EXPO CHICAGO returns for its 9th edition this spring (7–10 April 2022) featuring over 140 participants. For those in the city, Ocula Magazine introduces a selection of exhibitions to see.
Alisa Sikelianos-Carter: Stars Are Born in Darkness
Kavi Gupta, 835 West Washington Boulevard
8 April–11 June 2022
Alisa Sikelianos-Carter's painting practice explores hypothetical worlds, as with the parallel universe in Stars Are Born in Darkness, which posits a reality in which white supremacy is no longer, while Blackness becomes a superpower.
Based on true events of Africans on slave ships who threw themselves overboard to avoid enslavement, paintings on show conceive of an alternative timeline whereby bodies do not drown but rather reincarnate into divine beings—a cosmic revival expressed across a blend of black mica, abalone shell, and glitter.
Arghavan Khosravi: The Witness
Kavi Gupta, 835 West Washington Boulevard
6 April–21 May 2022
Arghavan Khosravi's multidimensional dreamscape paintings recover the tradition of Persian miniature painting, commonly employed to illustrate folkloric texts, while departing from its customary practice by bursting from the walls and expanding into space.
Where Persian miniature painting depicts landscapes and figures on the same plane, mixed-media works like The Witness (2022), a multi-panel painting made to resemble a deconstructed dollhouse, transform traditional Persian patterns into a renewed visual language.
