Tertiary Dimensions

This exhibition unveils the artists’ sensitivity to space and how such material practices propose an alternative, non-binary platforms for the queer and/or collective body. This platform becomes a meaningful tool against oppressive structures which limit pleasure, desire, visibility, and mobility. Here, we might further examine how these artists consider the queer body in space amongst the domestic, the architectural, the landscape, public or private sectors— and how the collision between such domains might summon, conjure, or propose a third space. In some cases, we might witness artwork that is inherently political and readily accessible because it is unlawful. In other instances, we encounter artwork that leaves us with an uncanny, yet beautiful remnant of itself, that it is hardly identifiable. From sculpture to photography, drawing to video, we observe such concerns of new dimensionality and depth articulated via mappings, site-specific installations, material explorations, and personal collections.

The exhibition organized as part of Platforms: 10 Years of Chances Dances — a multi-site series of exhibitions and events in celebration of 10 years of  Chicago-based queer collective, Chances Dances.

Tertiary Dimensions, 2014. Curated by Alexandria Eregbu. Installation view, Sector 2337, Chicago. Photo by Clare Britt.

Tertiary Dimensions, 2014. Curated by Alexandria Eregbu. Installation view, Sector 2337, Chicago. Photo by Clare Britt.

Gordon Hall, Set (X), 2015. Joint compound and pigment on wood. Photo by Clare Britt.

Tertiary Dimensions, 2014. Curated by Alexandria Eregbu. Installation view, Sector 2337, Chicago. Left: Betsy Odom, Double Bull, 2015. Leather. Right: Rami George, Untitled (scene from a still), 2014. Archival pigment prints. Photo by Clare Britt.

Tertiary Dimensions, 2014. Curated by Alexandria Eregbu. Installation view, Sector 2337, Chicago. Photo by Clare Britt.

Tertiary Dimensions, 2014. Curated by Alexandria Eregbu. Installation view, Sector 2337, Chicago. Photo by Clare Britt.

Tertiary Dimensions, 2014. Curated by Alexandria Eregbu. Installation view, Sector 2337, Chicago. Photo by Clare Britt.

Adam Liam Rose + Alex Zak, Operational Intercourse, 2015. Cardboard, rope, sheetrock, window blinds, black velvet. Photo by Clare Britt.

Tertiary Dimensions, 2014. Curated by Alexandria Eregbu. Installation view, Sector 2337, Chicago. Photo by Clare Britt.

About the Artists:

Aay Preston-Myint is an artist, printmaker, and educator based in Chicago, IL. His practice employs both visual and collaborative strategies to investigate memory and kinship, within the context of queer community and history. In addition to his own work in interdisciplinary media, he is a founder of No Coast, an artist partnership that prints and distributes affordable contemporary artwork, serves as a DJ and organizer for Chances Dances, party that supports and showcases the work of queer artists in Chicago, and is editor-in-chief of an online and print journal called Monsters and Dust. 

Adam Liam Rose + Alex Zak are interdisciplinary artists and partners working between Chicago and New York. They explore issues involving spatial politics, materiality, and identity. Rose works with malleable barriers and charged geographical lines to explore nationalist agendas within architecture and space. Zak works quickly with a sense of urgency to recognize markers of power, access, and labor with craft materials and silly putty. In collaborating, they are concerned with how their geographical identities and queer sentiments affect their views, conversations, and relationship.

Amina Ross is a transdisciplinary Chicago-based artist. Through visual abstraction she creates palatable tensions of repulsion and seduction. The conceptions of black visuality and the sexualized image are combined through a blending of image, writing, performance, curatorial and installation work. She has shown work at numerous venues including the Black Cinema House, Woman Made Gallery, Links Hall and Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery. She has spoken on panels and taught workshops at College Arts Association Conference, Black Artist Retreat, Threewalls and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Amina is committed to creating spaces that foster thinking, conversation, growth and love. These ambitions manifested in the founding of 3rd Language, queer arts collective; which has received the Propeller Fund grant and Davis Foundation awards for its summer workshops series. Amina holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently a teaching artist at Hyde Park Art Center.  She is a part of Chicago Artist Coalition’s BOLT residency 2015-2016 cohort.

Betsy Odom received her MFA from Yale University School of Art and her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She has exhibited internationally in group and solo exhibitions at venues including Glass Curtain Gallery in Chicago, Amel Bourorina Gallery in Berlin, and Rudolph Projects in Houston, TX. Recent solo exhibitions include 4WPS, ThreeWalls Gallery, Hyde Park Art Center, and Woman Made Gallery. Odom has been the recipient of several fellowships including an Illinois Arts Council Grant, a Chances Dances Critical Fierceness prize, and grant from the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs. Her work became part of the West Collection in 2012. 

Elijah Burgher makes small, colored pencil drawings that utilize ideas from magick and the occult to address sexuality, sub-cultural formation and the history of abstraction. Citing early 20th century occultist, Austin Osman Spare’s system, Burgher draws sigils—emblems to which magical power is imputed. By recombining the letters that spell out a wish into a new symbol, Burgher’s pictures of sigils literally encode desire while embodying it abstractly through shape, color and composition. Through precise, repetitive marks, he endows his drawings with a sense of all-over intentionality. His figurative works often depict naked men conducting rituals in rented rooms or wooded landscapes. They draw the ritual circle, invoke the dead, or cut symbols into one another. Others portray counter-cultural queer icons or betray a prurient attitude towards art history’s storehouse of imagery. At stake are a concern with human relationality and a desire to close the gap between fantasy and reality. Burgher has exhibited in solo shows at Western Exhibitions, Chicago (2013, 2012); 2nd Floor Projects, San Francisco (2011); and Shane Campbell Gallery, Oak Park (2010); and two-persons shows at Lump, Raleigh (2012); and Peregrine Program, Chicago (2009). He was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Recent group shows exhibitions at Cabinet (2014) and Hales Gallery (2014), London; Exile (2014), Berlin; Witte de With, Rotterdam (2013), H.F. Johnson Gallery of Art, Kenosha (2012); 92YTribeca (2012), New York City. His work was recently included in Phaidon’s Vitamin D2, a survey of contemporary drawing practices. In 2011, he was a resident artist at both the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Fire Island Artist Residency. Burgher has taught in Contemporary Practices and Painting and Drawing since Fall 2010. He received a MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004, and a BA from Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, in 2000, where he studied Literature. 

Gordon Hall is an artist based in New York. Hall has exhibited and performed at SculptureCenter, The Kitchen, Movement Research, EMPAC, The Brooklyn Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Whitney Museum of American Art, Night Club, Kent Fine Art, Foxy Production, The Hessel Museum at Bard College, White Columns, and at Chapter NY, among others. Hall has also organized programs as the Center for Experimental Lectures at MoMA PS1, Recess, The Shandaken Project, Alderman Exhibitions, and at the Whitney Museum of American Art, producing a series of lectures and seminars in conjunction with the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Hall’s writing and interviews have been featured in a variety of publications including V Magazine, Randy, Bomb, Title Magazine, What About Power? Inquiries Into Contemporary Sculpture (published by SculptureCenter, 2014) and in Theorizing Visual Studies (Routledge, 2012). Hall was awarded a Triangle Arts Foundation Residency in 2015, the LMCC Workspace Residency for 2013-14, attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2013, the Fire Island Artist Residency in 2012, and ACRE in 2010 and 2011. Hall holds an MFA and an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 

Katie Vota is a Chicago-based artist working to create interactive environments and sculptural objects that engage viewers in ideas of play, desire, pleasure, power exchange, and the role of the active body in shaping identity. Vota received her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (2010, magna cum laude) and a Studio MFA from the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago (2015). She was awarded a US Student Fulbright Grant (’11-’12) to study traditions of Andean Back-strap Weaving and Natural Dyeing in Cusco, Peru, with the Center for Traditional Textiles of Cusco. Vota has exhibited in numerous solo and juried exhibitions, at venues including Threewalls (Chicago), The Leroy Neiman Center Gallery (Chicago), Pratt MPW School of Art Gallery (Utica, NY), The Krasl Art Center (St. Joseph, MI), The Indianapolis Art Center (Indianapolis), and Area 405 (Baltimore). She is a Lenore Tawney Foundation Scholar, and has participated in residencies such as ISLAND (the Institute for Sustainable Art and Natural Design) in Traverse City, MI. 

Kiam Marcelo Junio (preferred gender pronoun: “they/their/them”) is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist creating work through photography, video, installation, performance, and hybrid forms. Their research and art practice centers around queer identities, Philippine history and the Filipino diaspora, American imperialism, the politics of visibility, and social justice through collaborative processes and healing modalities. Kiam served seven years in the US Navy as a Hospital Corpsman.  Kiam is the sole proprietor of IAMKIAM STUDIOS, a portrait and event photography, videography, promotional and media production company based in Chicago. They were born in the Philippines, and have lived in the U.S., Japan, and Spain. 

Margaret Bobo Dancy is a Video and Sculpture artist living and producing in Chicago. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013. Margaret has exhibited nationally at the Spectacle Theatre of New York City and with the Nomadic Limbs Dance Collective in Milwaukee. Bobo-Dancy has been a part of exhibitions in Chicago including Woman Made Gallery, the Nightingale Theatre, The Defibrillator, and the Fulton Street Art Collective. Her work has been highlighted in the Chicago Reader and the online art forum Hyperallergic. She is the recent recipient of the Chances Dances ‘Critical Fierceness Grant’ to finalize sculptures from her most recent body of work, “Transverberate”.

Matt Morris is an artist, writer, and sometimes curator based in Chicago. He has presented artwork at Queer Thoughts, peregrineprogram, The Bike Room, Gallery 400, Sector 2337, and The Franklin in Chicago, IL; Fjord and Vox Populi in Philadelphia, PA; The Contemporary Arts Center, U·turn Art Space, Aisle, and semantics in Cincinnati, OH; Clough-Hanson Gallery and Beige in Memphis, TN; with additional projects in Reims, France; Greencastle, IN; Lincoln, NE; and Baton Rouge, LA. Morris is a transplant from southern Louisiana who holds a BFA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati, and earned an MFA in Art Theory + Practice from Northwestern University, as well as a Certificate in Gender + Sexuality Studies. Recent curatorial efforts have been presented at Western Exhibitions and The Hills Esthetic Center in Chicago, IL. He is a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who teaches in the Sculpture as well as the Painting and Drawing departments. He is a contributor to Artforum.com, Art Papers, Flash Art, Newcity, and Sculpture; and his writing appears in numerous exhibition catalogues and artist monographs. 

Oli Rodriguez is an interdisciplinary artist working in video, photography and performance. A Chicago native, he began his undergraduate career at DePaul University studying Psychology, Gender Studies and Photography. Oli then pursued his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Film, Video, New Media and Animation Department. His projects often conceptually intersect and dialogue within consent, queerness, childhood and sexuality. Oli has screened, performed, lectured and exhibited at such institutions and museums such as, The Banff Centre, Schwarzer Kanal, Berlin, Germany, Smart Museum, University of Chicago, Bridge Art Fair, New York, NY, Co-Prosperity Sphere, Chicago IL, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL, X Initiative Gallery, New York, NY, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, Columbia College Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Gene Siskel Chicago and The Swimming Pool Project Space, Chicago, Nightingale, Chicago, IL. Currently, he is faculty in the Photography Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 

Rami George was born in the summer of ‘89, a year known for its numerous revolutions, the signing of the Taif Agreement (beginning the end of the Lebanese Civil War), and the conception of the World Wide Web. They spent a childhood marked by these and other significant events. Completing their BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012, they have exhibited and screened internationally. They continue to be influenced and motivated by political struggles and missing narratives. 

About the Curator:

Alexandria Eregbu is a visual artist whose work often takes shape in the form of performance, programming, and curatorial practices. Her concerns frequently address community, materiality, performativity, and visibility of racialized and gendered bodies in space. In 2012, Eregbu was commissioned by Out of Site Chicago to perform 11/10/10, a project that confronted the physical and geographical boundaries of the city of Chicago. The following year in 2013, Eregbu curated Marvelous Freedom/Vigilance of Desire, Revisited at Columbia College Chicago. This curatorial project reexamined the first Marvelous Freedom/Vigilance of Desire— a Surrealist exhibition that took place in Chicago in 1976. Eregbu’s work has been featured in two solo exhibitions and several group exhibitions including Seminar (New York); Exodus at the University of Chicago’s Arts Incubator in Washington Park; and Mythologies at Sullivan Galleries (Chicago). Eregbu was a recipient of the Propeller Fund Grant (2013), a 2014-2015 Resident Curator with HATCH Projects at Chicago Artists Coalition, and a Public Studio Artist in Residence at the Chicago Cultural Center. Eregbu received her BFA from the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago. She was recently highlighted in Newcity’s Breakout Artists 2015: Chicago’s Next Generation of Image Makers and is anticipating a Curatorial Fellowship and Artist Residency with ACRE this upcoming year.