On View: June 12th - July 26th
Artists: Jingqi Wang Steinhiser, Nicole Schonitzer
Steinhiser and Schonitzer paint worlds void of humans, populated instead by beings and animals that function as multifaceted symbols and populate worlds of internal liberation in each of their respective practices. Creature Reverie explores these worlds and their inhabitants.
Steinhiser, having lived a nomadic life in China, Russia, Mongolia, South Korea, and the USA, investigates the animal body as a traditional and modern symbol across these varied settings.
In her most recent works, she turns toward the concept of “home”: not as a physical shelter or fixed geographical location, but as an imagined psychological space shaped by memory, displacement, and inner world-building. In my recent paintings, houses emerge insistently and in shifting states: interior and exterior collapse into one another; houses tilt, fall, float, dissolve, or rest on clouds; they appear without doors, soaked, erupting, or wrapped in hair. The house is no longer a stable structure, but a living image; one that gathers the dispersed fragments of inner life. It becomes less an object in the world than what Gaston Bachelard describes as a space of daydreaming, where the imagination finds refuge and expands. Alongside these houses, animals inhabit interior spaces. Drawn from daily encounters, poetry, song, mythology, and ornamental forms, they accumulate into a personal symbolic language. Within the house, they are not simply placed but dwell, moving through rooms, occupying corners, and participating in layered, often ambiguous narratives. They function like figures within a dream, both familiar and estranged, carriers of memory and instinct. Yet this house does not protect against the external world in any literal sense. It behaves instead as a moving interior; a vessel of subjectivity that cannot be entered except by the one who imagines it. It is both shelter and cosmos; a small, contained universe that nonetheless opens outward into boundless psychological space.
The beings and forms (the ‘Guys’) of Schonitzer’s work exist in a symbiotic ecosystem situated in a bizarro-earth world, where they mostly inhabit giant bodily chambers, bathrooms, and the sea – spaces that are hidden, interior, wet, and gross. Here, there is power in softness, impulsivity is celebrated, and tenderness rules. The works in this exhibition are primarily set in the bathroom or baths or physically embody the Guys’ bathroom accessories. The Guys are at their most ingenious in the bathroom. They learn to make each other multiply through supernatural comb rituals. They rig their bidet for group use. They experiment in making personal ablutions collaborative and invent new ones entirely. They build the infrastructure of their baths with curves and tiers to suit their squishy bodies and proclivity for fun. For them, the bathroom is a place of rest, play, and experimentation. If chaos unfolds, it’s fine; everything is already tiled. In producing this work and building the world of the Guys, Schonitzer is concerned with the bathroom as a place that both underscores and provides a glimpse of possible resolution to many problems of contemporary, American life. She sees it as a venue to remove oneself from the addictive technology that keeps us surveilled and accessible at every waking moment, to reconsider what is personal and what can be shared and, thus, to move away from shame and towards shamelessness, and to sit with oneself in the literal and figurative sense, opening up a pathway for personal transformation and boundless creativity.
Both artists render visions of impossible places; places where the constraints of the human world fall away, and they find complete, authentic homes for their interior selves.
Jingqi Steinhiser
Jingqi Steinhiser(b. 1997, Beijing, China) is a multidisciplinary visual artist who grew up in Mongolia and currently lives and works in the United States. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2020 and her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2022. Shaped by a life lived across shifting cultural, linguistic, and geographic borders, her practice explores migration, memory, and the fragmented process of identity formation in a globalized world.
Jingqi’s work invites viewers into imagined surreal landscapes that capture the disorientation produced by constant movement and the lingering pull of nostalgia. She weaves symbols of specific historical moments together with imagery drawn from traditional mythology, prophecy, and folklore. Through this visual synthesis, her paintings create psychological shelters, spaces of pause and reflection, for individuals navigating multiple cultural identities. These figures often appear suspended between belonging and displacement, mirroring the artist’s own experiences of growing up between cultures. Rather than offering a fixed resolution, Jingqi’s work acknowledges both the struggle and the release found in existing within these in-between states.
A recurring formal strategy in her paintings is the construction of imposing barriers or architectural blockades positioned at the center of the composition. These physical obstructions deliberately prevent the viewer from entering the pictorial space. Conceptually, they reflect the obstacles she encounters in daily life: learning and switching between languages, articulating a single idea across different linguistic systems, and adapting to the accelerated pace of contemporary living and working environments. The act of blockage becomes both a metaphor for limitation and a site of negotiation.
Language plays a crucial role in Jingqi’s visual vocabulary. Her curiosity about proverbs, idioms, and their shifting meanings across cultures often finds expression in her work. Chinese phrases such as Wu Fu Lin Men (Five Blessings Arrive at the Door) or San Yang Kai Tai (Three Rams Herald Prosperity) are introduced through visual puns and homophonic humor, creating moments of wit that coexist with deeper emotional undercurrents. These linguistic references highlight how meaning can transform and sometimes fracture when translated across different cultural contexts.
Jingqi’s practice is also a response to the paradox of globalization; while increased connectivity brings cultures closer together, it can simultaneously erase specificity, producing surface-level uniformity that obscures individual histories. This pressure toward unity affects personal freedom, class dynamics, taste, and self-definition, leaving many individuals disoriented in their search for belonging. Her work resists this flattening by foregrounding complexity, contradiction, and emotional residue.
Recurring motifs like hollow castles, soulless birds, broken wonderlands, and distracted dinner conversations populate her imagined worlds. Suspended between familiarity and the strange, these scenes seek to mend fragmented childhood memories while engaging collective myths that resonate across personal histories. Each work is carefully constructed to evoke nostalgia while examining shared myths and symbols that resonate across personal and collective identities. Through this dual exploration, Jingqi invites viewers not only to witness her narratives but to recognize and reflect upon their own stories of belonging, loss, and becoming.
Nicole Schonitzer
Nicole Schonitzer (b. 1994) is a visual artist and curator from Chicago, Illinois. Her practice centers around painting, drawing, and installation. She holds a BA from Vassar College and an MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has been shown in New York, NY, Brooklyn, NY, Queens, NY, Chicago, IL, London, UK, and Providence, RI. She will release a book of her original drawings and writings in the summer of 2026. She has been featured in publications such as Create! Magazine, the Saatchi Art Rising Stars Report, Shoutout LA, and Canvas Rebel. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
My forms exist in a symbiotic ecosystem situated in a self-contained body-world where they pursue their respective, bespoke pleasures. Flesh and membranes protect them from the outside. Here, there is power in softness, impulsivity is celebrated, and tenderness rules. They take many shapes, both concrete and abstract: the Ghosts, the Worms, the Rays, the Moles, the hump, the cell, the tube, the three-pronged form, and so on and so on. The forms that can care for the others do, and the ones that can only be, are. They are gentle and soft with each other. Their movements are seductive and deliberate: pumping, undulating, permeating, inserting, and seeping. When presented with obstacles, they seep together and inch over them. Their labor is chosen, not prescribed.
Tending the forms is my chosen labor. The work is full of air and trajectory, bouncy. My application has bounce, flat then full marks. The paintings and objects are diagrams for delight, scenes flayed open and crusted with symbols directing one to a more tickled state. Their materials bleed, moving in tune with their base properties with a touch of my guidance. They percolate until air stops them in time. I work to move you to a place where you feel more alone but less lonely, away from our world’s probes and undertows. Here, as you float, you feel held by each particle in the atmosphere.
