At The Borderlands: Mitos | Memory

Silvia Gonzalez is an Artist and Educator living in Chicago creating zines and curating workshops to address structures of power, imagination, play, confinement, and freedom. Collaborative justice based projects include work with local art groups such as the Chicago ACT (Artist Creating Transformation) collective and the 96 Acres Project, led by the Artist Maria Gaspar. Silvia Gonzalez has experience organizing educational workshops that centralize creative work with intergenerational participants interested in critically disrupting current power imbalances. As a multidisciplinary artist, she uses visual and performance work to make connections between justice work, education, histories of trauma, healing processes, Xicanidad, the Nepantla state, and the potentiality within the radical imaginary. She is the organizer of an artist group called POCAS, People of Color Artist Space and connects artists of color from across Chicago to resources and each other.

For the past ten years as a multi-media artist, Amy Reidel has found meaning in imagery of "the storm.” As many throughout art history have done, Reidel uses the storm as a metaphor to signify emotional and physical conditions. She combines weather radar and color MRI’s with seductive materials like glitter, friendship bracelets and colorful paint; symbols of love, celebration and joy. Reidel’s chosen scientific image bases inform each other formally and conceptually, even if it’s only in a mythical capacity. Research has shown many visual similarities between imagery of the storms above and the “storms” (tumors) within. Through interpretative portrayals of changing atmospheric and bodily conditions, viewers can question these codes of danger and potentially see the beauty within them.

Ann Meisinger is a Chicago based curator and writer. She currently works at the assistant curator of public programs at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.