LifeLinien

About

In LifeLinien, works by Carris Adams, Yesenia Bello, Knut Eckstein, Óscar González Díaz, Unyimeabasi Udoh and Nicole Wendel take their cues from signs and signals, both physical as well as perceived, involving the body, landscape, commerce, and structures of power. Working with various types of signs ranging from those found in advertisements and on packaged goods to those that affect our ability to navigate space and place as well as others meant for protest, each artist investigates and reflects on the entangled systems that underlie the fabric of everyday experience, issuing a call to question, resist, and transform existing structures.
Works in LifeLinien by Unyimeabasi Udoh (Chicago) range from a strung-paper garland—of the type that you might find at a celebratory event, but which here spells out the phrase “No Surprises”—to a circular painting that references the pervasive public sign for “No,” to A Blind Glass, wherein Udoh coats a circular mirror in dark resin, inviting a reflective gaze onto its murky surface. While Udoh creates signs that point to the ubiquitous systems of communication and knowledge that operate around us, Carris Adams (Chicago/Houston) creates abstractions based on the signage that marks the social, cultural, political, and economic circumstances in the neighborhoods she traverses. Here, Adams’s paintings on billboard vinyl are abstracted from signs advertising psychic palm reading businesses that boldly promise spiritual healing and “results or it’s free.”
Knut Eckstein’s (Berlin) work often relies on packaging used in the marketing of  common household items. Emptied of their goods, the containers are repurposed into assemblages that re-imagine the by-products of consumerism that have traveled across the globe. Óscar González Díaz’s (Chicago/Berlin) work also takes discarded consumer goods packaging as its starting point. Here he uses a Mexican sign-making technique to adhere old candy wrappers and emergency blankets to glass with soda in order to list the names of autocratic government officials. Spelled out in alluring, colorful letters, the names blur and bleed into one another, ultimately becoming illegible.
Whereas many of the works directly reference specific types of signage and packaging, others, such as in the hanging installation work of Yesenia Bello (Chicago), ask visitors to be conscious of their own movements while navigating the exhibition. Drawing on her identity as a Mexican-American artist, Bello refers to the experienced tension of shifting between different cultures and modes of communication on a daily basis.  Her multi-media works similarly recognize identity itself as a form of collage.  Nicole Wendel’s (Berlin) expansive, atmospheric drawings emerge from a process of “Deep Listening” that records the traces of movements and sensations experienced in the body and the environment, often in collaboration with others. Through a mindfulness-based approach, Wendel’s performative notations ultimately begin to articulate a space for reflection.
To offer a lifeline is to connect to another in a way that supports and protects lives. By engaging with the signs, signals, and systems that dominate contemporary life, and to which we have become conditioned, the artists in LifeLinien ask themselves—and us—to consider what it might mean to carve out space for alternative paths forward. 

LifeLinien is curated by Holly Cahill and Debra Kayes of Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago.

Tiger Strikes Asteroid is a 501c3 non-profit network of independently programmed, artist-run exhibition spaces with locations in Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Greenville, SC. Their goal is to collectively bring people together, expand connections and create community through artist-initiated exhibitions, projects, and curatorial opportunities. 

Special website for the show: https://lifelinien.com/