Cohort | HCL 2024 Fellowship Showcase
Doors at 5:00pm
Performances throughout the evening
HCL presents an evening of installations and performances by HCL 2024 Fellow Artists in Residence, including works from Sofia Gabriel Del Callejo, Helen Lee, Regina Martinez, Allen Moore, and Rigo Saura. This showcase offers an opportunity to experience new works across a wide range of disciplines, all incubated with support from HCL, and to celebrate this cohort of artists completing their second year in the HCL residency program.
The program will also include performances by HCL alumni, Irene Hsiao and Cat Mahari.
Light refreshments will be served. More details to be announced.
Get Tickets
Advanced registration is appreciated but not required.
About the Artists
Sofía Gabriel Del Callejo believes in the force of collectivity for change. Formally trained in dance, during advance studies in Management, Policy and Culture she began to deconstruct her practice by using the liminality and freedom of performance to explore the relationships between movement, language and politics. Her current practice uses facilitation, performance, organizing, curation and administration as tools for feminist resistance against exclusion and violence. Examples include orchestrating simple performative actions for individuals to emerge as accomplices for change. Sofía is originally from Mexico City.
Irene Hsiao is a dancer, writer, and multidisciplinary artist. She creates performances in conversation with visual art in museums, galleries, and public spaces, a practice that includes site-specific interaction with visual artworks and experimental engagement with artists, institutions, and the public. She is the 2024 Resident Artist at the Heritage Museum of Asian Art, inaugural Artist in Residence at the Smart Museum of Art in 2020 and 2021, 2022-23 Fellow at High Concept Labs, first Artist in Residence at 21c Museum Hotel in 2022-2023, and a 2020 Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist. Her performances have been presented at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, Smart Museum, EXPO Chicago, Chicago Textile Week, Ragdale Foundation, Krannert Art Museum, Alma Art Gallery, Kavi Gupta Gallery, and more. Learn more at https://irenechsiao.wordpress.com/
Helen Lee creates performance resulting from deep investigations into the honoring, understanding and celebrating of life, death, identity, and her ancestral lineage in Korea and Japan. Currently she is exploring dance, storytelling, video, taxidermy, and social practice as tools to dissect trauma, racism, xenophobia, grief, shame, anger and meanings of home to nurture healing. Much of the work Helen creates is from her memories and experiences, and driven by a desire to create a way for others to look at their own memories, sit with them and find acceptance and peace within them.
Cat Mahari’s practice is built from a richly layered body history, stemming from an archive of research and physical training with the intent to manifest an intellectual, material and informal legacy through documentation. By examining personal marks and socio-genealogical maps, she explores architectural inner and outer built environments. Her work comes from a personal resonance with the unregulated tsunami of Blkness. Learn more at https://www.catmahari.com
Regina Martinez experiences sound as records of our connections and departures. Her current experiments draw from an archive of infinitely personal recordings she relates to as soundmarks: her father’s hands cleaning dried beans, a child telling a story to another child, drumline rehearsal after school, the creak of the front gate to home. Each recorded moment becomes its own instrument, its own layer of a composition and a washing and wringing out of memory meant to be overheard like a poem again and again.
Allen Moore emphasizes the importance of nurturing the Black Imagination with social representation throughout his practice in experimental visual art, music, and makerspace/DIY teaching. Recently, he is making hand-cast records, paintings, and sculptures from organic matter, that he puts in dialogue with overlayed sounds from the records, voice recordings, and Black soul, jazz, and hip-hop samples. He is interested in how these Black Culture signifiers connect viewers to underlying racial, emotional and socio-economic conditions, and using them as tools to create space for advocacy, creative representation, and healing.
Rigo Saura creates dance that explores the chaos/order dichotomy. Originally from Havana, Cuba, where he graduated from the National School of Modern and Contemporary Dance,he embraces the growing new directions in dancemaking, especially the collective process and the expanding role of artist curator as a mediator between a performance and its viewer. His framework for making movement is reliant on different people and embodied disciplines, and derives from a long held interest in how to transport new aesthetics practices, important cultural knowledge, and agendas for social change across and beyond the dance sphere.
Access Services
Free street parking is available. The accessible entrance to Experimental Station is a red door on the east side of the building. The nearest bus stops are the #59 at 61st and Dorchester or the #2, #171, and #172 at 60th and Kenwood. Experimental Station is a few blocks away from the University of Chicago/59th Street Metra Station.
The first floor of Experimental Station, where the event will be held, is wheelchair accessible, including accessible bathroom stalls. The main performance space utilizes fluorescent overhead lighting.
For any other questions or requests regarding accessibility, please contact Angee Lennard, HCL’s Accessibility Coordinator, at angee@highconceptlabs.org or 312-374-1117.
Presented by High Concept Labs in partnership with Experimental Station.