawing and collage to examine new ways of looking at and understanding landscapes. She has exhibited in Chicago and beyond, including the Chinese American Museum of Chicago, slow gallery, Heaven Gallery, Glass Curtain Gallery at Columbia College, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Research House for Asian Art, Emerge Art Fair in Washington, D.C., Zhou B. Art Center, Hyde Park Art Center, Gallery 400, and The Franklin. Chen has been a recipient of the 3Arts Make a Wave Award, and the Midwest Voices and Visions Award. Her work has also been published in New American Paintings. Chen earned a BA in Architectural History from the University of Maryland, and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently Associate Professor, Adjunct, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Image Credit: C.C. Ann Chen, Whereabouts, pen and tape on paper, 2025

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Tags: C. C. Ann Chen, Chicago, Lower West Side, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Whereabouts