Alden Burke is a Chicago-based educator, facilitator, and writer driven by the question “What are we going to learn from one another?" Her work centers around supporting collaborative making, process-based work, care in administrative practices, and creative sustainability. Alden is the Co-Founder of Annas, the Program Manager at Design for America, and a Lead Organizer for the Chicago Arts Census.
Caroline Joy Dahlberg is a performer, writer, and sensory choreographer. Her work focuses on the precarity of bodies, ranging from the scale of the ocean to a molecule. She uses intimate encounters and visceral metaphors to describe affections of closeness and loss, becoming and undoing. She received her BFA in Sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2014, and her MFA in Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018.
Mariel Harari creates nonlinear, autobiographical stories that invite viewers into worlds of decadent and nostalgic absurdities. Her work inhabits a space between trauma and escape. Grounded by laborious, often gendered processes Harari uses bright colors, surreal forms, soft, tactile, and shiny surfaces to uproot the viewer from that grounding. Harari works across installation, fiber, video, sculpture, and performance; drawing reference from fashion, science fiction, fairy tales, gender expectations, and personal narrative. She has been rewarded residencies at Annas Projects, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, High Concepts Labs, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her work has been featured in publications including Brooklyn Magazine and Surface Design Association. She has exhibited and performed work throughout New York, Chicago, and Miami. Harari was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY and currently lives and works in Chicago, IL.
Azalea Henderson work acts as a materially-inclusive collection of non-utile art objects, varying in matter and form. Her collage of a practice is rooted in ceramics and writing, which are often incorporated in installations.
Stephanie Koch is a facilitator, curator, and writer based in St. Louis and Chicago. She engages in institution-building as a creative practice and exhibition-making as a site of testing sociopolitical possibilities. She is currently the Gallery Director of The Luminary, an art institution based in St. Louis focused on art, thought, and action, a Co-Founder of Annas, an independent art space based in Chicago dedicated to the critical role of exhibiting process and collaboration, and a Lead Organizer of the 2021 Chicago Arts Census, a city-wide research project which collects, maps, and visualizes data that illuminates the lived experiences and working conditions of art workers in Chicago.
Maggie Wong makes art, writes about art, writes art, reads art, shares art, mentors artists, and is mentored by artists. She studies. Maggie queries through play to create social and sculptural forms of collective world-building amidst conditions of sentimentality, loss, and subjugation. To do this, she makes sculptures, prints, recordings, essays, sometimes performs, facilitates workshops, creates syllabi, and often works collaboratively. Usually, she makes lists.
Maggie received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she now works as a lecturer. Additionally is the Associate Director of Iceberg Projects in Rogers Park, Chicago. Her affiliations include Chicago API Artist United and ACRE where she is interim Development Director.
U T E N S I L
What is a prompt?
A prompt is an invitation to ease into entanglements, a generous permission to act, a container to explore a stretch in thought, a resurrected memory.
A prompt is an instruction. A prompt as a transition, bringing us to another space, another other, another self. A prompt as a thought experiment, as sensorial vibrancy, as a meeting of the unexpected. A stretch in thought, the resurrected memory. A prompt also asks: What is at stake, what tools are needed for vulnerability?
A prompt can move us. Find a utensil—trace the lengths of your arms; ask someone to trace the length of your arms; ask if you can trace the length of theirs; offer to trace them into the sky; ask if they might do the same for you.
A prompt contains self-reflection. Always around the corner is a world of people outside with which to build our collaboration. In becoming research, when we build from prompts, when we work from our conditions, how do we share and reperform with an audience? What are the limits?
Annas presents Utensil, opening at Comfort Station on November 6 from 2:00-6:00 pm.
The work is a continuation of the collective and prompted efforts of Alden Burke, Caroline Dahlberg, Mariel Harari, Azalea Henderson, Stephanie Koch, and Maggie Wong.