maybe you need time for your eyes to adjust to the dark

Chicago Artists Coalition proudly presents maybe you need time for your eyes to adjust to the dark, a two-person exhibition by 2023-24 HATCH Residents Michelle Chun and Armando Román, curated by Christian Gonzalez Ho.

I invite you to see the explosion of color in this exhibition as an alchemy of darkness. Armando Román and Michelle Chun’s mark-making practices trace and triangulate spirits, minds, and bodies. To represent these as co-equal is rare within the contemporary landscape.

The title of the exhibition is an excerpt of dialogue from Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonme Who Can Recall His Past Lives. Weerasethakul dissolves the categories of human animal man and woman within the darkness of the cinema; art becomes witness to the testimony of the numinous.

Similarly, the profusion of color and agility of form I encounter in Roman and Chun’s work dissolve the clinical divide between “representation” and “revelation.” Lingering before these pieces, I am disoriented and unmoored from a vision of myself as a hermetically-sealed individual. The sum of these gestures is a series of moments in which otherness is rendered perceptible. Such moments invite us to exchange clarity for mystery, surety for fluidity, and control for communion.

Michelle Chun is a visual maker from Southern California. She received a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and a MAR in Visual and Material Culture from Yale Divinity School. She approaches her practice as both a visual investigation of how fragments accumulate, circulate, and create cultural imaginations within a community and also, simply, as the material language of meditation and prayer. She is currently a HATCH resident at the Chicago Arts Coalition and was the Painting and Drawing Teaching Artist in Residence at Lillstreet Art Center in 2023-2024. She has shown at Helen J Gallery in Los Angeles, Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, and Gelman Gallery in Rhode Island among other exhibitions.

Armando Román is a Chicago-based artist who creates works on paper combining digital brushstrokes with physical marks from crayons, colored pencils, and pastels. The Mexican landscape, both cultural and literal, intrigues him, reflecting both a familiarity and foreignness due to his familial history. His compositions explore the relationship between border and center, using colors and patterns informed by Mexican folk art. Roman's art intertwines religious motifs and queer aesthetics, creating works that reflect an interest in both euphoric belonging and dysphoric rejection, embodying the double bind of pleasure and pain in his identity as a queer person raised Catholic.

Christian Gonzalez Ho is a PhD candidate in Art History at Stanford university and holds a Master of Architecture degree from Harvard University. Christian works as a cultural theorist, curator, and art historian, with a focus on how art and architecture mediate relationships with the self, others, and the numinous.

- Christian Gonzalez Ho