Wild Thing: Guest curated by Pia Singh

Elena Ailes (b. Albuquerque, NM) is concerned with the encounters, intimacies, and discordances found between human (actions, bodies, histories) and nonhuman (thing, being, astral) worlds. 

She has presented her texts, videos, and installations widely, including at Apparatus Projects (Chicago), the SculptureCenter (NYC), Randy Alexander Gallery (Chicago), Sector2337 (Chicago), the Harvard Graduate School of Design (Cambridge), and 4th Ward Project Space (Chicago.).

She is interested in that which makes her a better person and a worse person, especially in theory. In reality, she is an artist and writer living and working in Chicago, IL.

Born in 1967, Chris Austin studied mechanics at Ferris State University; a background that is evident in his meticulous art making process. Thoughtfully composed works emerge from methodical planning that manifests through research, sketching, and assembling source materials. Austin alternates between painting on canvas and hand-cut cardboard imbuing his work with a fresh viewpoint. Austin’s mechanical interest is further evidenced in 2-dimensional works in which he uses subject matter to break the linear border of the substrate. His painting practice is grounded in realism with a nod to folk art. Chris layers elements within his paintings - intentionally overlooking volume and shadow and instead focusing on “the composition [and] the colors”. His minimalist approach encourages narratives to emerge that are left open for personal interpretation and musing. Recent exhibitions include Into Action at Resolution Studios in Chicago and With a Little Help From My Friends guest curated by Megan Foy and Julian Van Der Moere.

Sayera Anwar (b. 1995, Pakistan) lives and works in Chicago. In 2018, Anwar completed her Bachelor’s in Visual Arts at Beaconhouse National University, Lahore. In 2024, she completed her Master of Fine Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she was awarded the prestigious New Artist Society Merit Scholarship. In her interdisciplinary practice, she explores themes of home, borders, and otherness, beginning with her initial interest in the Pakistan-India Partition and now within her diasporic experiences.

In the past three years, Anwar has been nominated for and selected to participate in artist residencies, such as Duje Pase Ton (From the Other Side), commissioned by the South Asian Canadian Histories Association, and VASL’s annual artist residency, Taaza Tareen’13, in Karachi, Pakistan. Her work has been exhibited at Full Circle Gallery in Karachi, SITE Gallery in Chicago, and in Convergence in Flux at the South Asia Institute in Chicago.

Cecilia Beaven is a visual artist and art instructor from Mexico City, based in Chicago. Cecilia holds an MFA in Studio from SAIC which she pursued as a Fulbright scholar and a BFA with honors from ENPEG La Esmeralda (Mexico City). Cecilia’s multidisciplinary artwork has been shown in solo shows in Mexico City, Houston, and Chicago, as well as in group exhibitions in Mexico, the US, Colombia, Sweden, Italy, and Japan. She has painted murals in several cities such as Hiketa, Paris, Houston, Chicago, Mexico City, Oaxaca, Pachuca, Tepoztlan, and Tijuana, where she was commissioned to paint a segment of the border wall between Mexico and the US.

Born in 1994, Renata Berdes’ persistence and focus in pursuit of her artistic outcomes is indomitable. Themes, or what she often calls “obsessions,” are pursued with much intention. When viewed collectively, her sculptural works suggest the assemblage of a new space that plays with scale and permanence. Individually her sculptures are imbued with the magic of what is possible; first there was nothing, and now by Berdes’ hands and imagination the object exists. Found objects are unified through an intimate connection with the sense of touch that manifests in rich textures. Berdes invites us to see the world from her perspective and delights viewers with her reinterpretation of what is. Berdes’ work has been exhibited at the Outsider Art Fair in NYC, Chazen Museum of Art in Wisconsin, and is in the permanent collection at the University of Wisconsin Waisman Foundation.

Chris Bradley is an artist based in Chicago, IL, USA. He has presented his work in solo exhibitions at Ackerman Clarke Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Shane Campbell Gallery, Roberto Paradise, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Raleigh, and has been included in group shows at the Chicago Architecture Biennial 2023, the Renaissance Society, Atlanta Contemporary, Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, and the NRW-Forum. He received his MFA degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010. In 2017, he was the recipient of the Meier Achievement Award. In addition to his studio practice, he is an instructor of sculpture at the University of Chicago. Over the past two decades, Bradley has developed a sculptural language around representation, poetics of ordinary subjects, trompe l’oeil techniques, and exhibition as site for the imagination. He aims to use this creative language to encourage his audience to practice the suspension of disbelief as a method for reconsidering and understanding this shared common world.

Zachary Cahill is an interdisciplinary artist who has lived in Chicago since 2005. In recent years his work has taken a decisive turn from parafictional nation building towards the genres of fantasy and fairytales. His artwork has been featured in solo exhibitions at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Regina Rex, New York; The Smart Museum of Art, Chicago; and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and he was included in the 8 th Berlin Biennale. Cahill has published a novel, two books of poetry, and self-published a graphic novel. He is Director of Programs and Fellowships at the University of Chicago’s Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, where he is also the founding editor-in-chief of the journal Portable Gray, an arts and ideas magazine put out twice a year by the University of Chicago Press. A monograph on Cahill's art, Zachary Cahill’s Composite Art: A Study of the Poetic Illuminations, by Dr. Jacob Henry Leveton is forthcoming from Mousse.

Isamu Guy Conners was born in 1990 in Tokyo, Japan and moved to Chicago as a child. Conners has a talent for realism and is gifted with a keen sense of visual perception. Where other artists may be intimidated by the detail or scope of a reference image, he has the ability to break his subject down to the key qualities that convey depth, texture, and character. He skillfully layers brush strokes over time – whether in a wet on wet application of acrylic or delicate washes of watercolor – yielding a rich and varied surface. Conners enjoys depicting landscapes and still lifes (typically of a single object), as well as working on commissions.

Selected exhibitions include Bouquet, Dog Show, and If a Mountain Could Love at Circle Contemporary in Chicago, as well as Championship Belt at NIAD Art Center in Richmond, California. His work is part of the ArtBank permanent collection in McCook, Nebraska. Outside of his work as a painter, Conners is an avid runner. He takes breaks from his practice to participate in several marathons each year in cities across the US.

Mari Eastman (b.1970, San Francisco, CA) holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA from Smith College. She has been in exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, the Berkeley Museum of Art, and had solo shows at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Sprüth and Magers Projekte, among others. Recent solo shows include The Green Gallery in Milwaukee and Bombon Projects in Barcelona, Spain. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Artforum.com, and featured in Contemporary Art Daily. Eastman lives and works in Chicago and is on the faculty at DoVA at the University of Chicago.

Sam Filicky’s work embodies the romanticism of traditional landscape painting and an appreciation for the beauty found in the natural world. Filicky’s primary inspirations include landscapes, seascapes, abstraction, and the joy of the creative process. His soft, atmospheric landscapes aspire to capture a particular feeling or tone, whether that of a particular season, element of nature, or hazy memory of a terrain once visited. He routinely alternates between painting and drawing, gradually building each composition through a layering of media on the surface. Filicky’s paintings are defined by bold brushstrokes – fluctuating between quick and gestural or long and meandering – and a wet on wet mixing of vibrant or muted acrylics.

Joshi Radin Flores is an artist living in Chicago. During spring and fall migrations, you can find her in the loop on Friday mornings conducting salvage and rescue operations with the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors.

Raised within an experimental, back-to-the-land community in central New York, Radin Flores grew up in close proximity to utopian thinking and its limits, and has been working through both ever since. Her practice moves across photo-based media and collaboration, tracing entanglements between natures, cosmologies, and geopolitical histories.

Erin Hayden is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago working in painting, ceramics, performance, video, and installation. She holds an MFA in Art Theory and Practice from Northwestern University and a BFA in Drawing and Painting from Illinois State University. Her ceramic sculptures and tea wares, created under the name Psychic Orcas, explore themes of waves, transformation, and interconnectedness, drawing inspiration from orcas and butterflies as symbols of freedom and change. Through an intuitive practice rooted in openness, awareness, and receptivity to the present moment, her work blends handmade sculpture, collected imagery, and immersive environments. Her work has been featured at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Stony Island Arts Bank, and Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea Torino, among others.

Mark and Lucy are both former members of Goat Island performance (Chicago) which is where they began collaborating.

Mark Jeffery (B. 1973, UK) is a performance artist, choreographer, community organisor, collaborator, and curator. He is a Full Professor in The Performance Department at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Since 1994 Mark has developed unconventional collaborations with visual artists, video artists, sound artists,writers, code artists, dancers, and cows.

Since 2019 he has collaborated with UK artist Lucy Cash on their film and installation project Winterage: Last Milk. A new multi year project A Show is a Living… (NO PERFORMANCES TODAY) will begin in 2025 onwards.

In 2012, he co-founded the language, performance, and technology collective Anatomical Theatres of Mixed Reality (ATOM-r) with Judd Morrissey. ATOM-r premiered its first work The Operature in 2014 at the National Museum of Health and Science, Chicago. In 2017 ATOM-r premiered Kjell Theøry at The Graham Foundation Chicago. In 2018, ATOM-r presented Rhinestone Cowboy, performed with cows at 606, Chicago. ATOM-r presented I Love The Dead at Gallery 400, Chicago in February 2023.

Mark was a former member of the internationally renowned Goat Island Performance Group from 1996 - 2009. Goat Island toured and taught extensively across North America and Europe. In 2019, The Chicago Cultural Center presented an exhibition dedicated to the work of Goat Island. The Goat Island Archive is now housed at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in their library collection.

Recent performances, exhibits and film screenings include: Winterage Last Milk Film 2023 onwards a collaboration between Lucy Cash and I had the following screenings 'Screenings include: Light Moves Festival, Ireland; Inbetween Time Festival, UK; Fine Arts Festival, NYC, USA; Rencontres International Paris / Berlin; LGBTQ Unbordered International Film Festival (Award Winner), USA; Artists’s Forum Festival, NYC, USA; Sentient Performativities, UK Graham Foundation, Chicago, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Chisenhale Dance Space, London, Alfred De Vrove, Prague, International Museum of Surgical Science, Chicago, Performance Arcade, Wellington, NZ, 606 Trail, Chicago, Gallery 400, Chicago, SAIC Galleries, Chicago, West Shore Community College and Ludington Arts Centre, Michigan. Arnolfini, Bristol, UK, Co-Prosperity Space, Chicago, Dartington Arts, UK, Kibla, Slovenia, Chicago Court Theatre, Chicago, Nexus Conference, Glasgow, UK, International Film Festival (Award Winner), USA; Artists’s Forum Festival, NYC, USA; Sentient Performativities, UK

Since Summer 2019 Mark has collaborated with Kelly Kaczynski on a long form residency project at The Poor Farm Experiment, Manawa, Wisconsin. NIDO LIVING IN THE PLAY, a annual sister residency programme takes place in Monte Castello di Vibio, Italy. There has been NIDO’s in 2023, 2024, 2025 and Nido V will take place in 2026. Each residency works with artists across all forms and is intergenerational and creating community and fellowship.

Since summer of 2018, Mark has created a performance space in his home, called Ohklahomo. The space allows for emerging and established artists to connect, make new work and always includes a dinner.

UK-based Lucy Cash in an interdisciplinary artist working within and through choreographic processes, and across form. Her commissioned work often involves social exchange and has taken place in galleries, museums, libraries, housing estates, on water and in the air. Her projects evolve ideas of collective practice which nurture interconnectedness between human and more than human, and across disciplines.

In 2013-14 the Foundling Museum chose her as their inaugural artist and she has undertaken a year-long residency for Whitechapel Gallery at Central Foundation School for Girls in Bow, London. She is the recipient of a fellowship from South East Dance, and between 2007–2016 she was an associate artist with Artsadmin (UK).

Lucy has received funding and commissions from the BFI; Arts Council England; Creative Scotland; Gulbenkian Trust; BBC and Channel 4. Her works on film and video draw on choreography & movement to reveal the systems and patterns of the subjects considered and have shown in both cinema & installation contexts and in galleries including Sophiensaele and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Hyde Park Art Center; Cultural Center and Sullivan Galleries, Chicago, USA; Zahoor ul Akhal Gallery, Lahore, India; Bonington Gallery, Nottingham; Tramway, Glasgow and Whitechapel Gallery, Tate Modern, Siobhan Davies Studios, and the Natural History Museum, London, UK.

Born in 1994, Lawrence M. joined Arts of Life to begin developing his studio practice. Working primarily in drawing, painting, and collage, he engages with a process and aesthetic reflecting his everyday interests – gathering imagery of animals, watching cartoons, and a spontaneous layering of diverse materials and ideas. Lawrence also enjoys traveling with his family, spending time with friends, and playing basketball, shot put, and a variety of other sports. Among other exhibitions, his work has been included in Duck Feet guest curated by Ricardo Partida, If a Mountain Could Love guest curated by Cody Tumblin, and Dance Dance Dance guest curated by Tyson Reeder.

Jasmeen Patheja (b. 1979, Kolkata) is an award-winning Artist in Public Service, working at the intersection of art and feminist movement-building. She builds ideas and facilitates collective action for the right to be defenceless. Patheja’s practice pans sites of gender based violence, bringing attention to the fluidity of their interconnectedness; sites are connected through the bodies that experience or enact violence. In 2003, she founded Blank Noise in response to the silence around street harassment in India and globally. Blank Noise is a community of Action Sheroes/Theyroes/Heroes, individuals stepping in to end gender-based violence. Over two decades, the initiative has developed participatory methodologies and art interventions that shift public consciousness. These methodologies have influenced and inspired social change in institutions and organisations across geographies.

Patheja’s work is rooted in listening to survivors of sexual violence, exploring themes of fear, memory, shame, empathy, desire, belonging, defencelessness, and the politics of fear. Key projects include I Never Ask For It (2004–ongoing), Talk To Me (2012–ongoing), Meet To Sleep (2015–ongoing), and Hahaha Sangha. Her practice spans performance, facilitation, photography, installation, sound, and video.

She is a TED speaker and a TED and Ashoka Fellow. Awards include the Visible Award (I Never Ask For It/Meet To Sleep), the International Award for Public Art (Talk To Me), the Jane Lombard Fellowship (Vera List Center, 2019), and the CARE Arts for Gender Equality Fellowship (Rockefeller Foundation, 2023). The BBC named her one of 12 artists changing the world (2019). Residencies include Akademie Schloss Solitude (Germany), the Rockefeller Foundation at Bellagio, and Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology. Her work has been exhibited at the Ford Foundation Gallery (NYC), The National Portrait Gallery (UK), Bronx Museum of the Arts (USA), and Centre for Contemporary Photography (Australia). Press includes The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, BBC, Bloomberg, and The Hindu.

Patheja has delivered talks at McGill University, Concordia University, Christ University,Mount Carmel College, Azim Premji University, and the College of William & Mary. She has taught at Grinnell College (USA) and Srishti Institute, where her classrooms become communities of Action Sheroes/Theyroes/Heroes. Students engage with the complexities of gender-based violence, locate their own experiences within it, and cultivate agency in designing for social change. She has seven years of experience in feminist mentoring, including her work with CREA, supporting young women leaders across organisations in India through a South Asia-focused programme.

Patheja collaborates with her grandmother, Inderjit Kaur, on the photo-performance series Indri, addressing ageing and agency. Patheja’s practice reflects on the visible and invisible labour of socially engaged art, the finite and infinite, and the tangible and intangible forms of making. Through her work with Blank Noise and I Never Ask For It, Patheja brings attention to what she calls the “infrastructures of listening to survivors of violence”—building capacities and methodologies for listening.

Tongji Philip Qian is a multidisciplinary artist and the co-founder of TPQ Studio. His artistic practice extends the limit of artmaking through conceptual lenses such as speed, labor, internationalism, and immigration. Rooted in images and words, Qian’s research investigates knowledge production in contemporary art with a scholarly focus on movements such as Minimalism, Post-Minimalism, and Conceptual art. His recent projects include Finding the Jetty (2024), No-risk Hour (2019-), Neighborly Passport Keep Right Except To Pass (2023), Questionnairing Reality (2021), and Art Beside a Single Handshake (2020). Qian’s drawings and paintings are represented in several permanent collections, including the RISD Museum, Mecklenburgisches Künstlerhaus Schloss Plüschow, and the Yangdeng Art Museum, whereas his artist books are housed in a large number of public collections, such as Special Collections at Smith College, Special Collections at the Center for Curatorial Studies Library and Archives at Bard College, Booth Family Center for Special Collections at Georgetown University, Center for Book Arts in New York, and Asia Art Archive in America. Qian earned dual B.A. degrees in Art History and Mathematics from Carleton College, an Advanced Graduate Certificate in Studio Art from New York University, and an M.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design. He has held teaching positions at Bard College and RISD, and currently serves as a Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Arts and a Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows, both at the University of Chicago.

Kellie Romany is an abstract artist interested in bodies and systems. Using a color palette of skin tones, Romany creates objects that act as a catalyst for discussion about human connections, race, and the systems surrounding these themes. She received a Masters of Fine Arts in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011 and a Bachelors of Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2008. Romany has exhibited both nationally and internationally, including museum shows at the High Museum of Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and DePaul Art Museum.

D. Rosen lives on the stolen and occupied lands of the Council of the Three Fires, known as Chicago, IL. They have received grants from The Foundation for Contemporary Art (2025), the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (2021, 2024), the Illinois Arts Council (2020), and the Nordic Summer University (2020). Residencies include Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; S12 and USF Verftet, Bergen, Norway; JOYA, Parque Natural Sierra María, Los Vélez, Spain; and HEIMA, Seyðisfjörður, Iceland. Recent exhibitions include Flower, Wind, and Dog at 65GRAND, Chicago (2025); GILT at Basketshop, Cincinnati (2025); Elemental Impressions of Interspecies Care, of Violence at ACRE Projects, Chicago (2024); and Lunglike Shadows at Arnarhlíð 1, Reykjavík (2023). Publications include "Gorgets: Trans Hummingbirds and Iridescent Echos," Queering Nature, Antennae (2024); "Chrysanthemum Powder and Other Interspecies Scent Rituals," Olfactory Art and the Political in an Age of Resistance, Routledge (2021); and "fashioning the undead," A Trace of Fashioned Violence (2020). Rosen holds an MFA from the University of Chicago, Department of Visual Arts, and a BFA from Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design.

Alex Scott was born in 1987 and is a Chicago native. Known for his use of simplified forms and flat, bright colors, Scott's fresh, direct approach to drawing and painting embodies a sense of nostalgia. His preferred materials are ballpoint pen, colored pencils, and acrylic. Scott’s influences range from cartoons and comics to classic mystery-comedy movies to children’s books, gaining continued inspiration from favorite books once read - The Phantom Tollbooth, Sam and the Firefly, In a People House by Dr. Suess, as well as books found in the studio. Neat arrangements of recurring characters, household objects, numbers, text, and symbols are frequently organized by letters of the alphabet and at times appear reminiscent of hieroglyphics. He often repetitively recreates past drawings or characters from memory with ease and accuracy, which results in slightly shifting iterations over years. This ongoing body of work exists across both individual works on paper and series of drawings in distinct sketchbooks.

Past exhibitions include EXPO Chicago, the Outsider Art Fair in NYC, Hand Drawn Circle at Intuit, and Dog Show curated by KG, among others. His work is part of the ArtBank permanent collection in McCook, Nebraska.

Jacqueline Surdell was born and raised in Chicago, IL. Now the third largest city in the US (and the largest in the Midwest), Chicago’s history of industry, labor, and midwest grit plays a significant role in Surdell’s work. Surdell’s Polish grandfather worked in the steel mills in Hegewisch (a neighborhood on the south side of Chicago), while her Dutch grandmother is a landscape painter. The dichotomy established between manual labor and conceptual labor influenced Surdell at an early age. Listening to stories of the mills — the operation of massive blast furnaces, chaotic melting pits, and subsequent injuries, was complimented with memories of frolicking in wildflower fields while her grandmother painted the colorful landscape. The combination resulted in an early-developed arts view where life and work, body and labor, industry and craft, and the high-brow traditions of plein-air landscape painting, merged. Those close familial memories influence Surdell’s complex terrain between art-making, body, sanctuary, and spirit.

Chris Viau was born in 1977 and currently resides in the city of Evanston. Chris’ work straddles the line between abstract and representational. This is due to his planned, yet dynamic, brush and line work. Upon first glance one sees a blend of colors and textures that reveal themselves as lush landscapes or weathered coastlines. He approaches art making with a high level of enthusiasm and is eager to experiment with new techniques. Chris is also a published poet. He has published four illustrated poetry books: Chicago Seasons, Being in Harmony with Nature, My Own Ways Through This Life, and Autumn in the Northwest. Viau’s art has been featured on studio merchandise and ArtLifting. Recent exhibitions include Perceptions of Flow: Movement at Evanston Art Center and our annual guest juried exhibition Perennial Hug.

“My favorite thing about being an artist is I can let my wild imagination show. The images that inspire me are landscapes. I feel that making landscapes is the best way to show my talent as an artist. Mostly I use chalk pastel and watercolor.”

Jean Wilson was born in Chicago in 1958 and has been a member of the Chicago Studio since 2007. Drawn to beasts both real and fictional - ranging from wolves and wildcats to bats and birds of prey to werewolves and three-headed hellhounds - Wilson is most inspired by the feared and respected nature of these subjects. Immediately visible across her body of work are sharp talons, ragged tufts of fur, glowing eyes, and jagged teeth lining unhinged jaws. While her feral menagerie serves as a collective talisman, it is also directly linked with her creative identity and related aspirational acts in the studio; she’ll often watch favorite creature features while wearing elaborate animal masks, fantastical wolf montage T-shirts, or a full body gorilla suit. As an avid consumer of pop culture, her paintings also sometimes depict stereo systems, CD players, headphones, or favorite musicians. For another ongoing series, Wilson has created yellow legal pad drawings over the years, poetic missives listing bits of text transcribed from various source material, including magazines, album covers, and online advertisements.

Wilson’s work has previously been featured in With a Little Help From My Friends curated by Megan Foy and Julian Van Eer Moere, Jesse curated by Peter Anastos, Opening Night curated by Liza Eilers, Face in the Crowd curated by Noёl Morical, Hand Drawn Circle at Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, Party Animal at The Franklin, and In Good Company at the Chicago Cultural Center, as well as a limited edition print run with Summertime Gallery in Brooklyn. She can also be heard on the Arts of Life Band’s 2017 album Kinda Weirdy.