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LATITUDE Chicago
10th Anniversary Exhibition and GALA at the Chicago Art Department November 3, 2023 – December 28, 2023 Guest Curator Link to LATITUDE website CBS 2 Chicago interview featuring: Lawrence Agyei, Anwulika Anigbo, Krista Franklin, Brian Gee, Stephan Goettlicher, Lauren Grudzien, Colleen Keihm, Chantal Lesley, Rachael Schafer, Ursula Sokolowska, Alexa Viscus, Reuben Wu What does it mean to investigate the intimacies of personhood that are so vastly experienced by diverse humans navigating this Life? The dynamic visual artists in the LATITUDE tenth anniversary exhibition strive on a daily basis to answer this question in practice. Alumni 2019-2020 lab assistant Sophie Lopez critiques immigration policy and confronts class dynamics as experienced by a Chicano family—her own—in the suburban Midwest. Latitude community member Anwulika Anigbo shares selections focused on joyful relationships between young athletes, to eschew typical, brand-centric tropes of body commodification. Leonard Suryajaya, in the wake of his 2021 Quarantine Blues presentation for Amsterdam FOAM, offers a signature levity to encapsulate the collective oddness encountered over the recent pandemic years. It can be observed that photographers often run forward into spaces when the rest of us run away to safety—whether that’s a physical safety, or a conceptual one. The bravery of these artist heroes in Chicago has been supported by the community space, and resources, consistently provided by Latitude. For the past ten years the organization’s Hubbard Street lab has served as a testing space and printing facility for Guggenheim Fellowship awardees, National Geographic photographers, Vogue contributors, MoMA exhibitors, and more. The high-quality and revolutionary image making that daily takes place will undoubtedly be anthologized, celebrated, and remembered as a significant generation within Chicago’s history of resident and visiting artists. Brian Gee, Latitude board president, keeps the scene hot and documents summer days at Chicago’s Hollywood Beach queer enclave. Lawrence Agyei and Alexa Viscus each elevate quotidian poses into high fashion, pushing away tired conventions of objectified perfection and coquettish sensuality. Chantal Lesley, a 2022 artist-in-residence, conjures fierce moods of her own form and femininity—from passion, to anger, and self love. Programming Fellow Lauren Grudzien and former volunteer Urusla Sokolowska present their own bodies as sites of respective exploration, indulging in traditions of self-portraiture alongside an agency of re-centering and physical exposé. Far evolved beyond a form that captures staid realism, photography at its full employ has in so many ways become each artist’s tool of scene dreaming. There is a creative aspiration to reframe the constricted vision or status quo that might otherwise be accepted as the final say. Hence, 2013 resident Reuben Wu offers a reimagination of landscape, technology, literal/figurative horizon, and time. Rachel Schafer and Stephan Goettlicher alternately evoke beautiful familiarities and haunting quietudes of old and new nature spaces that become home. Krista Franklin’s Afro-surrealist dreamscapes share a glimpse into the full body of her recent, lauded exhibition Solo(s) presently on view at Chicago’s DePaul Art Museum. For the past several years, since 2019, LATITUDE Chicago has been led by executive director Colleen Keihm. It is no coincidence that both as an artist and in her role of administrator, Keihm’s analog compositions, as she describes them, exist as spaces that push beyond the confines…inviting us to think and see beyond the common understandings of art. Cheers, Latitude community, to the past ten years. Looking forward to many decades more. |
My Tripping Tongue Makes Me Feel Like a Fraud, by Chantal Lesley 2020
Confirmed Bitch, by Chantal Lesley 2020
Not Less, by Chantal Lesley 2020
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