Time Feel
14–17
Chang-Ching Su
Understanding Grayscale (Rose, Almond and Gold), 2021–ongoing
Crayons
Dimensions variable
Dillon Bryant
26
Dead Eyes Wolf, Chicago, 2020
Transparent print placed in right side of the stereoscope
7 by 5 by 3.5 inches 27
Dead Eyes Leopard, Chicago, 2020
18
Wisp (from dirty laundry series), 2021
Cyanotype on cotton towel
30 by 56 inches
19
Tossing and turning (detail from dirty laundry series), 2021
Cyanotype on cotton bed sheet
20 Beach rats #2, 2021
Collage 10 by 8 inches
21 Beach rats #1, 2021
Collage 10 by 10 inches
Tzuen Wu (Theo)
Dead Eyes
Installation view
Dead Eyes Fox Chicago, 2020
Transparent print placed in right side of the stereoscope
7 by 5 by 3.5 inches 25
Dead Eyes Weasel, Chicago, 2020
Transparent print placed in right side of the stereoscope
7 by 5 by 3.5 inches
Transparent print placed in right side of the stereoscope 7 by 5 by 3.5 inches
Clara Emery
Untitled, Chicago, 2022 Archival pigment print
by 30 inches
Untitled, Chicago, 2022
pigment print
At the Edge of Reality, Xinbei, 2021
Archival pigment print 24 by 30 inches
34–35
Border Fish, Xinbei, 2021 Film still Chelsea Tan
untitled (Ivan at the kitchen table #1)
52–53
In the garden I was summer / rivened open, 2021 Diptych, inkjet on rice paper
15 by 15 inches; 15 by 15 inches
On Lenapehoking territory & Piscataway land 54
My grief is not for you to hold / what do these metaphors do, 2022 Inkjet on rice paper 15 by 15 inches
On Lenni-Lenape land
57 I found the word ‘empire’ in ‘diaspora’, 2022
Grief is an opening, 1983 Archival, inkjet on bamboo paper
by 10 inches
“Somewhere outside Ewha”
Leslie Meredith Wilson
Chang-Ching Su
Dillon Bryant
Tzuen Wu (Theo)
Clara Emery
Chelsea Tan
Eugene Tang
Peter Evan Costas
kyung
Cindy Ji
Linye Jiang
Kat Bawden
Jinwoo Hwon Lee
Olivia Mikolai Ridge
Ballout Justice Apple Zhuyan Ye
Sykes
Aloni
If you shake a Magic 8 Ball really hard, it fills with bubbles, and you can’t see anything inside of its mysterious liquid interior. Maybe you’ve never done this before. Maybe you don’t know what I’m talking about at all because you’ve never encountered that plastic object of pop fortune telling.
Maybe you aren’t the type of person who breaks toys.
But in the shaken up, bubble-filled, dark abyss of the Magic 8 Ball, its standard predictions—“Outlook good,” “Signs point to yes,” “My sources say no,” “Without a doubt,” and so on—are obscured. The answer to your yes/no questions must wait until the foam subsides.
“Ask again later.”
The unusable Magic 8 Ball has always struck me as a beautifully honest object. You got there because you shook it up to ask about a future that never is certain. If you didn’t like the answer, you shook it again. And again. And again. And, if you really didn’t like the answer, you shook it too hard and found yourself in the dark, which of course, is where you started. And all of this is encased in the form of the game ending black 8 ball.
“Concentrate and ask again.”
I’ve had Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J. Dilla, the Hip Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm by Dan Charnas at the top of my reading list this winter. In unpacking why J. Dilla—James Dewitt Yancey—was so revolutionary as a musician and a producer, the biography centers wrongness, misuse, sabotage, confrontation, disorientation, and friction. Charnas examines Dilla’s time feel, and the way that he used it to propel a sound built on the tension between fundamental binaries: “straight/swing,” “simple/complex,” “even/uneven,” “freehand/ quantized,” “predictable/unpredictable.”
It’s the story of someone who gravitated towards unusual time signatures, the beauty of being early and late at the same time, finding the frisson of hiccups and stutters.
“The sound of error stayed with him,” Charnas writes. “It remained until he found a way to make those errors on purpose.”
Making errors on purpose often requires the reworking of muscle memory, the em-
bodied sense of correctness. In that process of redisciplining, the new way of working is often experienced as discomfort and unease, until it isn’t, until it becomes the right way of doing things.
A new time feel.
“What even is time now?”
This might be the most hackneyed, grammatically questionable refrain of our Covid-19 pandemic era. Perhaps it resonates so broadly because the plans, predictions, and pacing—the rhythms of our lives—have been so profoundly altered. And for many, if not most, nothing feels quite right. Of course, amidst so many global conflagrations, the pandemic is far from the only source of disorientation. But it’s the distinct power of the pandemic—and the complicated, inconsistent, troublingly opaque governmental and social responses to the crisis—that flexes the ability to halt, delay, compress, prolong, and altogether fuck up our time feel.
“Reply hazy, try again.”
The studio visit is its own time. It’s a kind of time that almost always runs over. Questions are asked that don’t yet have answers. Projects are just getting started, while others might warrant a break. New possibilities abound. First instincts are questioned. Archives are revisited. Concepts get unstuck. Conversations start that may come back around many times over or end abruptly a half hour later. Directions are exciting but perhaps unclear, and that lack of clarity might itself be the answer.
“Cannot predict now.”
My sporty head and heart frequently experience this time as a scrimmage: a low stakes field on which to kick around, try, and re-try in the spirit of free play. It’s always a privilege to join artists in that space that doesn’t require perfection, just genuine engagement and exchange. And in getting to know the work of the 2022 SAIC MFA photography cohort, I found myself not only in the time of the studio visit, but also learning the rhythm of their practices. They brought me into times that were in turns prehistoric and fiercely present, nostalgic and broken, propulsive, bound up, insufficient, and overflowing.
Melting solid into liquid states, Chang-Ching Su’s video Understanding Grayscale (Rose, Almond and Gold) (2021) transforms crayons—some of the first tools of drawing that many use—into an oozing, pulsing, primordial sea. Crayola’s “Colors of the World” pack, which purports to “represent the people of the world” through its “specially formulated” skin tone colors, converges into something new (a humanisitic stew?), that seemingly predates us all.
Dillon Bryant’s blue impressions verge on the prehistoric in the dirty laundry series (2021). Set into the surfaces of both towels and sheets, Bryant’s cyanotypic residues are literal and figurative. They manifest a search for something lost, the threads back to queer beginnings that might be found, and maybe even, regained.
The eyes of taxidermied animals in the collection of the Field Museum of Natural History present viewers with uncanny liveness in Tzuen Wu (Theo)’s Dead Eyes (2020). These creatures from some other time—from some before—look out at us, up close, frozen. Too confrontational to be a haunting, they offer the judgment of the dead.
Clara Emery explores moments that happen on the outskirts of now. Gestures and interactions are guided by a set of rules unbeknownst to viewers. Arms stretch, mouths pull, bodies tense. A sense of familiarity competes with fugitivity. The work withholds.
Despite anchoring photographs in specific locations, Chelsea Tan makes people—and a sense of being stuck (trapped?) in people—central. Tan’s photographs meditate on presences that endure in spite of ourselves, the lingering imprints of being tangled up in others. They evince a search to get free of the past that is bound up in people.
In the series Renovating Kinship (2021), Eugene Tang documents the process of making a home. Centered around a collaborative renovation project, the photographs explore the stability and security found not only through rebuilding, but through relationships strengthened through labor. The incremental work of repair is buttressed by conversations, lulls, being in and with others.
Whereas Peter Evan Costas presents a lone, towering figure in Сьогодні я стою з Україною одна (2022). In that photograph and a series of related monochrome works, light projects over the sentinel-like artist who wears layers of uneven, heavy fabric. The artist appears co-extensive with the wall featuring paint, sketches, and mixed-media elements—creating a world for defending in which he is assertively present.
Exploring matters of dispersal, grief, inheritances, and identity, kyung draws from archives to bring past and present together. Their lyrical convergences—occasionally manifesting as diptychs— prompt viewers to consider the relationships that might connect parts and whole. But in exploring patterns of migration, extraction, and erasure in image and text, kyung holds open gulfs and absences not for resolution but as realms for acknowledgment.
Cindy Ji’s series of photographs represent the deepening of intimacy, as Ji examines the contours of her relationship with her sibling. Negotiating and navigating her relationship with her sister as an adult, Ji creates work that falls along two dominant times: being with her sister and being on her own. But even in moments of seeming aloneness, the spaces and stuff of their shared life—bathroom toiletries, kitchen odds and ends, storage containers—speak to growing entanglement.
Something is in the way in Linye Jiang’s color photographs of unpeopled landscapes. Haze, glass, walls, distance. The scenes open onto somewhere, often sublime, and yet hard to identify. In their meditation on barriers and chasms, the photographs bring viewers back to the present moment of searching for what may never reveal itself.
In the ongoing series Perceptual Isolation, Kat Bawden explores a past that refuses to recede. In the strange time of sleep and dreams, repressed memories return, calling forth what was only temporarily forgotten. Bawden’s photographs re-enact those moments to scrutinize the gestures, materials, and bodyscapes that suspend the space between remembering and forgetting. Not haunted, but summoning.
Jinwoo Hwon Lee 이훤 makes work in the “past tense”—already, always behind. If home is 14 hours ahead, Lee’s work ruminates on the lag. Night, day, inside, outside, straight on, tilted. In all of these different registers, the photographs somehow have the collective feel of waiting rooms. Gentle melancholy dominates the views of places and spaces where it becomes evident that location matters less than the overwhelming sense that there may be no catching up.
One hour of clock time. That is the standard length of the American detective procedural in which heroic lone wolves or small bands of warrior-types rail against crime and ‘the system.’ Olivia Mikolai Ridge mines that mythic justice for its archetypes and architecture. Deferral, absence, inadequacy, disposability, heavy hands, and dark alleys abound. The casting call for this world becomes a way to build new community and alternative timelines from the outskirts of made-for-tv, ripped-from-the-headlines narratives.
In Nour Ballout’s First Bath (2021), layers of transparent material build up into an architecture of obfuscation. A single image won’t resolve. These are works of fragmented, broken, partial, and expansive time. Even when forms come into focus, such as in For the Male Gaze, I’m Not the Man You Think I Am (2021) viewers look through a doorway at a reclining figure with a profound sense of distance—they exist on the other side of the time and space of the central figure who presents as refusal.
Justice Apple tethers images together toward reparative ends. Drawing on personal histories, Apple confronts parts in an effort to make new wholes, as well as to linger with the parts themselves— the forms and attended feelings still to be worked through. Sutured, stitched, and layered, these works harken to legacies of Dadaist and Surrealist absurd image play, while emphasizing themes of presence and becoming.
Intensified by the isolation of the pandemic era, Zhuyan Ye went looking for the spaces and objects that could offer feelings of safety. In photographs, performances, and writing, Ye explores the contours of solace. A chair—and the image of a chair—a home, one’s own body, the space between bodies, the body of another, these all hold the potential for protection. But more than protection, the notion of safety speaks to “freedom from danger,” and Ye explores the work of getting free.
Micah Sykes might write over the image. Often, this serves to intervene in how viewers perceive urban spaces. In one photograph, the phrase “Everybody’s a dope dealer” hangs in the sky at sunset suspended above a house and car mirroring the sky’s salmon, coral, and blush hues. The artist questions the structures that govern, produce, and police these environs. In Sykes’ bold mixed oil pastel, oil paint, and acrylic works, text names representations of what we know and wholly new creations, such as a hybrid “planecarboat.” Playing with signs, the familiar becomes something else, bridging meanings to hold them in tension.
Back and forth. Here and there. Then and still now. Galit Aloni explores present stagnation and the legacies of division in the Parallax series. Seeking other ways of seeing, Aloni might literally go to the other side, offer multiple views of ostensibly the same place and thing, or create a mirrored image that conveys the multiplicities of looking. Drawing directly from Aloni’s experience of life in the Jordan Rift Valley but bringing these strategies into new environs, time is occupied, stagnant, split, lost, and found.
Mahsa Alafar’s Warriors (2021) convey collective feminine poise and power. Showing only their shiny, bright green and fuchsia 3-D printed legs, these veiled figures glow from within. Draped in found fabric and seated on found furniture, they combine past and present to create an otherworldly feel. Further confounding and contesting elements of Orientalist fascination, the Warriors cluster on a carpet that features the digitally pixelated image of a Qashqai hand-knotted Persian rug titled, Not Accessible to Everyone (2021). Together, these presences evoke a sense of liveness, almost as if they are breathing, almost as if anything is possible.
i found the word ‘empire’ in ‘diaspora’
how if i were to peel it like a scallion id find at its center its little white seed, empty, not seed at all, smooth slivered case somehow leading to same sweet bulb that bursts its roots into water as in sienna earth, green blade of breath in a jar, nourished whiskers papering fibrous with survival, so unlike the roots in which they burrowed themselves into stolen mirth, a people migrating as mechanism to claim their metaphors for growth as they strip other lives, still, for their erasure. what ‘belonging’ could rest unquestioned in this narrative designated for land to settle for life, not theirs, not ours, but theirs, fled, in resistance, how they hid in heist, within plain sight, having built each letter on their tongues, each mechanism of flight with the price of elder limbs and eyes by my vision i grieve now what we reclaimed when word became something so easy to claim, to abide in a name when there sometimes is none to hold at all
Artist Biographies
Mahsa Alafar is an Iranian artist and researcher, currently residing in Chicago. She received a bachelor of fine arts from the University of Tehran and studying Masters in Fine Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she was the recipient of the New Artist Society Merit Scholarship. She works with different mediums. Her practice revolves around varying relationships between patriarchal and colonial culture, western gaze, female presence, power, and body as a site of resistance.
Galit J. Aloni (from Tel Aviv, b.1983) works with photography as a performance tool to re-define the formation of opposed or divided landscapes into a new syntax offering an alternative optical system of the observed. Her practice began from the unstable political ground of the Jordan Rift Valley. Switching perspectives continuously between the two border sides. The Parallax shifting angles correspond to the land matters as action of reforming, reconciliation and defiance. Completed her BFA from the Bezalel Academy Jerusalem, at the photography department in 2008 and has taught there since 2017.
Justice Apple’s work explores themes of feminine fragility, power, vulnerability, and resilience as it relates to identity, subjectivity, and the body as form. Obsessed with visual documentation as a child, she often draws upon extensive personal archival images, camcorder recordings, journal entries, and more to reimagine and reclaim critical moments of sexual breakthrough and breakdown. The work currently manifests itself in photography, mixed media, and collage as she questions the notion of aesthetic beauty as it relates to healing and emancipation.
Nour Ballout (b. 1993, Beirut) is a Detroit & Chicago based interdisciplinary artist and curator. They received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Wayne State University and are a current MFA candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Nour’s work as a visual artist and curator is rooted in a social practice exploring structures of naturalization as they manifest within bodies, built environments, and communities. Photographic self-portraiture, collaboration, and space making intersect in the interpretation and dissemination of their experience coming home to their body and the world as a trans-masculine queer immigrant. By reconsidering the right to look; they renegotiate the contract between photographer, sitter and viewer, here the paradoxes of representation, access, and privacy collide.
Kat Bawden is an artist whose work explores memory, consciousness, and the self. She works across photographs, handmade books, prose, and video projections to create an immersive visual world with its own sense of time. With a background in social science and public health, she draws influence from psychology, neuroscience, and dreams.
Dillon Bryant (b. Spearfish, SD) utilizes alternative photographic processes and collage to explore bodily ephemerality and queer material histories. In the “Dirty Laundry” series, liquid cyanotype emulsion is applied to the body and through performative gestures of pressing and embracing, wisp-like impressions are made from the contact between flesh and substrate, indexing the body as being present yet also at risk of fading away. Bryant has exhibited across the United States and abroad, including shows at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art, and the Midwest Center for Photography.
Peter Evan Costas is a Chicago-based Sound & Image Artist who uses mixed media to reconstruct and unearth memories and imagination. Through a combination of lens-based work, sound, sculpture, performance, and painting his work drives to both communicate the veteran experience and to use memory as a catalyst for fiction. Having served on submarines in the US Navy from 2011 to 2016, his personal experience within the military is a constant totem of time, growth, humor, trauma, and secrecy.
Clara Emery makes photographs, films, and sculptural objects that explore dreams, paranoias, and superstitions occupying psychological and spiritual threshold spaces. Through looking at different ritual traditions as well as her own uncanny experiences, she constructs scenes of these threshold happenings. She is interested in how dreams and rituals both overwhelm and protect us. Emery works and exhibits between the United States and Taiwan, drawing on the experiences and landscapes of both places. She graduated from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2019, and is currently an MFA candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Cindy Ji uses photography to explore transitional periods within intimate relationships, with people and places. Her relationship with the environment and her family changes with every move back and forth between South Korea and the United States, which has been occurring since 2013. The places and people she once thought she knew become unfamiliar as time passes. These changes in her life are the driving force in her work. Ji is currently pursuing her MFA degree in Studio Art in Chicago, IL.
Linye Jiang (b. 1988) has shifted her focus this year from human complexity in a family to another dimension of observation; she collects her landscape works that are identically delocalized, into which secret hearts and fierce thoughts must remain hidden.
kyung is a visual artist and emergency medical technician based on Three Fires territory in Chicago. Their recent commitments delve into trans care outside the medical industrial complex; anti-imperial lineages of memory; and vernaculars of grief.
Jinwoo Hwon Lee 이훤 is a poet and a visual Artist. Lee’s works focus on dislocations from language and time. Recipient of the Emerging Writer Award (2014) and the Excellent Book of the Year Award (2019), Lee’s works have been exhibited internationally. Notable exhibitions he partook were curated by Photography Curator of High Museum of Arts, Sarah Kennel; Curator of Colorado Photographic Center of Arts, Samantha Johnson; and a photographer in Magnum Photo Agency, Bruce Gilden. Lee published four books and participated in many anthologies. His photographs have been commissioned to be covers/features of magazines, books and other publications.
Olivia Mikolai Ridge (b. 1992) investigates systems of representation. Tracing the intersections of voyeurism and violence, she confronts media infrastructures of myth building and nostalgic fabrication. Her collaborations with the camera bring together interviews, photographic portraits, and immersive installations to trace collective desires and reimagine our roles within criminalized landscapes. Each research-based exploration builds on her professional experiences as a television extra, tour-guide, and assistant to an Ancient Greek archaeologist. She holds a BFA from Concordia University in Montréal where she served as the President of the Concordia Photography Collective.
Chang-Ching Su searches for transitional spaces between different systems or structures of authority, on the stage or behind the backdoor, before a parenthesis, after a quotation, within vicissitudes, beyond perpetuity. Acting as an internal birdwatcher, stalker, activist, protagonist, and apologist, he shuttles between understanding and incomprehensibility, between naivete and reality, between red velvet cake and national security, between free-flowing elocution and words approaching the tip of the tongue. As an interdisciplinary artist, Su works with images, languages, found objects, videos, appropriations, social structures, stereotypes, conversations, inquiries, humor, satire, and randomness.
Micah Sykes’ work is an exploration and reinvention of the urban environment. He considers his work to be something new called neo-urbanism. The work stems from the artist’s past growing up in a Los Angeles ghetto and the experience of his neighborhood fading and change do to gentrification. Sykes explores topics that relate to urban life including religion, race, and ideas about America. From being formerly homeless the artist worked his way off the street and eventually enrolled and graduated from the art school of UCLA and now attends SAIC with the New Artists Society scholarship.
Chelsea Tan is a Singaporean artist who uses photography, film, installation, and fiber arts as mediums to navigate through the complex themes of trauma, desire, intimacy, and loss. In her ongoing series, Godot, she predominantly uses photography to explore the sense of purgatory which stems from her own unresolved trauma and grief.
Eugene Tang (he/him) is an art laborer. His work focuses on people who are disenfranchised or unseen in certain social contexts. Using interdisciplinary mediums like photography, writing, and sculpture, to narrate the connection between human beings, objects, and space, to comprehend individual/collective complex experiences. Tang co-authored a book titled Grandma’s Girlfriends - the Splendid Youth of Elder Lesbians, which won ‘Best Daily Book of the Year’ of ‘Openbook Award, Taiwan’.
Tzuen Wu makes installations, photographs, and videos, that explore seeing and being seen. How the power dynamic works and flows, and the potential social structure behind them. Usually started with things happened around them, for example identity crisis, family history, and environment. They also like to play with different materials, from dark room to electronics.
Zhuyan Ye (1996) born in Zhejiang, China. She walks around the marginal spaces of the cities she has lived in while trying to test the relationship between the body and the space by a/the chair. Zhuyan makes images and sound, performs and writes.
Leslie M. Wilson is Associate Director for Academic Engagement and Research at the Art Institute of Chicago. Her research and teaching focus on the history of photography, the arts of Africa and the African diaspora, modern and contemporary American art, and museum and curatorial studies. She is currently at work on the exhibition not all realisms: photography, Africa, and the long 1960s at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art, which will open in winter 2023. She has recently written for publications including Dear Dave on Carrie Mae Weems, FOAM Magazine on Luther Konadu and Donovan Smallwood, and Manual on Aïda Muluneh, and interviewed Larry W. Cook for Weiss Berlin. From 2017–2021, she was an Assistant Professor of Art History at Purchase College, SUNY. And from 2019 to 2021, she held a curatorial fellowship at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago. In 2017, she received a PhD in Art History from the University of Chicago and holds a BA in International Relations from Wellesley College.
Jonas N.T. Becker makes photographs, videos, and performances that explore how systems of power place value on the body and the resource-rich landscape. His practice is research based, excavating layers of mainstream and marginalized histories, particularly in rural America. Each of Becker’s projects focuses on a specific landscape, drawing attention to interrelated histories and human impact. Becker has exhibited internationally, including at the MCA Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Photography, ICA LA, and LAXART. Becker works between his home state of West Virginia and Chicago, IL, where he is a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Shelf Shelf is the Chicago-based publishing imprint and collaborative graphic design practice of Lucas Reif and Austin White.
Printed May 2022
Type Janson Max Neue
Edition
150 copies
Paper Domtar Cougar
All art © 2022 the artists, all text © 2022 the authors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or retransmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any other information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
65 Over the Wall, undisclosed location, 2020
