Double Gaze

Dawn Kim is an artist based in Brooklyn. She has never flown a drone. 

Julie Oh is a Canadian artist living and working in the prairie city of Saskatoon. She graduated with a Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012 and since this time has shifted away from an autobiographical practice to focus more on nuanced, object experimentations using photography, video and installation. The works in this exhibition consider both her past and present approach to art making – bringing together transient aspects of objects, and observing how they relate to and often obscure the understanding of our everyday lives. Her recent projects include The New Normal, a traveling group exhibition of A4 documents/images curated by Hiba Farhat and Murat Adash, and Punctured Landscape, curated by Kegan Mcfadden at the Art Museum of the Americas. Julie would like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts for their generous support in realizing this new work at ACRE Projects. 

Lily Dithrich was born in Oakland, CA and currently lives and works in Chicago. She received her BA in studio art from Oberlin College in 2013 and has since been honored with grants and fellowships from organizations including the Anderson Ranch Arts Center, the Luminarts Cultural Foundation, and the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events. Through the manipulation and distortion of furniture, she illustrates both inter and intrapersonal human relationships. Much of her work addresses in/stability, co/dependence, isolation and mis/communication. She is currently in residence at Wedge Projects in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood. 

Bailey Hikawa and Scotty Wagner first collaborated in 2013 on an experimental play titled, “MOWOM.” In the surreal sculptural set designed by Hikawa, Wagner plays Sheila McAllister, an alter ego of his who suffers from split personality disorder. In 2014, Wagner appeared in Hikawa’s sculptural immersive performances at the di Rosa Preserve in Napa, California and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. In 2016, Hikawa and Wagner collaborated on a short performance titled “Freedom Finderz,” about two women lost in the woods with only their spiritual hiking app to guide the way, performed at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Their largest and most recent work is a performance and a video titled “Trial Child: Nurture a Better Nature,” about a society obsessed with self-control and where, Trial Child, a robotic replica of a couples’ would-be child, is the newest technology. In 2017 the performance and the video of “Trial Child” were shown in Santa Barbara, Los Angeles and Minneapolis. Trial Child the Video will premier here at MOCA Tucson on March 3rd. Hikawa and Wagner are currently artists in residents for their collaborative work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson, AZ.  

Bailey Hikawa was born and raised in Los Angeles where she currently lives and works. She received her BFA in Painting and Textiles from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco. She is an artist, designer, art director and collaborator who creates paintings, art objects, sculptural immersive installation, sets for theater, film, advertising and performative collaboration. She is most excited in a landscape that is both foreign and familiar. Scotty Wagner is a performance, video and installation artist based in Los Angeles, CA and Northern Michigan. He received his MFA from the University of California Santa Barbara and his BFA from the University of Michigan. In an ongoing effort to understand both the power we give technology and its inherent power to awe us, he looks to our biological, social, ethical, cultural and economic structures to create insightful work about the human condition today. 

Kate Sierzputowski is a freelance writer and curator based in Chicago. Fascinated by artists’ studio processes, she founded the website INSIDE\WITHIN to physically explore and archive the creative spaces of Chicago's emerging and established artists. In addition to running INSIDE\WITHIN, Kate also contributes art writing to Hyperallergic, the Chicago Reader, and Teen Vogue, is a co-director of the artist-run gallery space Julius Caesar, and is half of the curatorial project Episode with Mary Eleanor Wallace.