(Un)Real curated by Haylie Jimenez/ Azadeh Hussaini/ Rial Rye

(Un)Real curated by Haylie Jimenez
Marginalized subcultures being celebrated, interrogated, and documented remains the link between this body of work. These artists all showcase certain lived experiences with exaggerated and "unreal" elements that are often in the fantastical or surreal. Whether exaggerated limbs or butterfly wings feature, ultimately there is a sense of the "other" as unquestioned and integral.
The sculptural and archival nature of these works targets a feeling of existing in our realm, our world, forever solidifying the urgency and importance of these works and the artists behind them.
Juan Arango Palacios
Anthony Rodriguez
Adrian and Danny EL ES
Val Schlosberg
Mariposa Martinez
Janeice Maddox
Haylie Jimenez
Sydnie Jimenez
Moises Salazar Tlantenchi
Aaron Eskridge
September 4 - 26, 2026
Opening reception: Friday, September 4, 6-9pm
Azadeh Hussaini
State of Being
September 4 - 26, 2026
Opening reception: Friday, September 4, 6-9pm
Statement/Bio
Azadeh Hussaini is an Iranian-American visual artist, educator, and curator based in Chicago. Her practice spans painting, installation, drawing, and sculpture, engaging questions of identity, displacement, and social struggle as lived and material conditions.
State of Being brings together strands of Azadeh Hussaini’s recent and ongoing work, exploring how life takes form under pressure—how bodies, like structures, carry weight, absorb rupture, and persist.
Working with recycled materials such as paper, cardboard, newspapers, and fibers, Hussaini treats matter as already marked by time, circulation, memory, and fragility. Alongside these sculptural works, a series of self-portraits begun in March 2025 records intuitive moments of looking inward. Beyond representations of the self, the portraits become mirrors of feeling, circumstance, and time—echoes of a moment.
During the war, as Hussaini watched her homeland under bombardment from afar, the making of these portraits was interrupted. Empty sheets mark this absence, holding space for what could not be pictured.
Rial Rye
Oscillation
solo exhibition
September 4 - 26, 2026
Opening reception: Friday, September 4, 6-9pm
Oscillation translates ocular trauma and somatic disruption into a visceral visual ecosystem. Rooted in the artist personal experience with eye injury, the work replicates the resulting disorienting perceptual shifts, visual static, and persistent sensation of nausea.
Through a reductive subtractive process, high-visibility signal pigments are applied to wide wooden panels and are chaotically carved away. The act of gouging and excavating through fields of high-contrast green, purple, and intense neon accents reveals the raw wood grain underneath, creating a textured topography that vibrates against the eye. The undulating, maze-like line work mimics optical interference, ocular drift, and phantom shapes, forcing the viewer’s gaze into a restless state of micro-adjustments.
By scaling these perceptual distortions up to an immersive triptych, Oscillation bridges the internal mechanics of neurological and ocular damage with external physical space. High-contrast safety hues—typically deployed to signal hazard or demand attention—here function as an unsettling sensory overload, inviting the viewer to inhabit the uneasy equilibrium between clarity, disruption, and physical vertigo.
Rial Rye is a self-taught contemporary artist and sculptor based in Atlanta, Georgia. Grounded in a deeply autobiographical practice, Rye’s work translates first-hand lived experiences, physical trauma, and personal history into tactile visual phenomena. Through subtractive wood carving, intense optical fields, and high-visibility pigments, their work investigates the raw intersections of perception, memory, and material culture.