10/30 – Consider a Disappearance | Ruby Que

I’ve been drawn to the artist Bas Jan Ader, who disappeared at sea while completing his project “In Search of the Miraculous.” I obsessively watched and rewatched his video works, which often involved him leaving frame, becoming hidden, disappearing. In an article for the Brooklyn Rail, his wife wrote, “I’ve never totally given up hoping that he will one day come back.” This hit me. I’m thinking about the histories and reverberations of a disappearance: the longing, searching, never finding, and sitting with. I’m thinking about figures such as Ader, Connie Converse, and Amelia Earhart, but also our obsession with them, more precisely, finding them. I’m thinking about the people that have been forced to disappear or into hiding in my distant home city, Hong Kong, and the possibility of disappearance or invisibility as resistance. I’m thinking about absences in my own practice: the missing person, the abandoned homeland, the obsolete medium, the traumatic memory. I’m thinking about myth making and ghosts. Who disappears? Who gets left behind? How does one disappear, and how does one grapple with the void?

Ruby Que is an installation artist and experimental filmmaker who occasionally writes, sculpts, and performs. In their work they open portals and create hauntings. Their films and installations have been shown at Kavi Gupta, Comfort Station, Chicago Artists Coalition (Chicago, IL), Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art (Ithaca, NY), and Du Vert à L’infini (Franche Comte, France) amongst others. They have been awarded residencies including Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), ACRE (Steuben, WI), Ellis-Beauregard Foundation (Rockland, ME), and are currently a HATCH resident at Chicago Artists Coalition. They grew up in Hong Kong in the lingering shadow of colonialism, and now lives and works on the unceded homelands of the Council of the Three Fires: Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi, or what is known as Chicago. They were named a 2023 Breakout Artist by Newcity Magazine. They hold a BA from Cornell University and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

11/06 – Bridging Diasporic Divides: Synthesizing Family Through Visual Art | Natasha Moustache

Drawing from my experience as a first-generation person of African descent my arts practice centers around reassembling the fracturing I witnessed early on between the African and Black American communities. I use photography and domestic installation to synthesize family galleries as a way to connect experiences, rituals, and cultural signifiers that permeate the Diaspora. In researching this topic I’m thinking about cultural inheritance, colonial influence, shared generational traumas, and in particular creolization; how can we bridge the gaps between various African Diasporic groups in service of connecting us across oceans and manmade borders? How can we create new family archiving that narrows those cultural gaps between the African immigrant community and the Black American community and beyond? My work views the Diaspora through the lens of Eduard Glissant’s rhizome theory. I’m interested in ways to visualize the nuances of cultural experiences and signifiers – African and Caribbean artists and writers that work in similar ways. I find artist/writer interviews, film, and post-colonial theory particularly helpful to build language. I’m interested in the thoughts of other POC and BIPOC artists who identify as part of the African or Latinx diaspora.

Natasha Moustache is a photographic installation artist based in Chicago. Moustache’s practice utilizes portraiture and narrative documentation exhibited within intricately fabricated worlds that evoke themes of home, familial lineage, and cross-cultural commonalities centering the African Diaspora. Moustache received their BFA from Simmons College in 2004. In 2005 they were awarded the Center for Photography at Woodstock AIR residency at the age of 22. They continued their arts practice in Boston, Ma while foregrounding their photojournalist and freelance career in the subsequent years. In 2019, they enrolled in Chicago Columbia College to pursue their MFA where they were awarded the Stuart Abelson Travel Fellowship and later the 2021 MOCP Snider Prize Honorable Mention. Moustache’s work has been exhibited at the Houston Center for Photography, the International Center for Photography, the Center for Photography at Woodstock and the Hyde Park Art Center. Most recently, Moustache was a Latitude AIR in January 2023 and debuted their first solo show at the C33 Gallery in Chicago in April 2023. Their second solo show is currently on view at the Lubeznik Art Center in Michigan City, IN.