Prairie Land
October 29 - December 4
Monaco is pleased to present Prairie Land, an exhibition featuring works by Jen Everett, Jacquelyn Carmen Guerrero, Vanessa Viruet, Olly Greer, and Diana Zeng in the Main Space. The exhibition is curated by Janie Stamm and opens with a reception on Friday, October 29 from 6 – 9 pm and will run through December 4, 2021.
Beneath a sea of dancing goldenrods, cone-flowers, and tall grass lies the foundation of the ever expansive Midwest prairie; an ecosystem of tangled plant roots criss-crossing across flatlands and tender rolling hills. The prairie is a land of extreme broiling heat and bitter cold that, through this duality, a rich, fertile landscape is formed. The prairie serves as a protective hidden-in-plain-view habitat, luring countless beings to call this space home.
This landscape, while seeming idyllic on the surface and in thought, has been in a consistent battle since European colonizers invaded the land around the 16th century. The invasion of settlers forcibly pushed indegenous people out and plowed over wispy grasslands to create a divided landscape for agriculture. This horrific turn of events still echoes through the land to this day, with prairie land being the most endangered habitat in the United States. While the insidious actions of greed and manifest destiny tore the landscape apart, small swathes of native prairie remain today. Cities scattered across the grassland create an archipelago of Midwest islands that lure people to their cement shores.
Showcasing the work of Jen Everett, Olly Greer, Jacquelyn Carmen Guerrero, Vanessa Viruet and Diana Zeng, Prairie Land is a survey of queer and queer-adjacent art created within the expanse of the Midwest prairie. The work discusses topics of identity, class and bodily connection to land and considers the complications that arise when home is both on the prairie and elsewhere.
BIOS
Jen Everett- She/Her
Jen Everett is an artist from Southfield, Michigan, currently based in Saint Louis, Missouri. Broadly, she is interested in the myriad ways Black people continue to produce and transmit knowledge in excess of formal structures. Her practice moves between lens and time based media, installation and writing.
Jen received an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis where she was a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. She earned a Bachelor of Architecture from Tuskegee University. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally at art spaces including Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Krannert Art Museum, Kunsthall Stavanger, Seattle University’s Hedreen Gallery and SPRING/BREAK Art Show New York. Jen has been an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center, Atlantic Center for the Arts and ACRE. Her work is in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP) at Columbia College - Chicago.
Diana Zeng- She/Her
Diana Zeng (b. 1993, Chengdu, China) builds sculptures and installations through an intuitive technique of wrapping wire, textile, organic and inorganic materials.
A self-taught artist, Zeng works to unravel the entanglement of living within and attempting to break away from structures of power and expectations.
Olly Greer- They/Them
Olly Greer currently makes work surrounded by the prairie of Urbana Illinois. Recently they completed their MFA of sculpture from the University of Illinois. Olly is currently working on publishing their thesis entitled "Dykestethics," while settling into a new studio post the grad school grind. They are passionate about local food systems, fat resistance, swimming holes, and ACAB.
Vanessa Viruet- She/ Her
Vanessa Viruet is a Chicago based fiber artist of Puerto Rican descent. She creates monumental scale artworks to examine the complex histories rooted in textiles such as identity, cultural heritage, gender and class. Viruet holds a BFA and a MA in Teaching from the Maryland Institute College of Art as well as an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. She currently serves as an art instructor for Chicago Public Schools and teaches in the Fiber and Material Studies Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Someday she hopes to have her own scholarship for artists of color.
Jacquelyn Carmen Guerrero- She/They
Jacquelyn Carmen Guerrero (b. 1988, Hialeah, FL; she/they) is an interdisciplinary genderqueer artist of mixed Puerto Rican and Cuban descent whose practice explores relationships between identity and heritage, the natural and the supernatural, the ephemeral and the ancient. These subjects are expressed through ornate beaded textiles, ceramic sculptures, multimedia installations, music, and movement performances that provoke reflection and transformation.
Also known as (DJ) CQQCHIFRUIT, Jacquelyn is a co-founder of TRQPITECA, an artist duo and multimedia event production company that celebrates queer art and dance music culture. They have been an organizer in the queer nightlife underground since 2013, when they were invited to become part of legendary Chicago queer dance party collective Chances Dances. Guerrero’s musical research runs deep, having studied musical instruments such as voice, piano, and conga, and musical styles from Caribbean folkloric and popular music, to electronic genres such as house, Florida bass, and drum and bass through DJing. The potential of nightlife, dance floors, and natural spaces as sites of radical embodiment remains a focus of Guerrero’s personal and collaborative social practice, seeking to dismantle oppressive, man-made constructs.