(Un)Real curated by Haylie Jimenez

Marginalized subcultures being celebrated, interrogated, and documented remains the link between this body of work. These artists all showcase certain lived experiences with exaggerated and “unreal” elements that are often in the fantastical or surreal. Whether exaggerated limbs or butterfly wings feature, ultimately there is a sense of the “other” as unquestioned and integral.

The sculptural and archival nature of these works targets a feeling of existing in our realm, our world, forever solidifying the urgency and importance of these works and the artists behind them.

Juan Arango Palacios
Anthony Rodriguez
Adrian and Danny EL ES
Val Schlosberg
Mariposa Martinez
Janeice Maddox
Haylie Jimenez
Sydnie Jimenez
Moises Salazar Tlantenchi
Aaron Eskridge

September 4 – 26, 2026
Opening reception: Friday, September 4, 6-9pm

Azadeh Hussaini
State of Being

September 4 – 26, 2026
Opening reception: Friday, September 4, 6-9pm

State of Being

Statement/Bio
Azadeh Hussaini is an Iranian-American visual artist, educator, and curator based in Chicago. Her practice spans painting, installation, drawing, and sculpture, engaging questions of identity, displacement, and social struggle as lived and material conditions.

State of Being brings together strands of her recent and ongoing work to consider how life takes form under pressure—how bodies, like structures carry weight, absorb rupture, and persist. Working with recycled materials such as paper, cardboard, newspapers, and fibers, Hussaini treats matter as already marked by time, circulation, and fragility. Through layering and reassembly, these
materials hold memory in unstable and shifting forms. Shaped by a condition of in-betweenness across geography, language, and political reality, the work reflects on displacement and endurance without fixed resolution. While informed by an unstable and changing global context, the exhibition resists closure, remaining attentive to the ongoing nature of these conditions.

State of Being approaches living not as a fixed state but as a continuous practice of persistence, relations, and attention.

Rial Rye
Oscillation
solo exhibition
September 4 – 26, 2026
Opening reception: Friday, September 4, 6-9pm

Oscillation translates ocular trauma and somatic disruption into a visceral visual ecosystem. Rooted in the artist personal experience with eye injury, the work replicates the resulting disorienting perceptual shifts, visual static, and persistent sensation of nausea.

Through a reductive subtractive process, high-visibility signal pigments are applied to wide wooden panels and are chaotically carved away. The act of gouging and excavating through fields of high-contrast green, purple, and intense neon accents reveals the raw wood grain underneath, creating a textured topography that vibrates against the eye. The undulating, maze-like line work mimics optical interference, ocular drift, and phantom shapes, forcing the viewer’s gaze into a restless state of micro-adjustments.

By scaling these perceptual distortions up to an immersive triptych, Oscillation bridges the internal mechanics of neurological and ocular damage with external physical space. High-contrast safety hues—typically deployed to signal hazard or demand attention—here function as an unsettling sensory overload, inviting the viewer to inhabit the uneasy equilibrium between clarity, disruption, and physical vertigo.

Rial Rye is a self-taught contemporary artist and sculptor based in Atlanta, Georgia. Grounded in a deeply autobiographical practice, Rye’s work translates first-hand lived experiences, physical trauma, and personal history into tactile visual phenomena. Through subtractive wood carving, intense optical fields, and high-visibility pigments, their work investigates the raw intersections of perception, memory, and material culture.

Official Website

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Tags: Aaron Eskridge, Adrian and Danny EL ES, Anthony Rodriguez, Azedeh Hussaini, Haylie Jimenez, Humboldt Park, Janeice Maddox, Juan Arango-Palacios, Mariposa Martinez, Moises Salazar Tlantenchi, Rial Rye, Sydnie Jimenez, UNREAL, Val Schlosberg