***Access to Meaning 4*** */ magazine paper and acrylic on paper,* *by Jeannie Hua, 2025*

Unsettled Territories

an exhibition featuring the work of:

Kathryn Hempel, Michael Anthony Garcia & Jeannie Hua

OPENING Reception :: Friday, July 3, 6–10 pm
& performance by Michael Anthony Garcia and Jeannie Hua

ARTISTS TALK & Dialogue :: Saturday, July 25, 3–4 pm
A moderated panel discussion featuring all three artists on their art practices

COLLAGE WORKSHOP & Closing Reception :: Friday, July 26, 2–4 pm
participants use printed matter (newspapers, magazines, discarded books) to create new works of art. Participants welcome to bring their own ephemera but materials and scissors will be supplied. All ages and technical levels welcome.

Exhibit Curated / Organized by Jeannie Hua
with assistance by Agitator members Alex Wilson & Jason Greenberg

Unsettled Territories confront the strata of displacement, memory and embodiment by using a vocabulary of visual strategies that disrupt stability, unsettle dominant narratives, and create new spaces for collective witnessing. Across photography, mixed media, and sculptural intervention, the artists reveal the unseen infrastructures—emotional and physical, political and personal—that govern how we inhabit the world. Their works do not merely depict fragmented realities; they inhabit them, making visible the ruptures and possibilities that form contemporary lived experience.

***Untitled*** *- Hempel /* ***Access to Meaning 6*** *- Hua /* ***Brotes Organicos*** *- Lopez Garcia / all works 2025*

Kathryn Hempel’s palette and forms act as frameworks through which we consider the infrastructures of power. The images suggest maintenance and repair, yet also deterioration

Jeannie Hua’s images question the possibility of comprehension and understanding despite personal and public impairment of access to information and knowledge.

Michael Anthony Garcia’s sculptural photographs integrate textiles, organic forms, ritualistic elements, and altered environments. The result is a visceral dialogue with presence, vulnerability, and the politics of the body as territory. ———

Unsettled Territories positions the practices of these three artists within a dialogue about space—constructed and innate. Through their visual languages, the exhibition invites viewers into a query of how we are shaped by—and push against— the frameworks that define our lives.

EXHIBITING ARTISTS:

KATHRYN HEMPEL—

Kathryn is an interdisciplinary artist, Emmy award-winning film editor, VP/Partner of Cutters Studios, and an MFA graduate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She committed to making a new piece of art, photographing it, and then sharing it with friends online every day in 2022, 2017, and 2013. Through daily observations, experimental mark-making, and stream of consciousness, her public daily art practice led to the creation of over a thousand smaller-scale paintings, drawings, collages, and sculptures, and a series of more extensive works, such as the International Equal Pay Alphabet.

During the Spring and Summer of 2024, Hempel exhibited her work and taught fabric painting workshops at the Bei Koc gallery in Hannover, Germany, and SD Studios in Berwyn, IL. Her art has been published in and on the front and back covers of the Nerve Cowboy journal of poetry, fiction, & music and is the cover art on The Counterfactual, Throw it Away, and The Imperial Sound, The New AM. Hempel’s art has also been featured on the sets of independent feature films and commercial motion picture productions.

———

JEANNIE HUA—

Since graduating from the MFA program in 2022 at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Jeannie Hua participated in the Longform residency at the Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency as well as Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. She recently had a solo show at Gallery 456 in NYC. She won a NYC fellowship from Foundation for Contemporary Art to assist with the show.

She had a solo show at Core Contemporary as part of the Post-Invisibles 2024 Biennale with 15 simultaneous shows in Montreal, Toronto, Lyon, Paris, Mexico City, Bahamas, and Las Vegas. Jeannie taught various collage workshops including at the Ox-Bow School of Art. Her work has been shown at BWAC and First Street in NYC, as well as Agitator and Woman Made in Chicago. She had a solo show at Barrick Museum’s window gallery and at College of Southern Nevada’s ArtSpace Gallery.

She has participated in group exhibitions in galleries and museums in New York, Illinois, California, Nevada, Michigan, Virginia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Utah, Tennessee, Oregon, and Orquevaux, France. She was the recipient of the Denis Didero Grant, Nevada Council of Arts Grant, as well as merit scholarship to Ox-Bow School of Art, Ox-Bow residency and Penland School of Crafts.
———

MICHAEL ANTHONY GARCIA —

Multidisciplinary artist & independent curator Michael Anthony García, claiming both Mexican and US citizenship, is based in Austin, Texas, and predominantly focuses his practice around photography/ video, sculpture/ installation & performance. He is a founding member of Los Outsiders curatorial collective & has curated large-scale exhibitions of international artists, in & out of the US. Notably, he has had solo curatorial projects for Mexic-arte Museum, Texas State University Galleries, the gallery at the Austin Central Public Library and Fusebox Festival. He participated in the 2011 Texas Biennial & has won awards both for his curatorial & 3D work. He co-hosts an intersectional conversation podcast named El Puente and is publisher for POCa Madre Magazine. García has premiered work for The Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Experimental Action Performance Art Biennale in Houston, The Contemporary Austin, SoundSpace at The Blanton Museum of Art, El Museo de la Ciudad de México, and ThreeWalls in Chicago.
———

***Painted Lumber****, acrylic on wood &* ***Untitled****, acrylic on paper / both by Kathryn Hempel, 2025*

Community Workshop: The FOUND POETRY of COLLAGE

Friday, 7/26/26 from 2-4pm

Join us at the gallery for an artist led evening of mixing, mash-ups, hybridity and intersectionality. In this artist-led workshop participants use printed matter (newspapers, magazines, discarded books) to create new works of art. All are welcome to bring your own ephemera (newspapers, magazines, etc.) Materials and scissors will be supplied. All ages & technical levels welcome

***Untitled*** *by Michael Anthony Garcia, 2025*

Join us in July for open gallery sitting hours and the other public performances:

OPENING / ARTISTS TALK / COLLAGE WORKSHOP & CLOSING

Inquiries? Contact Jeannie Hua @ huajeannie@gmail.com

Unsettled Territories - exhibit opening