Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago is proud to announce:
Parallel Visions: C.C. Ann Chen, Carie Lassman, Frances Lee, and Monika Plioplyte
Exhibition Dates: August 22 – October 3 2026
Opening Reception: Saturday, August 22, 1- 4 p.m

Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago is pleased to present Parallel Visions, featuring work by the artist-run space TSA CHI’s newest members: C.C. Ann Chen, Carie Lassman, Frances Lee, and Monika Plioplyte.

Parallel Visions brings together four distinct artistic practices that approach questions of perception, place, and narrative from unique perspectives. Working across installation, painting, collage, and mixed media, these artists explore imagined landscapes, abstraction, adornment, and mythology. Rather than sharing a single visual language or method, their practices unfold in parallel, sometimes aligning and overlapping, sometimes diverging to reveal points of contrast and connection. The exhibition’s title speaks to this condition of looking alongside, rather than looking alike. Each artist pursues an independent inquiry, yet all consider how meaning is constructed through experience, memory, and shared cultural forms.This relational approach echoes Suzi Gablik’s call in The Reenchantment of Art for practices that move beyond isolated individual expression toward a more connected understanding of art’s relationship to myth, place, and community. The works in Parallel Visions invite viewers to move between perspectives and ask how what we see is shaped by the stories we tell. Together, these works create a conversation in which difference becomes a source of connection.

Featured artists:
Frances Lee presents new large-scale paintings on paper inspired by expressions of adornment in women’s basketball. Translating the uniform into the language of painting, Lee isolates its colors, shapes, and relationship to the body. The works consider the tension between individual style and institutional codes, using the visual language of the jersey to examine gender, women’s sports, and the conventions of painting. Lee’s work foregrounds the ways identity can be constructed through shared visual systems, drawing a connection between larger social narratives and the more intimate and atmospheric forms of looking found throughout the exhibition.

Carie Lassman explores spaces of uncertainty and the tension between opposing states. Dusty, weathered atmospheres are held within geometric constraints, while loose washes and transparent layers create porous, shifting fields. Repetitive structures introduce hard, opaque edges. These contrasts evoke divides between interior and exterior, public and private, and the natural and synthetic. Lasserman’s paintings extend the exhibition’s interest in parallel states, allowing contradictory conditions and images to exist simultaneously rather than resolve into a single point of view.

C.C. Ann Chen begins with slow observation of the land and seascapes of the Maine coast. Using rocks found on beaches in York, Maine, Chen creates viewfinders paired with commercial paint swatches, exploring the act of looking and the translation of observed color. Playful and participatory, the viewfinders invite visitors to look through the gallery and its south-facing window, connecting the exhibition space to the landscape beyond it. Chen’s work makes the act of seeing itself part of asking viewers to slow down, shift perspective, and recognize how perception shapes our understanding.
Monika Plioplyte’s Chorus is an installation of double-sided mixed-media drawings and collages that began as a series of self-portraits. Scanned and manipulated images of her own face and body draw on mythological bird-women, including the Siren, Harpy, and Alkonost. The work is presented here as an installation in which these figures function as a chorus, a collective voice, that the viewer can walk amongst. While the Sirens and Harpies of Greek mythology embody danger, seduction, and destruction, the Alkonost of Slavic folklore is a benevolent figure whose song brings comfort, joy, and forgetfulness of worldly sorrows. By bringing together contrasting mythologies, Plioplyte creates an uncanny environment where opposing narratives coexist, and multiple perspectives can occupy the same space without being reconciled into a single story.

Across the exhibition, the artists demonstrate what can happen when different ways of seeing are placed in conversation. The exhibition offers a model grounded in attention, curiosity, and coexistence. As a new group of members within Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago, Chen, Lassman, Lee, and Plioplyte also extend the organization’s artist-run ethos: a commitment to creating spaces and ideas where artists can encounter one another and build community through independent practices held in common space.

About the Artists
C.C. Ann Chen is an artist and educator based in Chicago, IL. Her work stems from landscape, exploring perceptual translations 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 experiences of land and seascapes in the North Atlantic, the Arctic, and closer to home, along the Chicago River and Lake Michigan. Chen uses drawing and collage to examine landscape imagery and understanding of place. She has exhibited in Chicago and beyond, including the Chinese American Museum of Chicago, Tiger Strikes Asteroid 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, and The Franklin. Chen recently completed a residency at the Surf Point Foundation, Maine, and has been a recipient of the 3Arts Make a Wave Award and the Midwest Voices and Visions Award. Chen earned a BA in Architectural History from the University of Maryland and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently an Associate Professor and Adjunct at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Carie Lasserman is a Chicago-based painter consumed by color relationships, line, and surface history. Her work hovers somewhere between abstraction and representation—suggestions of landscapes, architecture, plaid—exploring how physical and emotional structures can both support and constrain, where messy personal histories are caught within structural systems. Each painting is a physical record of its own making.
Frances Lee is an artist, educator, and arts administrator. Her artistic practice explores the symbolic language of images, materials, and objects through the relationship between abstraction and storytelling. Inspired by moral tensions in public space, civic discourse, and gender experience, her work explores how social forms are enacted and observed. With a focus on painting and sculpture, Lee’s artistic research asks how knowledge and communication are embodied in our social, personal, and biological structures of visual experience. Recent projects include the solo exhibition A tax on a bag and other landscapes (University of Illinois Springfield), put a bow on it., a curatorial investigation into the visual language of “girl stuff” (Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago), and Visual Languages of Camouflage and Painting, an ongoing archive of historical painting and studio art lessons exploring the tradition and impact of visual trickery, begun while teaching an arts+science course at the Marine Biological Laboratory (University of Chicago, Woods Hole, MA). Lee is a Lecturer in the Department of Art Theory & Practice at Northwestern University, a member of the artist collective Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago, and Deputy Director of the Lit & Luz Festival, a program facilitating cultural exchange between artists and writers in Chicago and Mexico.

Monika Plioplyte (b. 1989, Kaunas, Lithuania) has exhibited at Hyde Park Art Center, Northern Illinois Art Museum, Monique Meloche, Columbia College Chicago, Boundary Space, and Mana Contemporary (IL); Rare Visions and Space_Space (CO); and the Davis Center at Harvard University, AREA Gallery, and Gallery Kayafas (MA). Residencies include MASS MoCA, The Center Program at Hyde Park Art Center, the Harris Barron Fellowship at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, ACRE, Vermont Studio Center, and the NEIU Art + Design Studio Residency. She has received grants from the Illinois Arts Council, the DCASE Individual Artists Program, the John W. Kurtich Foundation, and the Blanche E. Colman Foundation. Most recently, she was named Newcity Breakout Artist 2026: Chicago’s Next Generation of Image Makers. Plioplyte holds a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She lives and works in Chicago, IL.

About the Curators
Teresa Silva is a writer, curator, and member of Tiger Strikes Asteroid, a non-profit network of artist-run spaces, since 2016. Her writings have appeared in Obsidian and Left Coast Press Inc. Recent exhibitions have been presented at Mana Contemporary, Chicago Cultural Center, and 6018North, and were featured in Art Papers, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Reader, Newcity Chicago, and WBEZ 91.5. In 2017, Silva was a Diversity + Leadership Fellow with the Artist Communities Alliance; in 2018, an artist-in-residence at The Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva; and, in 2020, a visual arts panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2022, she was listed at #5 in Newcity’s Art 50: Chicago’s Visual Vanguard for her contributions to making the city’s arts ecosystem more sustainable and equitable. Currently, Silva sits on the board of directors for Heaven Gallery. Prior to 2023, Silva was the executive and artistic director at the Chicago Artists Coalition, where she created supportive spaces for artists to advance their creativity and career by connecting them with leading art professionals and audiences through presentation and dialogue.

Cydney Lewis is a Chicago-based multimedia artist with a distinguished multidisciplinary background. She began in architecture at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she received a BS in Architectural Studies; she also attended L’École d’Architecture de Versailles, France. The fluidity of her ability to transform materials reflects her mastery of ballet as well as her endeavors in film. Her art is held in private collections around the world and has been exhibited widely, at venues including the Union League Chicago, Hyde Park Art Center, and The Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art. She has received various honors, including residencies with Chicago Public Schools and Lyseloth Musikerwohnhaus Basel, Switzerland, as well as awards including 3Arts Make A Wave, Best in Show at Governors State University, and the Black Creativity/Green Art Award from the Museum of Science and Industry.

About Tiger Strikes Asteroid
Tiger Strikes Asteroid is a 501(c)(3) non-profit network of independently operated, artist-run exhibition spaces with locations in Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Greenville, SC. Our goal is to collectively bring people together, expand connections, and create community through artist-initiated exhibitions, projects, and curatorial opportunities. We seek to build an ethos of cooperative achievement in the visual arts, creating physical and emotional space for artists to show their work and exchange ideas on their own terms. Our artist-run model expands the artist’s role beyond that of studio practitioner to include the roles of curator, critic, and community developer, offering an alternate model to the conventions of the current commercial art market.

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Tags: Carie Lassman, Chicagom Lower West Side, Cydney Lewis, Frances Lee, Monika Plioplyte, Parallel Visions, Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago