Chicago Artists Coalition is pleased to present Somewhere Behind Us, a HATCH Projects exhibition featuring works by Nora Chin, Andrea Coleman, and Erin Smego.

Somewhere Behind Us highlights the acts of casting aside formative influences by the exhibiting artists, as they came of age. What fragments will be found? What ideologies will remain intact? As individuals who are critically aware of their surrounding world and themselves, the artists break and discard binaries and other social constructs that were dictated by society to be true and absolute.

Nora Chin, Andrea Coleman, and Erin Smego use materials to reconsider personal and collective experiences to invoke new perspectives as they look forward. Family photographs become intuitive mosaics in the hands of Coleman, while Chin and Smego use clay and wood to unpack and process prescribed gender roles and a candy-coated, turbulent adolescence, respectively. Their works, however, thrive on carrying the heavy load of critical awareness to challenge cultural signifiers and bring levity to mutual respect and understanding.

Somewhere Behind Us is curated by Jamillah Hinson.

EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

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ARTIST BIOS

Nora Chin is a multi-disciplinary artist living and working in Chicago. She is interested in collective adolescent experiences and popular culture. Specifically, she is concerned with the adult experience of adolescence, or how we as adults unpack our coming of age. She focuses on nostalgic objects and expressions of tween and teen experiences made by adults in television and movies. Her work has recently been featured at the Logan Square Arts Festival, Fernwey, LVL3, Fat City, and at Wallway Gallery at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.
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Andrea Coleman’s work derives inspiration from using representational photographic family memorabilia, clippings and narrative as a basis to produce a series of digital paintings. Combined with expressive mark-making and coloration, each piece addresses elements of nostalgia and a distorted form of memory. Coleman digitally manipulates images found in photo albums to challenge ideas of authenticity and re-appropriate the aesthetic of aura and memory. Based upon her own
familial relationships and passed down information, the work investigates the intuitive interconnectedness and multidimensional relationship between aura and portraiture.
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Erin Smego is a sculptor and installation artist who lives and works in Chicago. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2011). Smego is currently an Artist-in-Residence at HATCH Projects, Chicago Artists’ Coalition. She has exhibited in numerous group exhibitions in the United States including: 65Grand, THE SUB-MISSION, baby blue gallery, The Fulton Street Collective, and 22. She’s had solo installations at The Hermosa Walls and Ignition Projects (Chicago). She has also exhibited internationally at the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art Museum in Gyenggi-do, South Korea. Smego was awarded the Edna L. Cushing Annual Memorial Prize in a juried show Elements of Abstraction (2015) at the St. Louis Artists’ Guild and the Working Artist Organization Grant (2018).

CURATOR BIO
Jamillah Hinson is a curator, grassroots archivist, and painter working in Chicago. Her work and research focus on the intricacies and diversity found in the communities of the African Diaspora. She currently works with the Chicago-based organization, Art Leaders of Color Network and is working on multiple curatorial projects for 2018-2019.

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Tags: Andrea Coleman, Chicago, Chicago Artists' Coalition, Erin Smego, HATCH Projects, Illinois, Jamillah Hinson, Nora Chin, Somewhere Behind Us, West Town