Artists: Elena Ailes, Cameron Clayborn, Rami George, April Martin, Máire Witt O’Neill, Derrick Woods-Morrow
Curator: Jameson Paige
Presented by: Heaven Gallery, Chicago, IL
Strained States is a group exhibition that translates the snowballing precariousness of global politics into an operative position of instability, one that attempts to acknowledge new subjectivities and methods for living in a groundless present. Playing with identity, form, and material, the artists included take up transition, ambiguity, and the erosion of limits as core interests in their practices. The show is a gesture towards understanding the complexity of our attachments, as well as the state of instability beyond its negative connotations, seeing it instead as a generative position to occupy with rigor, curiosity, and pleasure.
