Continuing our 20th anniversary programming, we are ecstatic to open a show featuring three former Roots staff members, curated by our Program Director, Bobby Luck. Through the ritual of domesticy, we as humans are in constant conversation with our ancestors in a sort of time-honoured parallel play. We create home within or alongside others in a mimic of a gestural culture learned from centuries of interpersonal consideration. Through obscuring the corporeal, the artists attempt to strip away the temporal aspects of connecting and disconnecting from loved ones. This abstraction of moments maps out a geography of negative space, finding what has been left behind within the shifting matter of our environments. Though a recreation of an occurrence cannot strip time away enough to fall back into a memory or moment completely, echoes of our kin’s actions seep through our own hands, like an image fading around the edge into something new.

Christina Warzecha uses color, space, and texture to build vignettes that explore how processing trauma can change the truth of memory. She encourages unpredictability and a sense of play in her work, creating fluid compositions that capture the wistful yearning for the safety and innocence of childhood. Similar to the coping mechanisms applied to more difficult moments from the past, she abstracts memory into fragmented feelings and forms.

phia lynne’s work encapsulates physical and ontological sanctuary through observation of the corporeal altar, considering how the most mundane evidences of being are weighted with remnants of memory. Archival images of black domesticity invoke a nuanced sensibility to a racialized relationship to love, loss, and desire related to interiority and propriety. Using non-archival materials, phia draws upon time as a medium and collaborator. Their work beckons an intimate, haptic exchange between itself and its viewer—a step closer, a crouch, a peek from below. Utilizing ekphrastic poetics, illegible imagery, and olfactory engagement, their work calls to recognize the scent of a homeland, the whistles of an ancestor, and the tender embrace of a distant love.

Utilizing memory, word, and material object, the work of Talia Kimberly Wright aims to bridge the gap between the ancestral, traditional, and regenerated lives of African Americans both affected by the Great Migration and across the African diaspora. As a poetry and prose writer with a strong foundation in speculative fiction, she is interested in the ways physicality aids us in tactile processing. By creating objects using textile, ceramics, paper, or paint, she is able to speak life into written words on the page. In other words, she aims to bring storytelling to the front of her practice by creating and providing physical examples, experiences, and textures that represent a journey––a way to process intergenerational movement, healing, and resolve.

Christina Warzecha (b. 1990) lives and works in Chicago, IL with her partner and five cats. She is the lead preparator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago. Christina holds an MFA in Ceramics and a Graduate Certificate in Museum Studies. Her recent body of work explores the material processes of ceramics and painting, referencing memory, coping, and nostalgia.

phia lynne is a Chicago-born and based interdisciplinary artist, archivist, and curator. Spanning experimental print media, video collage, painting, and writing, their work materializes the temporalities of homeplace and blackqueer belonging. Through tangibilized poetics, phia commemorates a sensorial acquaintance with the black altarplace. phia pursued their BA in Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Their work has been shown at Hyde Park Art Center, Blanc Gallery, Heaven Gallery, and John St. Gallery.

Talia Kimberly Wright is a multidisciplinary artist, memory worker, and writer born and raised on the Southside of Chicago. Utilizing memory, word, and material objects (books, ceramics, paper), her work aims to bridge the gap between the ancestral, traditional, and regenerated lives of Black people in America, specifically through the lens of Afro-surrealism. She has an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Tags: Bobby Luck, Chicago, Christina Warzecha, Phia Lynne, Roots & Culture, Talia Kimberly Wright, West Town