Ruckus Journal • January 18, 2023

Kelly Kristin Jones: Q&A

Chicago artist Kelly Kristin Jones creates photo-based work that challenges, interrogates, and investigates the remnants of white supremacy that linger in our visual culture and iconography. Thanks to recent calls to remove contested monuments from public spaces, some of her subjects may be more well-known than others, such as her photographs of public monuments that she has physically covered or blocked from the viewers’ sight. But others are not so obvious.

Chicago Reader • December 15, 2022

Finding power in pushing back

There is power to be found in pushing back, there is community to be made in forming resistance. In A Rebel’s Fantasy at FLXST Contemporary, curator Michael Rangel brings together seven artists from Chicago and beyond to remind us of the pure joy found in relishing rebellion, in pushing against the regulations, expectations, and constraints that bind us.

Chicago Reader • December 13, 2022

What does freedom look like?

“Can you see me?” at Weinberg/Newton Gallery intentionally gives a platform to individuals affected by incarceration and to communities that have been deeply cut by the prison industrial complex. What does it mean to listen to a person’s experience while simultaneously considering the depth of change it has on a group, a community, a generation? How can artistic collaboration center the collective voices of incarcerated folks while maintaining their humanity as individuals?

Newcity Art • November 1, 2022

Memory’s Keeper: A Review of "Remnants" at Heaven Gallery

A memory is a fickle thing. It transforms as time passes, reshaping and rebuilding itself within the memory’s keeper. We picture the details of a memory: the wallpaper in a room, the scraps of fabric on our grandmother’s work table, the aged books in the kitchen that hold our family recipes. But just like the objects themselves, these details age, they fade and reshape as the years go by and we desperately try to hold onto their richness.

Sixty Inches From Center • July 25, 2022

Review: Beautiful Snail at the Logan Center for the Arts

I can only assume that any mention of a snail is a reference to slowness—a beautiful slowness that is the process of making art. This is perhaps even more relevant during an MFA program.

Sixty Inches From Center • June 30, 2022

Review: I don't know you like that: The Bodywork of Hospitality

What does it mean to apply the concept of hospitality to the body? Hospitality is associated with hosting, with providing care and refuge. Does the body perform and enact hospitality, outwardly offering care, or is it the site of hospitality, hosting and embodying within itself a place of refuge, becoming a vessel for care?

Create! Magazine • June 30, 2021

FIELD TRIP: Art in L.A.

The undeniably talented figurative painter Alannah Farrell currently has their first solo exhibition in Los Angeles at Anat Ebgi Gallery, on view from June 5, to July 10, 2021. In their show “History of Violence,” the artist gives us a glimpse through a window of intimacy, into the lives of their friends and chosen family in stunning shades of soft blues and flesh tones. Each portrait is part memory, part narrative, and all raw truth.

Sixty Inches From Center • June 28, 2021

Review: We forgot the moon while holding up the sun

If you are familiar with the work of Kelly Kristin Jones, then you know that her work is all about contested monuments. Through physical intervention by way of her body, printed photographs, and digital tools, she disrupts and alters our view, blocking controversial public monuments from our sightline so as to literally and conceptually change our perspective of what these monuments represent.

Newcity Art • May 10, 2021

Boundary Crossing: A Review of Christina Quarles at the MCA

The paintings of Christina Quarles are all about boundaries: the boundary as threshold, as surface, as canvas, as skin. Largely focused on the figure—or perhaps more accurately, the body—Quarles twists and contorts them as they reach out, wrapping themselves around one another until the multiple bodies appear as one.

Create! Magazine • April 27, 2021

FIELD TRIP: Art in Chicago

FIELD TRIP explores different cities around the world by looking at three art exhibitions that are currently on view. Focusing on galleries and smaller art spaces, these shows are not to be missed! And our first stop is…Chicago!

Newcity Art • April 21, 2021

Fading Moments: A Review of Context 2021 at Filter Photo

Many group exhibitions lately have depicted “pandemic life” or had themes that “reflect on our current state.” It is no easy task to round up a selection of works that accomplish this on their own, as well as together, without disrupting their meaning and intention. “Context 2021” at Filter Photo pulls this off with a large group of artists from across Chicago and the United States.

Create! Magazine • April 13, 2021

New Works by Martine Johanna at Hashimoto Contemporary

Martine Johanna’s subjects appear to be in alien landscapes, settings that are absent of identifying features or realistic elements to ground them. Instead, the viewers are given the space to absorb and take in the artist’s ethereal scenery that she has so strikingly created.

Sixty Inches From Center • April 9, 2021

Review: 36° 15’ 43” N 29° 59’ 14” E at Goldfinch Gallery

Texture as memory, as language, as impression of thought and purpose; this is what is brought forth onto and within the imprints on the surface of objects made by SaraNoa Mark. Tactile and intricate, the artist’s mark making oftentimes reads like indecipherable words, while other times appears as imagery unfolding within the cracks of the surface, much like a relief.

Sixty Inches From Center • December 2, 2020

Fantasy of a Fantasy - A Review of Kajahl: "Royal Specter" at Monique Meloche

Monique Meloche’s exhibition Royal Specter, featuring work by the artist Kajahl, is in every aspect a museum-quality exhibition. I am not merely referencing the historically traditional and representational style of Kajahl’s paintings (that is to say, portraying a ‘likeness’ of the subject—and whose likeness is it? More on that later). I am also not just referencing the artist’s unbelievably skilled use of oil paint on canvas—materials that are, again, traditional.

Sixty Inches From Center • October 30, 2020

Out of Time by Cass Davis at Aspect/Ratio Gallery

The exhibition Out of Time by Cass Davis is an investigation of personal history, collective history, and gendered violence. The work oscillates between soft/tactile, and ghostly/alarming. Rooted in imagery that is (for better or for worse) deeply Midwestern, the work shown is aesthetically punctured by three-parts: textile works that hold faded images of religious revivals, assemblages of childhood objects embedded in earth and flowers, and photographs and moving images with lighting and tones that simultaneously haunt and render hyper-real.

Newcity Art • October 26, 2020

Continuously Becoming: A Review of Nine Lives at the Renaissance Society

I thought I knew what to expect when entering “Nine Lives” at The Renaissance Society, one exhibition of many that have opened around the country as part of the Feminist Art Coalition. I looked forward to seeing a collection of works that were by all female or non-binary artists, or that perhaps embodied a feminist ideology, which they did. It was much more than that, as each piece was so varied in its message, each artist putting forth an experience both singular and authentic.

Newcity Art • February 17, 2020

Ignoring the Male Gaze: A Review of Female Trouble at Western Exhibitions

Each artist in “Female Trouble” takes the once-tired subject of the female figure and gives it new life, as each piece strays from the traditional female nude in ways that are subtle at times, and other times louder than a bomb. Co-organized by Elijah Wheat Showroom, the show includes artists Amanda Joy Calobrisi, Lilli Carré, Qinza Najm, Kathryn Refi and Frances Waite.

Newcity Art • January 22, 2020

Contending With the Object: A Review of Tracing Faults at Chicago Artists Coalition

Like many of the exhibitions at Chicago Artist Coalition, “Tracing Faults” requires time to be spent with each piece, and a bit more context. One thing you can always expect from CAC’s Hatch Residency exhibitions is for the artwork to include unexpected material. As this residency encourages experimentation, boundaries are often refreshingly broken.

Newcity Art • December 12, 2019

A Tender and Strange Landscape: A Review of Elliot Ross at Filter Photo

The story in Elliot Ross’ solo exhibition at Filter Space: a selection of photographs from his tender and timely series “American Backyard,” is an unfolding narrative of gorgeous and softly surreal visuals of everyday life around the border between the U.S. and Mexico.

Create! Magazine • October 3, 2019

10 (+1) Highlights from Expo Chicago 2019

Claire Oliver Gallery, located in New York, showcased the exhibition Upending the Narrative, which included the work of Bisa Butler and Leonardo Benzant. Claire Oliver Gallery explains that the two artists “create detailed and sumptuous works of art redolent with content and mystery; these works demand to be studied. Equally important to the painstaking ‘making’ is their studio practices exploring the current condition in their own African American communities.”