Allison Svoboda: Spirit Hand

July 19 – Aug 30, 2025

Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago is pleased to present Spirit Hand, a solo exhibition by artist Allison Svoboda. In her quietly radical practice, Allison Svoboda engages land and water not as subjects to be represented, but as collaborators in the act of making. Her work invokes natural processes; wind, water, sediment, and decay co-create paintings and installations that bear the literal and metaphorical marks of the environments from which they emerge.

Spirit Hand explores the intersection of land, memory, and transformation—where prairie meets lake, where fire renews what human hands have altered. Through mapping, layering, and intuitive mark-making, Svoboda investigates the fragile yet resilient connections between ecosystems and the stories they hold. Her work becomes a quiet act of repair—bearing witness to the cycles of destruction and regrowth that shape the natural world.

The prairie, shaped by fire, thrives on its regenerative heat. The lake, still and expansive, reflects the sky while nurturing unseen life beneath its surface. These two landscapes—distinct in rhythm and deeply interdependent—are bound by an invisible reciprocity. Roots hold soil that feeds the water and moisture sustains grasses that welcome flame. Yet this balance is fragile. Human intervention disrupts the natural order: suppressing fire, draining wetlands, and erecting artificial boundaries where none belong.

In her process, Svoboda engages land and water not as subjects to be represented, but as collaborators in the act of making. Her plein air paintings were created by immersing the paper in the Great Lakes and its watershed merging water-soluble pigments with environmental elements like sand, plant matter, and salt. These works are exposed to wind, rain, and movement, allowing nature to leave its imprint on the surface. Akin to Dadaist and Surrealist automatism, Svoboda’s method yields paintings formed in part by a “spirit hand”—guided by the energies and forces of the sites themselves.

Alongside these atmospheric works, Svoboda’s use of burned paper, reclaimed fibers, and fragments of maps evoke the texture of scorched earth, the power of water and shifting terrain. Charred edges recall the necessity of fire in prairie restoration and delicate stitching mimics the slow and persistent return of native grasses. Her compositions echo fractal geometry and ritual mandalas—visual vocabularies of regeneration and sacred balance.

This is not traditional landscape painting. It is an act of remapping—a call to recognize the land as both scarred and sacred. Svoboda’s work asks: What does it mean to belong to a place that remembers? How can we learn to listen to what our earth is saying?

In Spirit Hand, Svoboda threads together what has been fragmented. Through gesture, collaboration with the elements, and a reverence for ecological cycles, her work honors the land’s own language—written in ash and water, roots and waves, always reaching toward renewal. Ultimately, Svoboda’s practice reminds us that to care for a place begins with listening to it. Her paintings and collages hold that listening in their very fibers, offering us a glimpse of what can emerge when we make space for the land to speak.

Spirit Hand is curated by Tiger Strikes Asteroid member, Cydney M. Lewis. 

Artist Bio

Allison Svoboda’s art practice exists on the edge between intuitive and deliberate mark making. Through paintings, sculpture and installations that are both ethereal and ominous, Svoboda highlights nature’s ability to regenerate, activate, and heal despite the damaged state of our environment. In 2015, she received the Hemera Fellowship to study Zen, calligraphy and shibori in Japan. This meditative practice and mark making continue to influence her work.

Svoboda has shown her work at galleries, art centers and museums throughout the U.S. and abroad, including the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum (Chicago, IL); Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago, IL); Walker Gallery (Denver, CO); K Imperial Gallery (San Francisco, CA); Olson-Larsen Galleries (Des Moines, IA); Fiskars Village (Finland); and Mingara Gallery (Australia). Svoboda’s public art sculptures can be seen at Nashville International Airport and North Center Plaza in Chicago. Her work is in private, corporate and hotel collections throughout the world, including Four Seasons Hotel San Francisco, InterContinental Real Guatemala, and the Ritz-Carlton Abu Dhabi, among others.

allisonsvoboda.com

Curator Bio

Cydney M. Lewis is a Chicago based multimedia artist who works primarily in collage and assemblage. Lewis's works feature an amalgamation of materials found in a variety of places; she explores the relationship between the spiritual and the natural and celebrates the depth of beauty that exists within the lived environment, pondering how humans can collectively move towards a more harmonious future despite being entrenched in a consumerist society. She studied at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago as well as L'École d'architecture in Versailles, France, receiving her BS in Architectural Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. She has received the 3Arts Make A Wave Grant and the Black Creativity/Green Art Award from the Museum of Science and Industry. Her work has been featured in Newcity, NBC News, and Suboart Magazine. Aside from her practice as a visual artist, Lewis has practiced ballet & art directed films, both of which give her a unique perspective on the fluidity of her narratives, & inform the materiality she employs.