Kind of Representational: Artist Talk
October 17, 2026 – November 15, 2026
Heaven Gallery, 1550 N. Milwaukee Ave. #2, Chicago, IL 60622
Relative to the sense of truth iconic signification still seems to produce, abstraction can be seen as a kind of fiction rooted in a diversion of material, process, touch, and indexing of thinking and psycho-social positioning, among other things. When mixed with likeness, abstraction, in this sense, can push away from the attentiveness to the points of referential origin that likeness demands. Abstraction adds other energies, motivations, thoughts, calculations, and impulses that extend, challenge, and complicate what likeness does. It’s like making stuff up, while re-telling a story, in order to add interesting new possibilities (humorous or shocking exaggeration, for example), which often needs to come at the expense of the integrity of the original event. The artists in “Kind of Representational” deliberately position their work in the middle of a similar tension between likeness and facture. Each of their practices relies on a mixture of either ruins of likeness, suggesting a catabolic and critical process; or building blocks of likeness, suggesting an anabolic and exploratory process; or combinations of both.