Hope Wang: before there was a hill there was a hole

May 14 - June 11, 2022

Opening Reception Saturday, May 14, 2022

6 - 9PM

“Before there was a hill, there was a hole,” is a quote from an article about the Henry Palmisano park in Chicago’s Bridgeport neighbourhood. The article traces its history as a limestone quarry, where after 130 years of mining, the huge hole extended 380 feet below street level. From “trash to treasure,” the hole became a landfill for construction waste, before the dumping finally ended and this space began its new life as a fishing hole and beautiful wetland prairie park. It is one of Wang’s favourite places in the city, and she thinks fondly about the digging/filling/overflow/reuse of that space. Peripheral details and imperceptible histories about our built environment hold meaning and narrative. Within her own work, Wang considers the ways architectural spaces become artifacts of memory, and what happens to our memories when the physical artifacts disappear or change. Through manipulation of material surfaces and perception, her work suggests that meaning and memory are often in flux, and thus, often written over and over again.

Wang often references her photographs documenting sloppy traces of human activity around sites of urban industrial labour: boundary-making traffic objects as surrogate bodies, screenshots of Google Maps parking lots, and golden-hour light casting shadows against buildings and sidewalks. In her studio, Wang also practices digging and dumping material such as screenshots, grocery lists, poems, sketches, colour swatches; reiterating ideas spanning across years as content for her artwork. before there was a hill, there was a hole presents an interior look at the errant thoughts and preliminary lives of these scraps before they become “finished” objects. 

Hope Wang is a Chicago-based artist, arts facilitator, and poet. Contending with sloppy traces of human activity around sites of industrial labour, her work considers the ways architectural spaces become artifacts of memory. She likes to joke that she creates geo-caches of public places she has cried in. 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, Chicago's first textile exposition featuring a week-long program of events highlighting the vast and innovative work spanning interiors, architecture, fine arts, craft, and fashion. 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. She has attended the Digital Weaving Lab Residency at Praxis Fiber Workshop (2021); The Weaving Mill WARP Residency (2019); and Spudnik Press Cooperative Fellowship (2019).