Year One

The Plan
September 19 – November 2, 2025
Opening Reception: September 19, 6-10pm

Journie Cirdain
Ingrid Olson
Marina Ross

Curated by Esther Espino

Shaped from the earliest years of guileless girlhood, anyone identifying as a woman has felt the restrictions of society wielded against her autonomy and selfhood. It is a shift that occurs in adolescence, sometimes prior, when a girl ceases to be a child, an object of unbridled consumption meant to sponge up all of her surroundings, and becomes an object to be consumed. Her appetite, for knowledge, experience, and exploration, is corralled and she is subjected to the leather crop of male expectations. Female appetite, since the book of Genesis, has been considered catastrophic. But no book acknowledges the exile of girls from the garden of childhood. Year One indulges in the nuance and complexity of female desire, joy and satisfaction unaffected by the influence of men.

The three artists featured in Year One each produce work imbued with curiosity, eroticism, fantasy, and gluttony. Ingrid Olson, in her rapturous pastel drawings, evokes a sense of play and freedom that points to the limitless creativity of girlhood. Using velour paper, she creates sensuously dense compositions that read like a preteen junk drawer. Flowers, butterflies, hearts and dolphins crowd the frame like a Delia’s catalogue. Olson layers a rich palette of jewel tones to a hedonistic extent. She grinds pigment into the paper thickly enough to generate a second piece by pressing a fresh piece of paper against the original drawing. An image blotted into life like lipstick on a tissue. Similarly, Journie Cirdain uses hyperfeminine symbolism to create drawings that explore a pernicious female eroticism. Rendered in graphite chiaroscura, Cirdain’s drawings cast roses, chandeliers, and candelabras with all the mystique of a film noir femme fatale. Domestic objects become tragic villains, the sparkle of crystal glints like a seductress’ smile, dew on a flower petal is as poignant as a tear, and a rose’s thorn as sharp as the canines of a maneater. Cirdain’s work reminds us of the predatory nature of desire, the biological imperative to hunt when hunger demands to be sated. Marina Ross’s paintings on paper provide a landscape of interiority, a Boschian garden of delights teeming with ideas. By fixating on single stills from The Wizard of Oz, Ross creates an iterative space for deeper contexts to surface. She loses herself in this decadent repetition, allowing the subtle differences between her paintings to disintegrate the scene. Dorothy’s innocent, wide eyed stare becomes increasingly doelike, a field of poppies wavers deliriously, and fantastic sets grow more and more surreal and disorienting. Deftly employing a spectrum of creamy pastel colors, Ross recalls the dreamlike moment when Dorothy opens the door to the technicolor land of Oz. A reentry into the garden Eve chewed her way out of.

Year One should be waded through like the creek that drowned Ophelia, Hamlet’s seminal doomed woman. Let the algae strangle your ankles, watercress brush your thighs, the perfume of briar roses sweetening the otherwise fetid smell of muck and mire. Imagine yourself submerged in the girl’s burbling grave. Ophelia lies buoyant, blissful in her little death. A serene perhaps sly smile on her face as she basks in her release not just from madness, but from the obsession of men as well. It is an exodus from the constraints that infected her mind and twisted her idea of self. An exit that allows her to rest placidly among the floating blossoms, her own vessel in the current.

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Tags: Chicago, Esther Espino, Ingrid Olson, Journie Cirdain, Marina Ross, the PLAN, Year One