Expo Chicago Recap
After battling fatigue from overstimulation, I managed to scramble some thoughts on work that caught my attention from this year’s Expo Chicago.
Moonassi’s body of work, Undercurrent, impressed me with its use of etching as a technique to represent intimacy and its absence. The images instantly transmit feelings of softness, intimate contact, and the complexity of communication when someone is emotionally distant. The abstract juxtaposition of the figures plays with fluid movement, which can be read as a representation of how relationships with others and ourselves are always in flux.
Sofia Fernandez Dias's work, Semillas, enticed me with its endearing compositions. I thoroughly enjoyed her approach to recontextualizing ready-mades while incorporating artisanal Mexican techniques like covering objects with beads and wax. Experiencing these minuscule scenes brought up questions like: What are they talking about? What is this performance? The curatorial team from the Hyde Park Art Center did a phenomenal job in reading and presenting Dias’s work. Walking into this booth felt like experiencing an enticing fragrance.
The outlandish world within a world of Sami Tsang immediately drew me in. Her extremely layered sculptural language captures the friction and multiplicity of her bi-cultural identity, being Chinese-Canadian. In addition to her ceramics work, she performed a live drawing on the booth walls, giving insight into her whimsical process.
Finally, the Prairie Colorfield by the artistic duo Luftwerk was introduced to me when a person accidentally stepped into the pile of seeds in the center of the booth. The gallery director of 6018North kindly demonstrated that the “damage” can be fixed easily, simply by participating in the work. She explained that Illinois used to be 90% prairie land, and today it's at about 1% due to city expansion and farming. Placing Illinois native prairie seeds in the pile is a symbolic gesture to create accountability for helping replenish the area’s ecosystem. Then we were invited to make seed balls. We wrapped them up in paper on which we could write a wish we’d like to grow with the seeds. We were then encouraged to take the seed balls and plant them wherever we wanted. It was a symbolic and spiritual engagement that reached life beyond the art space.
