On view: August 8 - September 21
Artists: Aimée Beaubien, CV Peterson, Erin LaRocque, Hannah Bates, Hillary Irene Johnson, Jaclyn Mednicov, Juan Molina Hernández, Katelyn Patton, Kellen Wright, Kris Casey, Molly Blumberg, Noelani Jones, Rachel Meyers Hefferan, Selva Aparicio, SK Reed, Théo Bignon, Tulika Ladsariya
Home Grown is an exhibition exploring human connection to nature through visual art. The second iteration of Home Grown will be an immersive environment of plant and nature-focused artworks integrated into a landscape of live plants inside the front gallery.
The exhibition will engage viewers to connect with the natural world through an exhibition of botanicals and organic items such as leaves, stems, fungi, and live plants. It encourages visitors to think more critically about our relationship to plants and our dependence on nature.
Aimée Beaubien
www.aimeebeaubien.com
@aimeebeaubien
Plants and photographs are woven into the fabric of my hothouse works. In an era of ecological depletion, I use photography’s infinite reproducibility to imagine a boundless proliferation of plant life—blending real and imagined forms into vivid, dimensional landscapes. Photographed leaves commingle with dried, drawn-on, and gold-leafed specimens, reverberating across dimensions in a conversation between image, representation, sensation, and technology.
With paracord—linked to survival, adaptability, and friendship bracelets—I build a flexible infrastructure. Woven into webs of entangled tendrils, it suspends forms and images in space and embodies the tension between fragility and resilience, preservation and reinvention. My process mirrors the adaptive growth of plants in a hothouse—where nature and artificiality converge, enabling accelerated transformation.
I create immersive environments with no clear beginning or end—spaces that embrace complexity, contradiction, and entanglement. These fluid, shifting landscapes invite viewers to navigate our shared ecological reality, where the real, the imagined, the preserved, and the lost coexist.
CV Peterson
In my practice, I work with living materials, especially fungi, not just as mediums but as co-creators. Through sculpture and installation, I explore the tension between sustainability and commodification, questioning how we relate to the living systems we so often turn into products.
In Home Grown, I present an interactive installation that centers mycelium as both material and presence. Mykitas Epoch: Who Goes First transforms the gallery into a garden. A field of sod breaks the sterile white-wall space, with a mulch tic-tac-toe board inviting viewers into a playful yet pointed game about environmental collapse. The playing tokens, cast in mycelium, are marked with gold and silver sigils representing plastic and Styrofoam, materials we rely on but must learn to release. By “blessing” these pollutants in symbolic farewell, the piece becomes both a game and a ritual.
But the question Who goes first? lingers beyond the board. Who goes first in the next wave of extinction? Who takes the first step toward stewardship: governments, corporations, communities, or individuals? Does humanity go first, or the planet? The title invites layered interpretations, from ecological urgency to the quiet politics of personal responsibility.
Blending science, play, and provocation, this work asks: How do we treat the life in our solutions? What does it mean to cradle something, not just physically, but ecologically and ethically? Fungus is not just a material. It is a species. And in this work, it becomes both collaborator and quiet provocateur.
Erin LaRoque
I cultivate collaborative, multi-kingdom artworks that intertwine the lives of Reishi mushrooms, known as “the mushroom of immortality,” various medicinal plants, and my honeybees with my own. These unpredictable, living tapestries and sculptures serve both practical and visionary purposes- they are personal gardens to cultivate beneficial compounds that can be consumed to improve one’s health and wellbeing, natural sites to provide companionship, joy, and therapeutic “soft fascination” within in an urban environment, and a demonstration of the possibilities of inter-species collaboration.
My embedded motifs reference and subvert florals and other organic patterns which have been historically used to bring a beautiful but sanitized and idealized version of nature indoors for human enjoyment. In these works, agents of nature form a collaborative work as dictated by their own life cycles, liberated from humans’ conventional standards of beauty. While I set the initial frameworks for growth, the weaving of the mycelium, the spontaneous emergence of mushroom fruiting bodies, the tangling of roots into organically inspired forms, and the undulating patterns of honeycomb form an unpredictable expression of each organism’s desired outcome and allow an alternate version of nature to be observed and contemplated.
These works are informed by science, pseudo-science, aspirational self-help rituals, historical floral decor and patterning, and fate. Allowing agents of the natural world to represent themselves as they are, and as they adapt to human intervention, is a way to tease the boundary between what’s considered beautiful, subversive, acceptable, or grotesque in nature, and in objects intended for human contemplation.
Hannah Bates
Hannah Bates' work explores the relationship between the natural world and post-industrial landscapes. She incorporates found objects into sculptures using techniques such as mold-making, casting, and assembling, working with materials like glass, metal, plaster, and cement. Her practice investigates the tension between organic and human-made elements, inviting viewers to reimagine their connection to place. Through this process, she seeks to unearth stories and cultivate curiosity about humanity's interconnectedness with non-human bodies and ecosystems.
Hannah Bates received an MFA in Craft/Material Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University and a BFA in Fine Arts at Columbus College of Art and Design. Hannah has taught within glass programs at VCU and Kent State University, and teaches metal casting workshops, most recently at the Akron Art Museum. She was an artist-in-residence at ACRE residency, chaNorth, and Sculpture Space. Hannah has exhibited at the Sculpture Center, RoyGBiv Gallery, and Heaven Gallery in Chicago. Hannah is currently a member of Vessel City, an artist-run space in Cleveland, OH.
Hillary Irene Johnson
I'm interested in beauty, mystery and unity of experience, perception, and expression. I feel the tendency to see the world in terms of what is inside or outside of myself, is a misunderstanding. I’m thinking about how the indexical nature of photography and video offers a bit of proof that the sublime is out in the world to be seen as well as being a state of mind. I believe that the feelings that arise in the presence of beauty are the result of energetic resonance and alignment. Working in the landscape and even in my own garden I feel a sense of mutual appreciation, a call to reciprocity. As John O’Donohue has it, “...the Beautiful offers us an invitation to order, coherence and unity. When these needs are met, the soul feels at home in the world.”
I’m after something similar to Matisse, who saw his paintings as an expression of the inner life of his mind. I also feel kinship with Agnes Martin and her Zen-like grids, who wrote of beauty, "It is not in the eye, it is in my mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection." I’m also thinking about Elaine Scarry’s notion that beauty witnessed calls forth ongoing mimetic representation which may have a deeply restorative effect. The field of neuroaesthetics affirms this impact, and to fully experience this inherently is an invitation to slow down.
In this work, I photographed a pair of lemon-balm plants from my own garden highlighting these humble objects and celebrating their beauty and the relationships I see between them and parts of the human body, the roots which resemble synaptic connections in the brain and which remind me of the longing all living things have for connection and contact.
I work with unbleached hand-made abaca paper infused with materials from the landscape. The paper appears delicate but is actually incredibly strong. The assembly of the image in sections encourages the viewer’s perception of the parts which comprise the whole and to savor the details of subtle beauty. The warm luminance of the lightboxes with handmade paper is an acknowledgement of the luminous nature of each aspect of existence.
I’m interested in the encounter for the viewer, with the presence of the paper, at this monumental scale.
Jaclyn Mednicov
Growing up in a suburban landscape of uniform architecture, I found refuge in nature. This early connection led me to landscape painting as a way to explore and express my evolving interests. Over time, my practice has become multidisciplinary, rooted in the use of natural materials gathered locally or gifted by loved ones. These botanicals, often on the verge of decay, are pressed into clay or encased in washi, leaving impressions that either reveal intricate details or obscure them.
Major life events, particularly the loss of my father, have deepened my exploration of themes like time, mortality, and memory. Nature, in its fleeting beauty, becomes a metaphor for time itself—a quiet reminder of life’s impermanence.
Juan Molina Hernández
Juan Molina Hernández (b.Guanajuato, México) is a Chicago-based visual artist. Molina Hernández's art practice includes photography, textiles, sculpture, and installations that explore narratives of home, lineage, memory, archives, and un/belonging. By appropriating symbols from the environment, culture, and personal memory they construct stories in relation to place, family, and a culture that never speaks just one language.
Molina Hernández graduated from Northern Illinois University with a Bachelors of Fine Arts in photography. In the past, they have exhibited at ACRE Projects, Charlotte Street Foundation, Chicago Artist Coalition, ENGAGE Projects, Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, New Mexico State University Art Museum, Roman Susan, and Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago.
juanmolinahernandez.com
@juanmolinahernandez
Katelyn Patton
These works are part of a larger body of research exploring how creative artistic practice can be used as a tool in the land management of invasive and pest species of plants and insects. Through using weedy and cultivated species as artmaking tools I see an opportunity to engage in nuanced conversations about healing and harm that reflect the complexities of contemporary life with new audiences.
The visual forms in Fluvial Silk Study I & II were created through absorption of natural dyes over multiple days onto silk, leaving marks similar to sediments settling in a river flow.
Seed Saving is in its second iteration and is a collection of all of the invasive buckthorn seeds removed from the berries that I've dyed with throughout the year. The germination rate of these seeds is extremely high so care must be taken with their disposal. I am removing these seeds as a threat to the environment by damaging them through the act of artmaking.
Kellen Wright & SK Reed
Kellen Wright is a multi-disciplinary visual artist currently based in St. Louis, MO working in installation, drawing, photography, and publication. Her work draws from histories of landscape painting and photography to expound upon her relationship with the contemporary environment in flux over time.
Kellen's practice approaches complicated contexts of place; how histories, biases, personal experiences, ecological conditions and political borders add tangible dimension to abstract boundaries. Abstraction is a lens to queer a landscape, creating situations of speculation for viewers to poetically consider the near future of our environment. Through passive practices like walking and conversation, active research such as writing, transcription, annotation, drawing, foraging, photography, and repurposing and reuse of salvaged materials, she build archives of material that denote a relationship between a body and places of overlooked potency and resilience. Her recent work specifically complicates the binaries of urban and rural and inside and outside, taking places like backyard gardens and urban parks for subject matter.
Kris Casey
www.kriscaseystudio.com
IG: @Kris_Casey_Studio
I declared I was to be an artist at the age of nine as I was in love with painting. My work has always involved the use of mixed media with painting. As a teenager, I experimented with using materials such as clay, rubber cement, fabric, and collage to create semi-abstract works that depicted nature and natural phenomena. I was fascinated by the human relationship to nature and the natural. In my early twenties, I became enthralled with “kitsch” and the relationship between kitsch and nature. These “kitsch” works were saccharin depictions of birds and plants, embroidered on raw canvases that I would use prior as drop cloths to accumulate marks and splashes. After a while, the drop cloths became more interesting to me and I began working non-representationally while still making gestural references to natural objects. I began to work on the floor and to use the canvas as an “arena to act” like the action painters and to stain raw canvases like the color field painters. Today, I work with actual, physical materials of nature, incorporating nature’s processes into the execution. I write about my process to draw out and examine the principles and concepts I use in my practice.
My studies in media philosophy and aesthetics inform my studio practice to examine how perception and materiality are shifting in today’s posthuman era. I hold a BFA in Fine Arts from Columbia College, an MA in Aesthetics from Paris 7, and an MA in Media Philosophy from Goldsmiths. I am currently completing a Phd in Philosophy, Art and Critical Thought at the European Graduate School. I have had the great opportunity to study with artists and philosophers including Bernard Steigler, Sarah Kember, Rosi Braidott, Luciana Parisi, Judy Natal, and Sabina Ott. My concepts and processes are informed by these influences and I am grateful for their impact and guidance.
I cannot think of myself without thinking-painting. I have always been fascinated with the material of paint, with the object of the brush, with the illusion of space and form and light and depth. I cannot take painting out of my personal history. At nearly every turn, painting lies deeply entangled in my own heterogeneous subjectivity. It is fascination and pleasure, yet it is also responsibility, longing and desire. Sometimes it is even a burden: Why must I paint? Why must I continue? Quitting, which I have tried, never lasts. The longest period of non-painting was about four years long, between the age of 26 and 30. In this period, I did reading and writing, and discovered a line of flight that led me into the questioning of technologies and their relationship to desire, nature, and being. It was during this period that I “found” philosophy and, in the end, it was the study of philosophy that brought me back to painting. I am, therefore, indebted to philosophy for inadvertently turning painting back on to me.
I no longer fight off painting’s uncanny hold. I am “all in”, and I mean that in the sense that Otto Rank meant when he said that “an artist ’s calling is not a means of livelihood, but life itself ”. Painting cannot be undone in me. It is in my code.
Molly Blumberg
Learning to navigate the world with an unpredictable body, especially during this collective moment of reckoning with the permeability and precarities of all of our bodies, has me fascinated with moments of leakage - the gaps where the inner leaks out and what should be contained escapes and becomes exposed, and the moments of impact where our bodies collide and blend with our lived environments.
My sculptural practice explores the spaces between our human bodies and the materiality of lived environments. As a body can melt into a couch or lean against a wall, working with or against designed objects, my work exists in these moments of potential permeability where our bodies are not so separate from the contexts of our surroundings. Skins of handmade paper swallow household items, broken chairs prolapse bodily blobs of rubber, nylon bulges, plaster seeps, pigments bleed and blend.
These sculptures - sometimes collages of pieces, sometimes autonomous beings - wrestle with figuration and fragmentation. Moments of specificity dissolve into formlessness, disrupting an understanding of a complete body and positioning the human body as a precarious and unpredictable material being. Pulling from art-historical depictions of the female body and employing feminist practices of fragmentation and reassembly, my work explores the phenomenology of a fleshy body that is a site of constant state change.
Many works are ambiguously bodily (simultaneously breasts, bellybuttons, anuses, ear canals), offering fleshy encounters with material that might make us blush or giggle. Yet we are left to question exactly what is so funny. Childhood curiosity and potty-humor go hand-in-hand: bodies can be the site of incredibly weird, funny, and joyful experiences before they become so loaded.
Noelani Jones
I am a community-building Fiber Artist passionate about strengthening individuals and communities with art and an appreciation for the natural world. My work highlights our dependence on nature and restoring a relationship with the land through seasonal, land-based crafts of natural dyeing and handweaving. Growing up on the island of O’ahu, Hawai’i being surrounded by such a beautiful eco-system, shaped me and my art making and has made me very aware of my impact on the planet as well as my footprint as a weaver.
My current practice is centered on creating site-specific installations of handwoven cloth with natural materials and functional works of art. I make work about weaving and natural dyeing. My weavings have fringe or use drapery as a concept. I never want the viewer to question if the work is woven by hand. I work with ideas of place, time, memory, craft, and community. By accessing my kuleana, a Hawai’ian value of responsibility to the land, it is my purpose to be a good steward. I aim for a continual practice of ethically foraging & cultivating plants from the land for dye, slowly weaving by hand on a foot-powered loom, and making with all second-hand, recycled, or scrap natural fibers. The land feeds me and my weaving and dyeing practices. This work explores connections with the land through colors derived from site-specific places for dye and connecting woven threads.
Rachel Meyers Hefferan
My goals as textile artist and wool producer are to celebrate interconnectivity, moments of slowness, touch, and the satisfaction I find in the materiality of fibers. Combining my practice as a weaver with my lifestyle as a small-scale shepherd allows me to engage in holistic practice that brings natural and second-hand materials through the entirety of their life cycle. Thoughtful collection of discarded fiber stashes, environmental practices around dyes, and supporting local wool production allows me to invite others into this practice through conversation, workshops, community, and other events. I create woven abstractions of living communities and networks so that people may slow down and reflect on physical processes and material sources to better appreciate what they cannot see. Source imagery that inspires these abstractions often comes from microbial communities that aggregate during the fermentation process; these tiny communities facilitate the recycling of all the basic materials in our world, which I find both inspiring and fascinating. Through playful uses of color, pattern, and textures, I hope to pass my
sense of awe on to the viewer while at the same time creating an object that serves as both a metaphor and a stilled enactment of these processes.
Selva Aparicio
Selva Aparicio (b. 1987, Barcelona, Spain; currently based in Alfred, NY, and Chicago, IL) is an interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture and installation. Her practice explores themes of memory, intimacy, death, and the temporality of life, often through works that celebrate the cyclicity of the natural world. Raised on the outskirts of Barcelona in a landscape once cherished by the Catalan bourgeoisie and later abandoned during the Spanish Civil War, Aparicio draws inspiration from this evolving environment—first a refuge for squatters and outcasts, now a reclaimed natural park. This early and intimate connection to nature fueled her enduring interest in the ephemeral.
Working with nature’s discarded materials—including cicada wings, oyster shells, lettuce leaves, plant seeds, and even human cadavers and hair—Aparicio combines organic matter with traditional craft techniques such as weaving, carving, and sewing. Her work functions as an extended death ritual, foregrounding a unique reverence for the neglected and forgotten. Painstakingly handcrafted, her sculptures and installations pair delicate visual beauty with raw emotional charge, offering space for environmental, social, and political reflection while also creating public outlets for navigating grief and loss in a world increasingly shaped by them.
Aparicio studied Sculpture at Escola Massana in Barcelona, earned her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015, and received her MFA in Sculpture from Yale University in 2017. Her work has been exhibited internationally at institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; DePaul Art Museum, Chicago; The Museum of Art and Design, NY; The International Museum of Surgical Science, Chicago; Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT; Can Mario Museum, Palafrugell, Spain; Kyoto International Craft Center, Japan; Instituto Cervantes, New York, NY; and Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, Spain, among others.
SK Reed
In my work, fluid and Sci-Fi “Creatures” engage with and learn from their non-human companions. I look to all the animate species surrounding me for relief from the intensely gendered and capitalist present. Living between Kansas and Missouri, I speak to the lost and critical connections between my body and the local environment. Spending time outside, I realize a greater kin I have been neglecting: the birds, water, animals, and plants that also call this place home. Using painting, ceramic, and installation practices I imagine a world where bodies are more than their physicalities and the wisdom of the more-than-human beings we share this world with are prioritized over profit.
My figurative paintings and sculptures challenge rigid notions of gender. I explore the strangeness associated with being a Queer body, the difference between the liberation felt within oneself and the ways my body is perceived by others. I embrace the fact that over fifty percent of the body is water and enjoy thinking about all the tiny, symbiotic organisms that share a home on and in the body. While the flesh is seen as a boundary for where bodies begin and end, my paintings feature watery paint that spills over these edges. The paintings embrace fluidity, a body seeping into and becoming part of its environment.
The ceramics speak to a different reality, the felt edge, a solid form in three-dimensional space. The difficulty and strength of my own Queerness is the struggle to be easily named. Not at home in the gender binary, I often feel I am living between dueling realities. When familiarizing myself with the wildly diverse prairie landscapes, dreams and fantasy take over, opening a place of possibility which expands my understanding of what is possible.
Inspired by the joy I find in Queerness and in these wild spaces, I create ephemeral installations on the gallery walls. The installations imitate beams of light radiating behind the artworks, connecting them to one another while stretching to towards the viewer, welcoming them into this world. In “Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds” adrienne maree brown writes, “What you pay attention to grows.” Additionally, she shares Toni Cade Bambara’s inspirational words, “the role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.” These sentiments fuel my current work, envisioning new ways forward in this often-harrowing world by paying close attention to how other species are surviving.
Théo Bignon
Like a knowing wink from a stranger in an anonymous crowd, Théo Bignon’s work finds pleasure in a tension between what is hidden and what is revealed. He creates embroideries, objects, and installations that combine autobiographical considerations and broader socio-political histories to examine the intersections between manifestations of desire, spaces of queer socialization, and notions of ornamentation and decoration.
Bignon embraces the erotic possibilities of everyday objects and the ways decorative techniques can transform or subvert the mundane. Drawing on embellishment crafts such as beading and embroidery, he questions notions of artificiality and excess—reproaches often projected onto non-heteronormative identities—and considers their historical exclusion from dominant artistic discourse.
His practice pays homage to subtle forms of resistance: going unnoticed, deceiving as a tactic for survival, like his beaded lavender sprigs. Since 2022, Bignon has been fabricating this flower, a symbol for many radical queer groups and a prevalent plant in the South of France, using a technique developed in the 16th century using a technique developed in the 16th century as a side-hustle by beadworkers, who collected excess or misshapen beads to create delicate flowers sold to the bourgeoisie. He sees in these decorative practices a rich terrain for subversive interventions, where the work of the hand echoes the malleability indispensable to the constitution of *2SLGTBQIA+ identities.
Tulika Ladsariya
Tulika Ladsariya explores connections using tenderness and nurturance to discuss beauty, identity, and history. Using an interdisciplinary practice of painting, ceramics, and installation, she creates work thatexplores threads that link multiple worlds.
Born in Mumbai, India and having spent the last decade in Chicago, USA-- she has exhibited in Museums, galleries, art centers and artist-run spaces in both countries- Hammond Museum NY, Ralph Arnold Gallery (Loyola University), North eastern Illinois University (NEIU), O’Connor Gallery (Dominican University), Shingoethe Center (Aurora University), Heaven Gallery, Chicago, Collar Works, NY , Expo Chicago, Riverside Arts Center, Jamaat Art gallery Mumbai and Kalakriti Gallery New Delhi and Hyderabad. She is a member of the Spaceshift collective, a cultural community group for South Asians in Chicago and Praxis, an artist collective in the Midwest. She was a resident at the Hyde Park Art Center from 2019-2021 and a BOLT resident at Chicago Artists
Coalition from 2022-23. She is a member of the Midwest Clay Guild and a 2022-23 recipient of the In-Session Fellowship for Threewalls Foundation and an Individual Artist Program grant by the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) by the City of Chicago.
SK Reed + Kellen Wright: Prairie Watchers
This installation is a collaboration between SK Reed and Kellen Wright. Wright created a rammed earth rectilinear path using dirt from St. Louis, Missouri where they live. Along this path, are local clay figures called, “Prairie Watchers.” The clay from these pieces are from Kansas City, Kansas, Reed’s home city. Covered in leaf and petal patterning, the ceramic figures are inspired by two tallgrass prairie species, the yellow coneflower and the long-headed coneflower. The sculptures carry charcoal, made by Wright out of foraged honey suckle, a plant that can dominate landscapes.
This is the second collaboration from the artist duo, the first being at STNDRD exhibitions in Granite City, IL in collaboration with Purple Window Gallery’s (Chicago) Artist Outpost series, a celebration bringing together artist-run communities across the midwest.
