Artist-in-Residence: Erol Scott Harris
 
Jan 8 - Feb 19, 2022

Erol Scott Harris: Lore
Residency Dates: 
January 8 - February 19, 2022

Exhibition Reception:
Saturday, February 5, 12:00 - 4:00pm

Open Hours, by appointment:
Thursday, February 10, 12:00 - 4:00pm
Saturday, February 12, 12:00 - 4:00pm
Thursday, February 17, 12:00 - 4:00pm
Saturday, February 19, 12:00 - 4:00pm

A Tea Ceremony and Meditation
Thursday, February 10, 12-4pm, every half hour

Cello Performance
Saturday, February 19, 3:30pm

Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago is pleased to announce our fourth artist-in-residence, Erol Scott Harris. This residency will allow the artist to continue his autoethnographic investigations into his familial experiences with migration, labor, and cultural transformation through material experimentation with his body.

Erol Scott Harris: “I feel that the landscape occupies the body just as much as the body occupies the landscape. I generate a narrative scene by using my body as a stamp. The surfaces upon which I leave marks are material vehicles for spirit. I’m being guided to physicalize my ancestors in painting, photography, sculpture, and video-–to conjure hope, justice, freedom, and joy in order to heal my community and to aid in the cultural transformation of the world.”

During the first four weeks of his residency, Harris will experiment with using his body as a paint applicator on surfaces including linoleum, plastic, vinyl, and canvas through such actions as pressing, folding, and pouring. Using a paintbrush as a wand, he can then go in and exaggerate his “stamps” by applying strokes in an exhaustive way, without dipping back into the paint between strokes, but rather by moving the brush across the surface until it runs dry. The residency will culminate in a two-week-long solo exhibition, LORE, which will bring forward lived experiences and complex identities through a window installation and Harris’ new painted wall works. In addition to investigations into the use of his body as a painting tool, the works are grounded in family lore (Erol spelled in reverse) that connects Harris’ paternal African-American background (specifically, a father named Earl and a grandfather named Early) with his mother’s side of the family—vintners who migrated from Códoba, Spain to Guanajuato and Zamora, México, ultimately become railroad workers in Chicago. Harris is reminded of his background each day, as he looks out his studio window and watches the sunset over the railroad tracks that his grandfather helped lay and the train cars in which his family lived and his great-grandmother was born.  

Erol Scott Harris: LORE is curated by Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago member Teresa Silva.

Artist Bio

Erol Scott Harris is a multidisciplinary artist who creates identity-based work. Currently living in Chicago, Illinois, he is a farmer boy who was born in the north suburbs in Waukegan, Illinois.  Harris studied painting and comes from a music background, having played cello for many years. Collaboration is a big part of his work and combining painting and performance has also become increasingly important to him, as have curating and art advising.

For Harris, painting/art is an arena in which to uncover how he can work with the body—his own and others’. His painting process involves setting up a series of potentials in which he becomes free to move with them by performing, by using his physical form. He also incorporates photography as a way of maintaining the presence of his body through time and space. His interest is in what is left after his body is no longer performing. Once the paint has absorbed his energy, what remains are traces of his body; the remnants are relics that still breathe.

“I’ve come to realize that while I continue to exist and develop as an individual, my whole self, or soul, has such vast potential, that it can never be expressed fully through a lifetime. My work is to intimately document the multitudinous array of myselves falling into subjecthood, as they dissolve, evolve and reverberate in my imagination.”

Curator Bio

Teresa Silva is a writer, curator, and the Executive and Artistic Director at the Chicago Artists Coalition. Since 2016, Teresa has been a member of the artist cooperative, Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago. She co-organized the recent exhibitions Wen Liu: On Longing at Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago in 2021; Luis A. Sahagun: Both Eagle and Serpent at the Chicago Cultural Center in 2020; and Living Architecture at 6018North for Art Design Chicago in 2018, with support by the Terra Foundation for American Art. Silva has received numerous special honors. In 2019, she ranked #6 on Newcity’s list of Art 50: Chicago’s Visual Vanguard for her significant contributions to the development of emerging artists and curators’ careers. In 2018, Teresa was granted a prestigious Artists’ Community Administrator Residency by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in Captiva, FL; and, in 2017, she was a Diversity + Leadership Fellow, a full-year program supporting the careers of emerging residency leaders of color.

Image courtesy of the artist.