McHenry County College (MCC) will be hosting an exhibit titled The Vacant Plot of Sky by artist Hope Wang, January 18 – March 1, 2022 in Art Galleries One and Two, inside and outside the library, respectively.
Contending with sloppy traces of human activity around sites of industrial labor, Hope Wang's work treats the architectural landscape as a malleable document of visual language where building facades become eroded, redacted, and defaced. She translates images of architectural "scars" in factory parking lots, construction sites, and city commutes through computer-assisted handweaving and meticulous printmaking. Using the representational technique of trompe l'oeil to push cloth and paper to appear as a different material altogether, she crafts elaborate inside jokes with herself, and explores loss and longing through material illusions that reference those scarred sites. These thin spaces between physical occupancy and material manipulation of textile, print, and photography suggest that meaning and memory are often in flux, and thus, often written over and over again. Her work considers the ways architectural spaces become artifacts of memory, and questions what happens to our memories when the physical artifacts disappear or change.
There will also be a reception with the artist on Wednesday, February 16 from 4–6 p.m. in the Galleries. The event is free and open to the public. Face masks are currently required on MCC’s campus at all times.
Hope Wang is a Chicago-based artist, arts facilitator, and poet. She hosts and operates LMRM, a floor loom rental studio for Chicago fiber artists. Wang is also a co-organizer of Chicago Textile Week 2019 and 2021. She received her BFA (2018) from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a 2021 recipient of the gener8tor Art Accelerator Program Grant. Her work has been exhibited at Savannah Center Gallery for Contemporary Arts (Gary, IN); Friend of a Friend Gallery (Denver, CO); Chicago Art Department (Chicago, IL); Sullivan Galleries (Chicago, IL); and Zhou B Art Center (Chicago, IL), amongst others.
The College is located at 8900 US Hwy. 14 in Crystal Lake. For more information, contact Trevor Power, gallery curator, at (815) 455-8785 or tpower@mchenry.edu.