Field Notes

Featuring works from Sebastian Hidalgo, Mario Mena, Bibiana Saucedo, Robert Vargas, and Alex Wilson.

A field note is what an observer writes when they are close enough to something to feel it. It can be a location, map, person, or photograph, and it is never neutral. The artists in Field Notes work like field-workers of their own city, each keeping a record of Chicago that cannot be separated from their own relationship to it. What they gather is not simply information, but evidence of their connections to people and places. Sebastián Hidalgo photographs the ordinary but essential work of a living and breathing city. Bibiana Saucedo paints inward from that same ground, drawing on her Mexican heritage and family memory to create dreamlike paintings. Alex Wilson takes the most literal field note of all, titling each work by a street address, so that a doorway becomes a portrait. Robert Vargas resurrects archival maps of Chicago through layered oil and spray painting.

Together, these artists’ work converge on the idea the following idea: to truly know a place is to be personally bound up in it, and the record and the person keeping it can never quite be apart. Each artist’s work uniquely describes their relationship with Chicago. This group Exhibit at DragonFly Gallery visualizes how Field Notes say as much about notetakers as they do the people and places in a notebook.

Background Image: Spectral Cartography 1 by Robert Vargas