Hiding in Plain Sight

The Chicago Artists Coalition is pleased to present Hiding in Plain Sight, a HATCH Projects exhibition featuring works by Soheila Azadi, Hannah Givler, Leander Mienardus Knust, Raul De Lara, B. Quinn, and Hillary Wiedemann, and is curated by George William Price.

Expurgation, even when it subtracts or omits, adds a space for contemplation that allows us to read both the secondary authority and the original beneath. Walking through the gallery space, this exhibition reveals that it and its components are simply vision, rather than an absolute given. Paradoxically, we enlarge that vision—as we traverse the space—through the formation of a new universe. The physical specificity of the works in Hiding in Plain Sight enter into a comparative methodology with their gallery surroundings. In doing so these works—made of the visual, physical, and sonic—exist always on the cusp of becoming sculpture; they are actions rather than static symbols.

Our presence in the space amplifies this collective field of vision, which through an erasure of presence or an embrace of the peripheral brings attention to itself. Push and pull, material and immaterial, freedom or control, Hiding in Plain Sight asks us to orient our bodies in response to the creation of its own system, situating itself simultaneously within and outside of the world. Engaging with the bodies that activate them, the works breathe outward, intersecting with the architectural container they inhabit. Within these sculptural “actions”—temporally infinite and inexhaustible—it is our self that endures.