Soft Show
Roman Susan at 1224 W Loyola Ave, Chicago IL
July 21 - August 12, 2018
What was Soft Show?
CT: That entire show was paying homage to my youth in Chicago and my upbringing. It had a lot of cultural aspects to it; I was producing a lot of works that were from Black popular culture during the 90s. It had some works that featured Will Smith from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. It would be in dialogue with a piece from PBS, Disney Channel, or popular culture, like “The Big Comfy Couch.” I would try to integrate my own family photographs into these images.
This version of popular cultural iconography that was intertwined into my own history felt fun and nostalgic. I titled it Soft Show because it had soft sculptures that I had produced out of felt so I was using this practice of craft to create hair products that were very familiar to me growing up and common in my household. Then I wanted to recreate them into these Muppet-like soft sculpture plushies: it would be a bottle of pink lotion hair product, a container of blue magic hair grease, a hot iron, and hot comb.
The exhibition honored what I knew to be home and things that I had missed about being around my siblings and being around my Mom. I knew that the show was going to be a departure for me to leave Chicago. I already was being really reflective about that while I was making this show. I didn't know what the future would hold from the show, but I knew that my time in Chicago was reaching a point where I just became more curious about the rest of the different regions of the country.
I had this feeling that I was going to move very soon after and then I started applying to graduate school. This show was really important for me to make sure that I was reflective of my history in this really sentimental way.
How did starting in fiber arts inform your current craft-based work with materials like stained glass?
CT: Embroidery and the fiber practice is a very slow, repetitive, and reflective kind of exercise for me. It's a way in which I'm able to have dispersed parts come together as these cellular molecular atoms when they are formed together create a whole. Working in embroidery and working with fiber materials has taught me that I could translate that same method of piecing together dispersed parts to create a full image, object, or a full feeling or emotion.
I apply that to the mediums that I use today, even when it comes to glass or working with body casting. The fragment is such a huge component of my work because of my background and fibers.
Depending on these fragmented parts to form together, and congeal together, to create something that another person can experience. It also allows for there to be unresolved moments. It's in the nature of the fragment that things are not quite finished or they're not answered. I found a lot of that to be an evolution from my practice with embroidery; I'm able to not have things be so pristine or have full clarity.
While working with glass, concrete, or working with metal, i'll let things behave the way that they're supposed to. Oftentimes, that natural organic behavior is the “error.” Things degrading, breaking down, not quite holding together firmly create a tension between materials. But there's still these man-made or human-made things that have human error in it. They're able to deconstruct or they're not quite proportionate. The show at Roman Susan impacted my entire trajectory.
The work that I made immediately after that show is what I ended up applying to graduate programs with. Then that show kind of launched this belief that things don't have to be clear. There should be gaps or fissures.
How are you referencing Black popular culture in your current work?
CT: It's not directly referencing media or television, but it'll be referencing community or what is an urban . . . how do we define urban landscaping?
I do it a lot through architecture now, imbuing that kind of architecture into the body. Where you start to see this weathering of the material, and things become exposed, like rebar in a concrete building. I’ll incorporate a garment that I wear, like hats, snapbacks, and fitted caps. Even things like religion, I find to be very intertwined. Contemporary black congregations, communion with one another, it's always faith-bound. I feel like that's very incorporated into Black communities in America. Christianity is tethered to popular culture through media or black film. I’m not always directly referencing a movie or television, but it's more of these nuanced experiences.
How do you address the convergence of familial ties and personal identity?
CT: I was obsessed with these family photo albums growing up. I keep all of the family albums in our household. I have them with me. I've moved with them. I consider my immediate family to be my siblings and my mom. They have trusted me with these albums for over a decade now. I'm the only one who has had the physical albums, they and I look through them all the time. Especially at that time, i was really trying to interrogate what this kind of fractal-parental being that I or any of my siblings were dependent upon.
These vulnerable states of our infancy and in our adolescence, I spent a lot of time desiring to get to know my parents and siblings better as an adult. While I was producing that work, the embroidery allowed me to spend a lot of time with facial features or expressions- things that were being emoted in the images. I have a lot of curiosity and wonder about the psychological state of my parents, along with my siblings, kind of observing them in real time. Then, trying to mesh the two, that history with the contemporary experience of these people in my life, that I felt so close to.
There are a lot of moments in which there wasn't enough vulnerability that I was craving. I would seek them out through these images and spend so much time creating stories around them or narratives about what could possibly be happening in their mind.
It gave me an opportunity to spend time with my family, who I felt like we were starting to drift apart. We were living in different places at the time. Then I started going to school. I was at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I was starting to be exposed to diversity for the first time. I had never been immersed with people of difference, specifically racial, class and cultural difference until I started college. It was a huge cultural shock for me. I would commute back and forth from the south side of Chicago all the way downtown or up north to spend time with my colleagues.
It was just two different experiences to go back and forth like that. I felt like I didn't want to lose a sense of myself while also knowing that I was starting to evolve because I was having these new experiences. Retracing some steps, having curiosity about my own family lineage and history, is what I was really trying to get at by looking at those albums.
I recently just looked at the albums again because I hadn't for probably like two years. I hadn't looked at them because I felt like, through embroidering those images, I kind of felt like I lost a little bit of something that I can't quite articulate. It made me not be able
to look at those images for the past couple of years. Now recently, I just started looking at them from a different lens. It's less about looking at them and kind of looking at the environment.
What role did you see Roman Susan play in Chicago?
CT: I saw it when they first opened it. I lived across the street. I had just moved to Rogers Park, maybe two months before Roman Susan opened. I remember seeing this red and blue glittery sign just appear on the building. I would take the train at the Loyola stop to get to school and get back to the south side often. Over time, as I would walk to my apartment, which was literally across the street, I started to see more people congregating on that corner.
It finally occurred to me that this is an art space. I didn't really know much about art spaces at the time. I was studying to be an art educator in undergrad at SAIC, I didn't know a lot about what it meant to have a gallery or run an independent exhibition space. So it was like one of my first encounters of walking into somewhere where there would be an exhibition that you could engage with. The aesthetic of the space always felt like a sense of home to me. It had these qualities of an apartment, but also a commercial space at the same time.
It was like this real in-between space to me that I couldn't quite figure out. It had this platform that almost felt like a stage, but then it was too high to be a stage. It was all really new to me. I started to witness people exhibit there that I would meet at school or I would meet at some event. I would notice they would have an exhibition there. It kind of gave me the language to understand, like, oh, artists can show and exhibit their work.
So it was like a huge introduction to that world for me. Having a show there later on down the line, I think it was 2012, when they opened, and then I ended up having a show there in 2017, so five years later.
It was the first show I had ever had. I saw all kinds of exhibitions. There was a lot of video work. I had a friend who did a stop motion animation project there, where they would invite the community to do these drawings; over time, it became a video. The same friend, her name was Siobhan Leonard. We had a class together, a stop motion class at SAIC. To see her take that some of those elements that we learned from that class and then present them in that space was really cool.
Yeah, it was interesting. I did not know what that was going to become when that red and blue sign went up there. It opened my world. So many different lives can be touched by this, like this little commercial space on the corner of that building.
Where does Soft Show sit in the context of your overarching art practice?
CT: I would like to say that it gave me an entry point into site-specific installation. The show let me – I could do anything I wanted in there. That gave me confidence. I could exhaust the way that my work is being presented, installed; a piece that was intended to be on a wall could be a piece that stands on the floor.
I remember that it was the big couch piece that I created a backing for, a structural backing. This was just a textile embroidery fiber piece that was meant to be pinned on a wall. It wasn't interesting enough, or there wasn't enough wall space for me to install this piece. I ended up transforming it into a floor piece. It was like my first test at taking something that I intended to be something else and then having to work with the space and make it more site-specific to the space.
Now, my work is almost exclusively site-specific. A lot of the time, I'm always thinking about installation, or how I can engage the audience in a more interesting way.
That show led immediately to another show in Chicago at Goldfinch Gallery. Then, after I had that show at Goldfinch Gallery, I had another show and another show after that. So it opened so many doors for my career to continue – to progress. It all came from that show at Roman Susan.
Other artist histories: hiba ali // Tallulah Cartalucca // Julietta Cheung // Kandis Friesen // Steven Husby // Juan Molina Hernández // Kevin Norris // Ruby Que // Olive Stefanski // Gwyneth Zeleny Anderson