Gallery KIN

Gallery KIN exhibits works of art out of an Edgewater apartment inhabited in-part by its curator Lindsay Hutchens, and participates in dialogues that surround family, community, and home, through two-person and group exhibitions installed throughout her functioning living room, kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom.

SECOND-HAND: Adrián García Orozco and Jennifer Sova
opening reception Sunday, June 16, 2019; 1:00 – 6:00 pm
June 17 – July 7, 2019, by appointment

Jennifer Sova, mwc.bw.p.uy_1/11 from men with children, 2017 - 2019; Adrián García Orozco, still from La Piel de las Almas, 2019

Jennifer Sova, mwc.bw.p.uy_1/11 from men with children, 2017 - 2019; Adrián García Orozco, still from La Piel de las Almas, 2019

Gallery KIN is pleased to present its first exhibition of 2019 on Father’s Day, featuring a documentary film by Adrián García Orozco and archive of found photographs by Jennifer Sova.

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Something can’t be handed down until a certain amount of time has passed. Artists Adrián García Orozco and Jennifer Sova both work with these kinds of objects, heirlooms that have been held by one set of hands, lived with and enjoyed, then given a second life through ownership by the next generation. The nature of inheritance however connotes loss within a gain, and as evidenced in SECOND-HAND this exchange can be more full and rich than an object’s humble beginnings could ever have promised, or lacking and incomplete.

Adrián García Orozco’s short film La Piel de las Almas begins with a stop-motion sequence of smooth pebbles self-arranging on the flat surface of a metate, one that belonged to Orozco’s own grandmother, immediately bringing the viewer into the domestic space of a revered matriarch. Whimsical anecdotes are told through documentary style first-person narratives and interspersed with vignettes of inanimate objects that come to life to perform a filial memory. An alarm clock, wool mouse, and the capital of a column are imbued with the values of those who used them, reminding loved-ones in the present how to live and eventually focusing their attention on the beauty within loss and their own mortality.

Jennifer Sova’s ongoing archive of found photographs in men with children accumulate around the one snapshot in her possession that features she and her own father. In the absence of a lifetime of memories, Sova’s photograph and the others in her collection of discarded mementos are mysterious pieces of evidence to be analyzed. In Sova’s words, “men have been allowed to be absent in the raising of children in our society for centuries, so my story isn’t unique, but that makes these images of men with children stand out.” The images and their closeness in appearance to their referents show more to the uninitiated than Orozco’s clock, mouse, and capital, however the chasm the viewer is left with in the abandonment of context is palpable. Next to men with children, the touch and memory in La Piel de las Almas brings an even finer point to the distance and ambiguity of the purely photographic index.

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During the opening reception from 1:00 to 6:00 pm on Father’s Day, June 16, artist Jenn Sova will be scanning photographs on-site as part of her archive building for men with children. Anyone wanting to contribute their own photographs of men with children - printed or digital - are encouraged to do so on June 16 to share what stories and memories they have with Jenn.

Visitors are invited to bring printed family photographs to have them professionally scanned and receive hi-resolution digital files for free throughout the run of the exhibition.

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Adrián García Orozco (León, México) is a stop motion animator with a background in communication with emphasis in audiovisual production. MA in Visual and Critical Studies for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has also a musical practice that combines regularly with his filmmaking.

Jennifer Sova is an artist, organizer, and arts advocate. Her interdisciplinary art practice is an exploration of masculinity, loss, and identity through photography, video, and performance. Sova is the founder and director of The Overlook, a mission-driven nomadic arts project. She currently splits her time between Chicago and Bloomington, Indiana.


DISTANCES MEASURED FROM HOME: Michael Curtis Asbill and Barbara Diener
Sunday, October 28, 2018; 12:00 - 3:00 pm

Barbara Diener, Trees, 2013; Michael Curtis Asbill, West Shore Pipe Line Co. Arlington Heights, IL, 2018

Barbara Diener, Trees, 2013; Michael Curtis Asbill, West Shore Pipe Line Co. Arlington Heights, IL, 2018

Gallery KIN is pleased to present photographic works by artists Michael Curtis Asbill and Barbara Diener for its next exhibition.

Survey-like photographs by Michael Curtis Asbill act as evidence of blatantly present but easy to overlook industries that fund the super rich. Finding ties not only between his birthplace in Texas and his current home of Illinois, Asbill begins to map the monolithic stores of high-octane gasoline that we fly by in our cars, and how they might come to build a Major League Baseball field. On a more affective register, photographic portraits and landscapes from Barbara Diener's Sehnsucht series place us in and around rural Illinois communities that mirror the artist's childhood home in Germany. While her selection process of choosing towns to photograph relied on demographics, the photographs themselves evoke longing gazes onto individuals, spaces, and moments that remind us of the frequent comparison between where we are now, and where we come from.

Michael Curtis Asbill: MFA, 2017, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, BFA, 2014, Texas State University, San Marcos. Exhibitions: Rise from the Rubble, Weather the Winds: Fundraiser/Auction, Chicago Artist Coalition; SAIC MFA Show 2017, Sullivan Galleries, Chicago; In the Portfolios, Flaxman Library Special Collections, Chicago; SofTactics, Cement Loop, Austin, Texas. Collections: The Art Institute of Chicago.

Barbara Diener (b. 1982, Germany) received her BFA in Photography from the California College of the Arts and MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago. Her work has been exhibited internationally and her photographs are in private and institutional collections including the New Mexico Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Photography. In June 2018 Daylight Books published her body of work Phantom Power.

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LIVING WITH THE NON-HUMAN: Kelly Neibert and Zhiyuan Yang
Sunday, October 7, 2018; 12:00 - 3:00 pm

Kelly Neibert, Howl 5, 2018; Zhiyuan Yang, still from Yang’s Cat Family, 2017

Kelly Neibert, Howl 5, 2018; Zhiyuan Yang, still from Yang’s Cat Family, 2017

Gallery KIN is pleased to present new works by artists Kelly Neibert and Zhiyuan Yang for its first exhibition.

Look around and it's clear that humans have had a geologic impact on our planet, which promises consequences from extreme misfortune to utter overthrow or ruin. A reckoning is certainly overdue, but this exhibition is decidedly not about the Anthropocene.

This exhibition's smallness by comparison is only able to contend with such a vast and complete truth by way of its vulnerability, and setting of stakes within the every-day. LIVING WITH THE NON-HUMAN is about the beings, at a fraction of our size, who comfortingly and oftentimes awkwardly share our most intimate spaces: dancing in front of a mirror, making love in bed, or sitting on the toilet.

Paintings and drawings by Kelly Neibert are worlds within themselves, where she plays with narrative as much as perspective and color. They exist not so much as studies, but as love letters. Zhiyuan Yang's 12-minute video adds a new chapter to existing work that continues to triangulate the parent-child family structure, our personal relationships with the non-human, and art criticism.

Kelly Neibert (b. 1987) is a Chicago based artist originally from the small, rural town of Waynesboro, Pennsylvania. She completed her MFA in Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018. Through painting, Kelly looks toward her own familiar spaces and the people and animals that inhabit them as a source of comfort, beauty, and comic relief.

Zhiyuan Yang is an interdisciplinary artist from Beijing, China, who makes work that explores the ambivalent relationship between alienation and belonging.

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