Walk into a bar

Eli Greene, Jason Hirata, Lin Hixson, Gloria Maximo, Devin T. Mays, Luis Romero
October 14 – December 9

Opening Reception: Saturday, October 14, 1:00-5:00 PM

Walk into a bar

This exhibition is organized around a simple but meaningful commonality: movement. Although movement is not materially or thematically present in any overt way, each piece in the show has some connection to movement through either process, subversion, or suggestion. Movement as a means to bring certain works by certain artists together was a responsive choice arrived at after considering works that we felt could generate a productive situation if brought together. Just as we hope is true for the experience of the exhibition, we allowed each choice of invited artist or requested artwork to guide us from one to the next, thereby creating a network of pieces that would pick up on one another in ways that couldn’t be explained or made sense of other than through direct engagement with their shared presence. A relationship to movement as part of the making or viewership of the work soon developed as something that might provide enough of a framework to move beyond taste or convenience while still resisting the heaviness of a concept-driven project that would diminish each artwork’s capabilities in service to the big idea.

Notes on artist contributions
Eli Greene: movement of memories, interfering and generating, objects and images migrate and change as they move in and out of forms

Jason Hirata: projections devoid of the very sequences of sounds and images moving through time that they exist to serve, devices borrowed and brought together from various sources

Lin Hixson: making drawings to make performances, not from but alongside, indirect and necessarily so, there is movement and there will be movement

Devin T. Mays: movement paused and attention called, stopping to regard, encounters captured to join others in picture before moving on

Gloria Maximo: labor on the roadways, commuting and transporting, moving selves and moving goods, working and working paintings

Luis Romero: assemble from marks and scraps, build across and under and above, a space to navigate

Artist biographies
Eli Greene lives in Chicago. Recent exhibition sites include Produce Model (Chicago), Goldfinch (Chicago), the Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago) and the Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago. Greene as a Summer Artist in Residence at Apparatus Projects (Chicago). This is her first showing at Regards where she will have a solo exhibition in January 2024.

Jason Hirata lives in New Jersey. Recent exhibition sites include Ulrik (New York), Fanta-MLN (Milan), Artists Space (New York), 80WSE Gallery (NYU), Kunstverein Nürnberg, Kai Matsumiya (New York), the Henry Art Gallery (Seattle), and Château Shatto (Los Angeles). His work has been written about in e-flux, the New York Times, Bomb Magazine, and Artforum. This is Hirata’s first showing in Chicago.

Lin Hixson lives in Chicago where she directs the performance collaborative Every house has a door along with dramaturg and co-founder Matthew Goulish. Every house regularly creates performs for local, national, and international audiences. Hixson and Goulish previously led and co-founded another performance collaborative, Goat Island. Every house performed at Regards in 2019.

Devin T. Mays lives in Chicago and Houston. Recent exhibition and performance sites include SculptureCenter (New York), Belmacz (London), DePaul Art Museum (Chicago), Anthony Gallery (Chicago), Moody Center for the Arts (Houston), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Apparatus Projects (Chicago), and Regards (Chicago), where he has performed and exhibited multiple times.

Gloria Maximo lives in New York City. Recent exhibition and performance sites include Laurel Gitlen (New York), Simone Subal Gallery (New York), Queens Museum (New York), Metro Pictures (New York), The Gallery @ Michaels (Santa Monica), and Bridget Donahue (New York). Her work has been written about in Portable Gray, the New Yorker, CURAMagazine, and ARTnews. This is Maximo’s first showing in Chicago.

Luis Romero lives in Chicago. Recent exhibition sites include Museo de las Américas (San Juan, PR), Everybody (Chicago), Adams and Ollman (Portland, OR), National Museum of Mexican Art (Chicago), and the Chicago Cultural Center. Romero was a recent fellow in residence at MacDowell (New Hampshire). This is Romero’s first time exhibiting at Regards.

Image info: Jason Hirata, Floaters, 2020. Projectors. Image courtesy Artists Space. Photo: Daniel Pérez.

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Tags: Chicago, Devin T. Mays, Eli Greene, Gloria Maximo, Jason Hirata, Lin Hixson, Luis Romero, Regards, Walk into a bar, West Town