Jan 14th 2017

Trace Elements

@ Miishkooki

4517 Oakton, Skokie, IL 60076

Opening Saturday, January 14th, from 7PM - 10PM

On view through Friday, February 24th

Join us for our first show of 2017 featuring paintings by Ellen Hanson and Caroline Liu with a performance video by Erin Washington.

Caroline Liu is a Chicago-based artist who creates paintings and drawings that visually navigate the inner workings of her concussed mind.

In 2012, a solid wood door fell several feet onto Liu’s head. Her short-term memory never fully recovered and the incident continuously shapes her daily life and art. Her work has become a therapeutic practice and vehicle for holding onto memories and emotions she would otherwise forget. Through repetitive patterns, mark making, and a vibrant color palette, her paintings depict personal narratives that focus on feelings of identity, vulnerability, and loss. Her work is a pilgrimage in finding herself and discourse.

Ellen Hanson is a Chicago-based artist who makes post-romantic landscapes by balancing comfort and discomfort, utopia and dystopia, nature and artifice. She is interested in creating scenes where the sublime penetrates urban life and intersects with voyeurism. Hanson received her BA from Bennington College in 2014 where she focused on painting and art history. Her work has been featured on Mist Gallery, and she has most recently exhibited at Yeah Maybe in Minneapolis.

Erin Washington is a Chicago-based artist who examines themes of vulnerability and permanence while embracing materiality and labor. Questioning how time structures transitions in ephemera, she creates mixed-media paintings and drawings which unravel time through the performance of their belabored making, and their subsequent degradation. Using fugitive and symbolic materials (blackberries, chalk, fire, ashes, moss, bone and saliva), Washington sources imagery from the Sciences, Mythology, and Art History that represent ruptures and failures in the search for meaning and truth. Colors fade or pigments are burned: the objects emulate the cycles they describe. The artist’s actions and products are in a constant state of flux, highlighting the disharmony between meaning, beauty, and a fundamentally messy universe.

Trace Elements’ opening reception is Saturday, January 14th, from 7-10pm where there will be music and refreshments.

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