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Cover Image (front and back): Installation view with work by Mike Cloud and Rachel Hayes (above)

The Prairie’s Edge

April 12 - June 1, 2024

Candida Alvarez, Elijah Burgher, Holly Cahill, Mike Cloud, Gianna Commito, Edie Fake, Vanessa Filley, Julia Fish, Beverly Fishman, Diana Guerrero-Maciá, Azadeh Gholizadeh, Michelle Grabner, Christina Haglid, Rachel Hayes, Gina Hunt, Michiko Itatani, Miyoko Ito, Anna Kunz, Alice Lauffer, Aya Nakamura, Deb Sokolow, May Tveit, Georgina Valverde, Susan C. White, Amy Yoes, and Jade Yumang

Curated by Hilma’s Ghost

Photographs by Nathan Keay

CosmicGeometries: The Prairie’s Edge

Curated by Hilma’s Ghost

Cosmic Geometries: The Prairie's Edge is a group exhibition of intergenerational and intersectional artists either based in the Midwest or adjacent to it, that examines the spiritual and aesthetic functions of abstract painting and geometry in art. The artists deploy a range of painterly devices to create cosmic and transcendental visions that combine esoteric world traditions with the language of Modernism. Their motifs are inspired by sources as divergent as Islamic architecture, Buddhist mandalas, Hindu yantras, medieval Christian stained-glass windows, and quantum mechanics, rendering formal devices that range from optical illusions, to elaborate ornamentation techniques. These artists primarily work with the language of painting, but also draw from languages and materials adapted from sculpture, installation, craft, and textiles. Within these works lies a rich affection for color, shape, and compositional elements, which reveal the daring sensibilities that artists are bringing to the historically overlooked arena of the spiritual in art. These artists' practices build upon palimpsest legacies of alternative power structures that are constantly being erased.

In January 2022, Hilma’s Ghost curated the collective’s first curatorial project Cosmic Geometries at EFA Project Space in New York. That show had 25 intergenerational and diverse artists primarily working in New York, but also a few international and historical artists. Cosmic Geometries: The Prairie's Edge will focus on 26 artists living, from and/or strongly associated with the Midwest, and also include several historically significant artists. The focus of both these exhibitions is primarily on women, nonbinary, and trans artists as that aligns with the mission of the collective.

ABOUT THE CURATION PROCESS

After curators Sharmistha Ray and Dannielle Tegeder selected work for the exhibition, the gallery engaged Sarah Potter, a professional witch, to do use tarot to guide the physical placement of the art in the gallery As was the case for placement in the first iteration of Cosmic Geometries (at the Elizabeth Foundation), arrangement the artwork in Cosmic Geometries: The Prairie’s Edge, tarot cards were drawn at random from the ABSTRACT FUTURES Tarot Deck by Hilma’s Ghost (beginning with the twentytwo Major Arcana)- one assigned to each artist in alphabetical order. The art work in the exhibition was then hung in order of the cards - from The Fool (0) to The World (22) The remaining 4 artworks were drawn from the suite of Pentacles. Remarkably, or perhaps not remarkably, the final placement of the artworks were faithful to

their tarot pairs that are hung alongside them in the exhibition We have included pulled cards with each artwork in this catalogue in order to invite the reader an opportunity for noticing the uncanny affinities between the tarot cards and the art on display, and to share in the sense of magic that was threaded throughout.

ALICE LAUFFER

Although it was not until the very end of the 1960’s, near her fiftieth year, that Alice Lauffer came into her artistic maturity, the previous decade had by no means been without activity for her. It was during those year that, Lauffer, under the professional name of Loray-Comte, worked as a highly successful independent commercial artist. She also expanded on her earlier training at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts by attending night classes at the School of the Art Insistute of Chicago and by studying with Paul Weighardt at the Evanston Art Center. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, Lauffer was also a regular (and rather successful) participant at he major summer art fairs held in the Chicago area, where she exhibited watercolors.

It is difficult to document the chronology precisely here - she rarely dated her worksbut at a moment in 1968 Lauffer turned her attention to the airbrush and the ellipse, and would turn these two elements into the touchstone of her art. Her command of the airbrush dated to her experiences as a commercial artist, and her application of it to these paintings seems to reflect a desire for an autonomy of touch, a removal of direct manila interaction with the surface of the paintings, replacing contact with something more subtle and more pristine. In this, and in her urge toward abstraction and in the sequential examination of a formal device, Lauffer was in accord with many of the concerns activating the national art scene at that moment, resulting in the movement we now identify as Minimalism

The Ellipse or oval shapes that were called into being with her airbrush certainly had special significance for Lauffer. It is a pleasingly volumetric shape, and Lauffer engaged it in endless episodes of intriguing modeling. The not-so-subtle female overtones of the shape were also fully exploited, and by the end of the 1970’s Lauffer was using titles like Phaedra, Andromeda, DNA Totem, and Receptor This egg-like shape could (and did) easily metamorphose into flower bud or vulva, rich and evocative and sensual, an object of consummate design that is capable of continual extrapolation.

EXCERPTED FROM “Alice Lauffer: The Perseverance of Vision” by James Yood, and published in Alice Lauffer - A Retrospective Exhibition on the occasion of her exhibition at the Illinois State Museum in 1988.

Phaedra, 1976

Acrylic on canvas

61.5 x 49.5 inches

Courtesy the Illinois State Museum

Sphinx, 1977

Watercolor on paper

30 x 22 inches

Courtesy the Illinois State Museum

GEORGINA VALVERDE

" I frequently use crochet, a technique that was passed down to me by my maternal grandmother, who in turn learned it from her mother The series, Atavia, consists of three tower-like structures, each dedicated to three women ancestors whose energy and life work has had an impact on me (see attached statement) The towers were inspired by the transmission towers that dominate the landscape around the area of Gray, Indiana The idea of somehow transmitting messages to my grandmothers and great grandmothers through manual work that I inherited from them was a seed for the work

The magic I seek is to awaken in the viewer the awe that I feel about the material world and its possibilities, something that gets lost in the rush from consumption to discarding I embrace a posthumanist view of materials (Jane Bennet, Vibrant Matter); I see materials as exerting their own agency and energies on humans and deserving of our care and consideration "

- Georgina Valverde

Mixed media

72 x 27.5 x 27.5 inches

Courtesy the artist

Vessel (For Mathilde Gartner), 2019

, 2019

65 x 17.5 x 17.5 inches

Beacon

Mixed Media

Courtesy the artist

CHRISTINA HAGLID

There is something profoundly reassuring about the smooth solidity of the forms anchoring Christina Haglid's compositions More sculptural than two-dimensional in effect, these works on paper depict shapes as concrete and convincing as they are wholly imagined With their focus on glowing light, gleaming water, and curved matte surfaces in calm, earth-tone palettes, Haglid's serene yet mysterious compositions open like windows on worlds that both soothe and beckon To gaze through these windows at Haglid's imagined realities is to partake of a solace and serenity more vital in these anxious and uncertain times than ever

Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, and Bernd Sauermann, editors. Posit Journal, May, 2021.