“Future Reliquaries” by Kayla Anderson

In partnership with ACRE, the Chicago Athletic Association hotel is pleased to display work by Kayla Anderson, which will be available for viewing in the hotel’s fine art case, located in the second floor lobby, from August 1 through September 9.

Kayla Anderson is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and organizer based in Chicago, IL. She has participated in artist residencies and incubators at the Chicago Artists Coalition and Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL; Elsewhere: A Living Museum, Greensboro, NC; and ACRE, WI. She is a Visual Arts Fellow of the Luminarts Cultural Foundation.

Using a playful approach to methods of “excavation”, her work engages with cultural artifacts of the past in order to propose parallel worlds. Kayla creates spaces to inhabit where images from the past and present collide to form an alternate, often mythic reality. Through intricate installations involving video, sculpture, and found objects, she challenges perceived boundaries between subject, object, and image.

The series Future Reliquaries engages with practices of world-building and myth-making by treating organic objects found at sites of personal pilgrimage as fragments of a geologic body. Through a series of fabricated reliquaries, object identification worksheets, the series plays with ideas of speculative archeology, material alchemy, and encapsulation. At the core of the work is a fascination with the double-edged sword of preservation and the history of plastic as a once utopian and now dystopian material.

Learn more about Kayla’s work, and stop by the hotel to see “Future Reliquaries.”