Amidst Twin Suns: Alberto Checa

Oolite Arts is pleased to present Amidst Twin Suns, the first solo exhibition of resident artist Alberto Checa, curated by Jean Chung.

A tender, intricate practice albeit his brutalist, PVC-bound structures, Checa’s works depart with an intimate deliberation of relationships bound to systemic experiences of the Latino working class in the United States. Focusing on the unseen, yet public labor systems rooted in necessity, love and survival, Checa translates these experiences into his own abstract mimetic aesthetics, as not to simply reproduce, thus exploit and retraumatize the communal experience for the sake of one’s creative production.

Checa’s work is both documentation and inquiry, yet never in privilege of memento, as transient assemblages, exploring what is beyond the apparent horizon, closer looking at the possibilities suspended in-between two tides. Through disruptive yet vacant settings and recurring motifs of performance and methodical compositions, Checa coordinates the physical space of the gallery into a porous, decentralized network, taking the specter both everywhere at once and nowhere in particular. Careful graphite drawings of sculptures occupy in conjunction with materials often identifiable in relation to job sites, intermingling with performers’ hands dirtied with plaster questioning alabaster, sound mobilizing, sculptures reimagining themselves as tools, and amidst, ushering a new kind of choreography, a new way of understanding, transforming and revising possibilities of being, building and protecting.

About the curator
Jean Chung is an artist and writer currently based in New York City. Drawing from a queer immigrant lens, Chung works primarily around narratives of intimacy that arise from in-betweenness and opacity. Expanding on the idea of observation and research as an act of self and communal care, Chung’s practice stems from a diaristic approach that includes repetition and the constant translation between photo, painting and text.