Sweet Creature

Exhibition on view: July 21-August 10, 2010
Opening Reception: Friday, July 21, 6-9:30 pm

The Chicago Artists Coalition is pleased to present Sweet Creature, featuring HATCH Artist Residents Cameron Clayborn, Sydney Shavers, and Anna Showers-Cruser.

"No one man should have all that power," Kanye West commands on his 2010 album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. A plea to be recognized for bringing an alternative perspective as an artist into this world, he entreats the listener to acknowledge the constraints present in our current society. However, these words never lose relevance as time continues to show us how we have yet to step outside our violent, suppressive systems. 

The three artists in Sweet Creature use their practices to explore microcosms of how power operates, manifesting spaces for dialogues that are productively uncomfortable. These conversations revolve around race, power, queerness, illness, and systems in place that maintain the guise that there is one way to be in this world. Beginning from a place of deep personal experience, Clayborn, Shavers, and Showers-Cruserinvite viewers to experience what it feels like to be told you are nonconsumable. The psychological pain of living in a world that is not constructed for one's body can, at times, feel insurmountable, but, together, these artists offer a space to unlearn preset values that create and inform "otherness." 

Or as Kanye asks us, "You got the power to let power go?"

Sweet Creature is curated by Ariel Gentalen.

Cameron Clayborn, Untitled (Curtain Arrangement 1), 2017, satin fabric and stainless steel, dimensions variable; Anna Showers-Cruser, Studio View, 2017, Cast Silicone with materials found and prescribed, dimensions variable; Sydney Shavers, Post Still #2, 2017, film still. Courtesy of the artist and CAC.