Fragment Gallery's presentation at Expo Chicago 2024 is a dialogue between window-shaped paintings and drawings by Meredith Sellers and Michelle S. Cho's pewter sculptures. Both artists explore systems of wealth, power, political economies, and the state of today’s American society through imagery of car crashes and car remnants.
VIP Preview: April 11th, 12:00–9:00 PM.
April 12–13: 11:00 AM–7:00 PM.
April 14th: 11:00 AM–6:00 PM.
Booth 425
Meredith Sellers' painting practice considers the mediated image and its relationship to power, violence, and apathy, through the frame of the window as both an architectural and digital space. Her tableaux—shaped like actual windows familiar to the artist—depict windows that are obfuscated, providing only glimpses into stock photos and borrowed images, including details from Dutch Golden Age painting. Most recently, she has been utilizing images of car crashes as a metaphor for the violent tensions that underscore contemporary American society. The visceral wreckage offers a subtext of toxic rage, blind selfishness, and careless abandon, some of American society’s most pervasive ills.
Using pewter, Michelle S. Cho creates a myriad of sculptures in silver and golden shades from tires and car remnants collected from the shoulders of Interstate-95. Transforming refuse into new commodities, the artist utilizes sculpture to evoke legacies of transportation, migration, and craftsmanship. Her works consider the political economies of raw materials and their histories in circulation within a transnational context.
