Mercurial Lake

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Artists Bios

Alberto Ortega Trejo is an artist, curator, and architectural researcher. His work uses architectural history, drawing, sculpture, writing and video to address representations of indigeneity in architectural modernity and contemporary politics, the production of extreme environments, and social transformation in the Americas. He has been a fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians and a grantee of the New Artists Society at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Jumex Foundation for Contemporary Art, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and DCASE. His work has been shown in venues as DePaul Art Museum, Fundación Andreani for BienalSur, Ca’ Foscari Zattere for the 16th Venice Architecture Biennial, Harun Farocki Institut, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Uri-Eichen Gallery, Chicago Design Museum, Extase, SITE Galleries, SpaceP11 and Centro de Arte y Filosofia. His work is part of private and institutional collections in Mexico and Latinamerica. He has been a guest speaker for institutions like MoMA’s Emilio Ambasz Institute x DocTalks, the American Institute of Architects, the Society of Architectural Historians, Smart Museum of Art, Materia Abierta, UPenn, and CENTRO. He is currently the curator of The Last of Animal Builders, an exhibition at Mies Van der Rohe’s Edith Farnsworth House. He manages the Katz Center for Mexican Studies at The University of Chicago. 

ebere agwuncha is a Nigerian American, Chicago-based transdisciplinary artist and educator. Their work seeks to reach the natural depths of memory that hands carry through contemporary craft practices. ebere is preparing for the end of the world via architecture(s) of preservation, ritual, meditation, domesticity, and intimacy. She currently utilizes various materials and techniques including woodworking, ceramics, woven natural fibers, photography, interactive sound, installation, sculpture, and moving image. ebere holds a Bachelors of Industrial Design from Iowa State University. their work has been shown and supported by ACRE Residency, CAC BOLT Residency, Comfort Station, Chicago Art Department, 3Arts Make a Wave Award, Chuquimarca Projects, in care of Black women, The Buxton Initiative, Plates Journal, Rukus Magazine and others. ebere has taught with the SAIC Sculpture Department and currently teaches with the Arts and Public Life Design Apprenticeship Program. 

Roland Knowlden is a Liberian American interdisciplinary artist and architectural designer from New Jersey, currently based in Chicago, IL. Knowlden’s architectural background has cultivated his ongoing interest in constructed landscapes, and the cultural and social implications of rendering space, either as landscape or map. Working across painting and collage, Knowlden’s abstract cityscapes articulate the tensions wrought by erasure, displacement, and palimpsest within new imagined geographies. Interrogating notions of origin, belonging, boundaries, and power, Knowlden’s critical cartography aims to not only reproduce existing environmental experiences and affects, but to propose new spatial realities. With each new configuration and composition, Knowlden furthers his practice of imagining otherwise. Rolandknowlden.com / Instagram: @rolandknow

Fabrizzio Subia is a Chicago-based performance artist and poet from Guayaquil, Ecuador. His work has been exhibited throughout Chicago including the International Museum of Surgical Science, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago Art Department, 6018 North Gallery, P.O. Box Collective, The Story Collider, The Green Mill, and more. He received his BFA in Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2020. He is a Resident at Chicago Art Department, a member of radical art collective P.O. Box Collective, and has been a cohort member of the Hyde Park Art Center’s Center Program. Currently, he acts as Assistant Manager of Exhibitions and Development at the International Museum of Surgical Science.

Lydia Cheshewalla is an enrolled member of the Osage Nation with Cherokee, Modoc, Dakota, and Xicanx descendancy. She is a visual artist who creates ephemeral, site-specific land art and installation accompanied by poetic factualism and grounded in Indigenous kinship pedagogy. 

Lydia’s areas of interest are constellated, as they explore relationships between entities. Using a framework of place-based practice focusing on the Great Plains, an ecoregion that was created by the Indigenous people of the area through intentional and repeated application of fire to land, Lydia seeks to understand, uplift, and practice the cycles of care present in the historical, current, and planned cultivation of mutually benefiting and sustaining systems between humans and more-than-humans. Using ephemerality as a vehicle for delivery and collaborating with beyond-human kin, she rejects Western reliances on scarcity, preciousness, immortality, isolation, and waste production in creating value.

Jose Luis Benavides is a Latinx and queer video artist, photographer, and adjunct for the City Colleges of Chicago. He has taught as an adjuncted at Tennessee State University, and lecturer at Vanderbilt University. He is a recent Ignite Fund/3Arts grant awardee. Born-and-raised in Chicago, in the Logan Square neighborhood, he works primarily with a range of personal archives. He explores issues relating to gender and sexuality, cultural erasure, migration, and institutionalized violence. He has created commissioned work for the Chicago Film Archives, and Defy Film Festival. His work has screened and exhibited at Chicago Art Department, Far Out Fest, Humboldt Intn’l Film Festival, Reeling: The Chicago LGBTQ+ Intn’l Film Festival, Full Spectrum Features’ Chicago Cinema Exchange: Mexico City, Onion City: Experimental Film and Video Festival, Michigan State University’s Latinx Film Festival, University of Massachusetts’ Revolutions Per Minute Festival, CinHomo: Muestra Internacional de Cine y Diversidad Sexual LGBTI, Cadence Video Poetry Festival, University of Chicago’s Screenshare Gallery, and Gallery 400. His work has been viewed internationally in Brussels, Hungary, Mexico, Palestine, Spain, and Turkey. He has had solo screenings at Heaven Gallery, The Nightingale Cinema, and Biquini Wax. His first solo exhibition was at Terremoto magazine’s La Postal. In 2018, he founded the ongoing platform, Sin Cinta Previa: Latinx & Queer Archive Video Series, for which he was awarded a Hyde Park Arts Center – Artists Run Chicago 2.0 grant, a Propeller Fund grant, and the POWER Project grant from the Art Leaders of Color Network.

Paige Taul is an Oakland, CA native who received her B.A. in Studio Art with a concentration in cinematography from the University of Virginia and her M.F.A in Moving Image from the University of Illinois at Chicago.  Her work engages with and challenges assumptions of black cultural expression and notions of belonging through experimental cinematography. As a part of her filmmaking practice, she tests the boundaries of identity and self-identification through autoethnography to approach notions of racial authenticity. She is a visiting artist at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, IL.

Teresita Carson (b. Mexico) is an artist and educator working across disciplines, including moving image, new media, sound, sculpture, photography, printmedia, fiber, and installation. Taking an irreverent feminist approach to world and counter-archive building, she explores the abstract intersection between the historical, the speculative, indigenous cosmogonies, and magical peripheries. Through weaving and its Indigenous histories, she activates the genre of science-fiction as a feminist strategy to mine for aspirational modalities and clues towards a decolonial path. Her experimental films have been shown at film festivals and curated film exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art of San Diego. Recent venues presenting Carson’s work include Adds Donna Gallery, Mana Contemporary, Sullivan Galleries, Moving Image at ACRE, Spudnik Press Collective, Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (CICA Museum), Ugly Gallery, Hyde Park Art Center and Gallery 400. She is director of the project space INTERSECT, which exhibits and supports artists making time-based work. She holds a Bachelors in Fine Arts from the School of the Art institute of Chicago and an MFA from the University of Illinois Chicago. She resides in Chicago, Illinois in the land of the Three Fires Confederacy, Potawatomi, Odawa and Ojibwe Nations.

Daniel Borzutzky is a poet and translator. His most recent book is Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018. His 2016 collection, The Performance of Becoming Human received the National Book Award. Lake Michigan (2018) was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize.  A forthcoming collection, The Murmuring Grief of the Americas (Coffee House Press) will be published in 2024. His most recent translation is Paula Ilabaca Nuñez’s The Loose Pearl (2022), winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation . His translation of Galo Ghigliotto’s Valdivia received ALTA’s 2017 National Translation Award, and he has also translated collections by Raúl Zurita, and Jaime Luis Huenún. He teaches English and Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His work has been recognized with grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN/Heim Translation Fund; and the Illinois Arts Council.

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