I Live in a Box of Paints
(I'm Drawn to Those Ones that Ain't Afraid)

Noelle Africh | Roshini Agarwal | Louise Fishman
Suzanne McClelland | Jared Packard | Julia Rommel | Carrie Yamaoka

RUSCHWOMAN
2100 S. Marshall Blvd., Suite 105
Chicago, IL 60623


January 8 — February 19, 2023

Opening reception: Sunday, January 8, 3–6PM



Following the opening, gallery hours are available by appointment only.

Please contact thewaves@ruschwoman.blue to make arrangements
to visit RUSCHWOMAN during the run of the exhibition.


Noelle Africh, Gyre, 2022.
Wall spackle, graphite, and colored pencil on panel; 60h x 48w in.
Photographed by Mikey Mosher.





“…I need another world/
this one’s nearly gone/
Still have too many dreams/
never seen the light/
I need another world/
A place that I can go….”

–Anhoni. “Another World.”
Antony and the Johnsons. The Crying Light.
Secretly Canadian: 2008.



“I would call them manic mourners. Their return to painting, as though it were an appropriate medium for what they want to address, as though the age of the simulacral could be represented, comes from the feeling that since the end has come, since it’s all over, we can rejoice at the killing of the dead. That is, we can forget that the end has to be endlessly worked through, and start all over again.”

–Yves Alain-Bois. “Painting: The Task of Mourning.”
Painting as Model. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990. Print, p. 243.



“I try to take the painting by surprise… It’s hard to paint, and it can be impossible if you don’t recognize your own trickery. Handling your unconscious with firm but caring hands, fully conscious about your work process, is absolutely necessary.”

–Louise Fishman. “How I Do It: Cautionary Advice from a Lesbian Painter.”
Heresies #3: Lesbian Art and Artists. Vol. 1 No. 3, Fall 1977. Print, p. 74–75.



It is difficult to attempt imaging what lies beyond thresholds of catastrophe. What is visible in the aftermath of death, in the hours then years that follow upon a death? Joan Didion described her ‘Magical Thinking,’ loosened from time, ice skating backwards along jittering graphite lines made just before the event. Mirrors spark a similar uncertainty: what is affixed by a camera remains liquid, moving, hunting in the periphery through a Looking Glass or some shiny enough substitute. Elsewhere Joni Mitchell personifies this nascent view in a woman she met, one full of resemblances who did not shirk the intensity of the moment: ‘Be prepared to bleed.’

Image. Visibility/vision. Looking. View. Resemblance. It’s as if uttering these sounds that correspond to the dazzling problem of sight calls out to reprobate chroniclers, those very queer constructions whose eyes and hands aren’t precisely mirrors, but their purpose is to show you what they’ve been shown.
Painters.

It’s with great admiration and devotion that RUSCHWOMAN places these paintings and painting-adjacent projects into public view. This is a group of risk takers spanning generations. Women who have kissed and who have loved women. Identities that have undergone as extensive of deconstructions as their paintings have. They’ve flown across oceans, drinking in the powerful liquidity that is a fact of our environ.

What is the starting place for articulating anew the visible codes by which a social landscape might be organized in the aftermath of, say, years of destructive national leadership or of war or of natural disasters so elemental and totalizing that even the most foundational conceits of a prior visual culture have been utterly disoriented?

In the fallout following a loss of trust, what is perceivable and how are those perceptions recorded or relayed into stable communiques?

How does the world appear, phenomenologically, when more than 6,670,000 of its human inhabitants have died from COVID-19 in the past three years? And how do artists see ourselves in light of more than forty million HIV related deaths since the early days of the epidemic? What advances forward into recognition as the rest disappears?

This isn’t about optics in the sense of rhetoric—fuck the spin and keep on riding. And yet, this project is fervently optical, desperate to trace the drama from surface registration and light beams to blinking through tears. On view is a series of resultant objects that attempt to convey looking, seeing, and some doubt-filled earth-shaken apprehension of a view of another world for which we are in dire need. Perhaps limping, perhaps lunging, a group of painters have attempted to give form to a process ongoing, one that does not stay still the way most of the paintings appear to but risk charging their leavings with the testimony of what things could look like beyond this point. Glistening sirens announce swamps ahead; wade in, shall we?

I need [to see] another world.
[I’m] nearly gone.


_____________________________________________________


ARTIST BIOS

Noelle Africh (b. Chicago, IL) is a painter and educator living and working in Chicago. Their materially diverse practice places heavy emphasis on the process of making. Their investigations with material transformation and entropy are motivated by their interest in the aesthetics of repair and the politics of perception. Africh’s practice creates space for doubt, play, failure, ambiguity and contradiction. Africh received their MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2022). They hold a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics and Actuarial Science from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign (2015). Their work has been exhibited at Galerie Gisela Clement (Bonn, Germany), Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago, IL), The Plan (Chicago, IL), The Green Gallery - West (Milwaukee, WI), Patient Info (Chicago, IL), and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.


Roshini Agarwal (b. Pune, India) is a painter currently based in Chicago, IL. She earned her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2022. She has shown work with Siblings Collective in Chicago and Irving Art Centre in Irving, TX. Her interest lies in pattern and geometry as tools of visual perception and its relationship to colour.


Louise Fishman (b. 1939, Philadelphia, PA; d. 2021, New York, NY) used scrapers, trowels, and traditional brushes to apply and remove dense layers of paint in loose, gestural scores across the canvas. This subtractive method of mark-making celebrates process and rejects the masculinist impulses of abstract expressionism. Rather, Fishman’s meticulous and energetic work often evokes the rigid, interlocking form of the grid. Her training as a sculptor was visible in the physicality of her paint, which was vigorously applied, indexing her movement about the canvas. “If good painting is what you want to do, then good painting is what you must look at,” the artist wrote in 1977. “Take what you want and leave the dreck.” Gilles Heno-Coe elaborates on this sentiment in Fishman’s work: “For Fishman, this meant taking the relevant bits from Paul Cézanne or Willem de Kooning, as much as from Agnes Martin or Eva Hesse. The pursuit of individual freedom and personal expression was and remains her primary motivation as an artist.” Fishman recently held solo exhibitions at Karma, New York (2022); Krannert Art Museum, Illinois (2021-22); Vielmetter, Los Angeles (2021); Karma, New York (2020); Vielmetter, Los Angeles (2019), Locks Gallery, Philadelphia (2019), Cheim & Read, New York (2017), and Goya Contemporary, Baltimore (2013); and retrospective exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2016), and the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase (2016). Her work is represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York; Jewish Museum, New York, New York; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Chicago Art Institute, Chicago, Illinois; and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia, among others.


Suzanne McClelland has exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad since the early 1990s. Her practice includes large-scale paintings, works on paper, and books. These often extract fragments of speech or text from various political or cultural sources, explore the social, symbolic and material possibilities that reside within language, and celebrate the physicality of speech and sound. McClelland parses such issues as the limitations and malleability of communication, the impact technology has on interpreting information, and the mechanics of translation. Her works are infused with social commentary, underscoring the way in which language itself is gendered and politicized by its context. McClelland has participated in the 1993 and 2014 Whitney Biennials and has been the subject of solo presentations at The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, curated by Amy Smith-Stewart; The University of Virginia Museum of Art, curated by Jennifer Farrell; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, Philip Morris branch, curated by Thelma Golden. Her paintings are held in numerous public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The Yale University Art Gallery, The Albright-Knox Gallery, and The Walker Art Center. Awards and residencies include Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019, PS1/ Clocktower, Nancy Graves Foundation Grant, American Academy of Arts and Letters, Berg Contemporary invitational Residency in Stykkisholmur, Iceland, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Anonymous Was A Woman Award, Lab Grant Residency with Dieu Donne Papermill and a Visiting Artist with Urban Glass and Troedsson Villa, Nikko Japan. Recent publications include monograph “Suzanne McClelland: 36-24-36” with an essay contribution by Thierry de Duve, published by team (gallery, inc.) in 2016 and distributed by D.A.P.


Jared Packard (b. 1989, Washington, D.C.) is an artist and curator based in Omaha, NE where he works as the Exhibition Manager at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art. Packard completed his BA at Clark University and his MFA at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Recently he has curated Opulence: Performative Wealth and the Failed American Dream, Bemis Center; Ditch Seed, Generator Space, Omaha; and the NEA-funded unLOCK: Merging Art and Industry, Lockport, IL. Solo exhibitions of his work have been exhibited at Project Project, Omaha, NE; MdW Fair, Chicago, IL; ADDS DONNA, Chicago, IL. His next major solo project will open at the Salina Art Center, KS in April of 2023.


Julia Rommel (b. 1980, Salisbury, Maryland) is an American painter with a strong interest in the art historical canon. Keenly aware of the precedents set by Abstract Expressionists as well as European Masters such as Matisse, her paintings are manifestations of a process of construction and deconstruction that eventuates in an abstract work that not only has a sense of the history of its own making but is also loosely associative in its reference to landscape. In her paintings, Rommel is less interested in signature brush strokes than in what she describes as using tools “to keep my signature away”. Her paintings act equally as research into color. While they are not attempts at color harmonies, the artist is interested in the conflict between colors and of using tones to eliminate one another. Rommel’s work acts between painting and relief, insisting on the objectiveness of the work. Her international exhibition record includes the Milwaukee Art Museum, Jack Hanley Gallery, the FLAG Art Foundation, Lisson Gallery. Greene Naftali, Bortolami, and Sorry We’re Closed. Rommel’s work is held in numerous collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Hammer Museum, LA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, the Albright-Knox Gallery, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Rommel is represented by Bureau, NY, and Standard (Oslo), Oslo.


Carrie Yamaoka is a New York-based visual artist whose work traverses the disciplines of painting, photography and sculpture. She is interested in the topography of surfaces, materiality and process, the tactility of the barely visible and the chain of planned and chance incidents that determine the outcome of the object. Her work engages the viewer at the intersection between records of chemical action/reaction and the desire to apprehend a picture emerging in fleeting and unstable states of transformation. Exhibitions include the ICA (Philadelphia), MOMA/PS1 (New York), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Fondation Ricard (Paris), the Henry (Seattle), Artists Space (New York), the Wexner (Columbus), Leslie-Lohman Museum (New York), Victoria and Albert Museum (London) and MassMOCA. Writing about her work has appeared in the New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, The New Yorker, Time Out/NY, Hyperallergic, Interview and Bomb. Her work is included in the collections of the Albright-Knox, the Art Institute of Chicago, Dallas Museum of Art, Henry Art Gallery, and Centre Pompidou. She is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and an Anonymous Was A Woman award. Yamaoka is represented by Commonwealth and Council (Los Angeles). She is a founding member of the queer art collective fierce pussy.


_____________________________________________________





I Live in a Box of Paints (I'm Drawn to Those Ones that Ain't Afraid), 2023, Installation View

I Live in a Box of Paints (I'm Drawn to Those Ones that Ain't Afraid), 2023, Installation View

I Live in a Box of Paints (I'm Drawn to Those Ones that Ain't Afraid), 2023, Installation View

Julia Rommel, Zanzibar, 2022, Oil on linen, 48h x 52w in.

Julia Rommel, Zanzibar, 2022, Detail View

I Live in a Box of Paints (I'm Drawn to Those Ones that Ain't Afraid), 2023, Installation View

Noelle Africh, Poor Grid, Green Plume, 2022, Distemper on panel, 14h x 11w in.

Roshini Agarwal, Untitled, 2022, Cassein on panel, 8h x 8w in.

I Live in a Box of Paints (I'm Drawn to Those Ones that Ain't Afraid), 2023, Installation View

Roshini Agarwal, Nearest Tenth, 2022, Distemper and silverpoint on panel, 36h x 36w in.

Roshini Agarwal, Nearest Tenth, 2022, Detail View

Carrie Yamaoka, 14.125 by 11.625 (#24), 2021, Cast flexible urethane resin, relfective polyester film, and powdered pigment, 14 1/8h x 11 5/8w in.

Carrie Yamaoka, 14.125 by 11.625 (#24), 2021, Alternate View

I Live in a Box of Paints (I'm Drawn to Those Ones that Ain't Afraid), 2023, Installation View

I Live in a Box of Paints (I'm Drawn to Those Ones that Ain't Afraid), 2023, Installation View

Carrie Yamaoka, 10 by 8 (wall #3), 2021, Relfective polyester film, urethane resin, acrylic paint, and mixed media on wood panel, 10h x 8w x 1d in.

Carrie Yamaoka, 10 by 8 (wall #3), 2021, Alternate View

Noelle Africh, Gyre, 2022, Wall spackle, graphite, and colored pencil on panel, 60h x 48w in.

Noelle Africh, Gyre, 2022, Detail View

I Live in a Box of Paints (I'm Drawn to Those Ones that Ain't Afraid), 2023, Installation View

I Live in a Box of Paints (I'm Drawn to Those Ones that Ain't Afraid), 2023, Installation View

Jared Packard, broken/reassembled #3, 2022, Oil, acrylic, spray paint, and stitching on raw canvas, 20h x 16w in.

Jared Packard, broken/reassembled #2, 2022, Oil, acrylic, spray paint, and stitching on raw canvas, 20h x 16w in.

Jared Packard, broken/reassembled #5, 2022, Oil, acrylic, spray paint, and stitching on raw canvas, 20h x 16w in.

I Live in a Box of Paints (I'm Drawn to Those Ones that Ain't Afraid), 2023, Installation View

Roshini Agarwal, Fifth Postulate, 2022, Distemper and silverpoint on panel, 24h x 24w in.

Roshini Agarwal, Fifth Postulate, 2022, Detail View

I Live in a Box of Paints (I'm Drawn to Those Ones that Ain't Afraid), 2023, Installation View

I Live in a Box of Paints (I'm Drawn to Those Ones that Ain't Afraid), 2023, Installation View

Suzanne McClelland, Oprah, 2003, Mixed media on canvas, 48h x 40w in.

Suzanne McClelland, Oprah, 2003, Detail View

Suzanne McClelland, Oprah, 2003, Detail View

Louise Fishman, Untitled, 2020, Watercolor and Sumi ink on paper, 10 1/4h x 14 1/8w in. (artwork) / 15 1/2h x 19 1/2w in. (framed)

I Live in a Box of Paints (I'm Drawn to Those Ones that Ain't Afraid), 2023, Installation View

Louise Fishman, Untitled, 2021, Watercolor, glue, and coffee ground on paper, 10 1/4h x 14w in. (artwork) / 16h x 20w in. (framed)

Noelle Africh, Untitled, 2022, Distemper, federal income tax safe, 4h x 16w x 12d in.