Parallel Visions: C.C. Ann Chen, Carie Lassman, Frances Lee, and Monika Plioplyte

Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago is pleased to present _Parallel Visions_, featuring work by the artist-run space TSA CHI's newest members: C.C. Ann Chen, Carie Lassman, Frances Lee, and Monika Plioplyte. **Parallel Visions** brings together four distinct artistic practices that approach questions of perception, place, and narrative from unique perspectives. Working across installation, painting, collage, and mixed media, these artists explore imagined landscapes, abstraction, adornment, and mythology. Rather than sharing a single visual language or method, their practices unfold in parallel, sometimes aligning and overlapping, sometimes diverging to reveal points of contrast and connection. The exhibition's title speaks to this condition of looking alongside, rather than looking alike. Each artist pursues an independent inquiry, yet all consider how meaning is constructed through experience, memory, and shared cultural forms. This relational approach echoes Suzi Gablik's call in _The Reenchantment of Art_ for practices that move beyond isolated individual expression toward a more connected understanding of art's relationship to myth, place, and community. The works in _Parallel Visions_ invite viewers to move between perspectives and ask how what we see is shaped by the stories we tell. Together, these works create a conversation in which difference becomes a source of connection. **Featured artists:** **Frances Lee** presents new large-scale paintings on paper inspired by expressions of adornment in women's basketball. Translating the uniform into the language of painting, Lee isolates its colors, shapes, and relationship to the body. The works consider the tension between individual style and institutional codes, using the visual language of the jersey to examine gender, women's sports, and the conventions of painting. Lee's work foregrounds the ways identity can be constructed through shared visual systems, drawing a connection between larger social narratives and the more intimate and atmospheric forms of looking found throughout the exhibition. **Carie Lassman** explores spaces of uncertainty and the tension between opposing states. Dusty, weathered atmospheres are held within geometric constraints, while loose washes and transparent layers create porous, shifting fields. Repetitive structures introduce hard, opaque edges. These contrasts evoke divides between interior and exterior, public and private, and the natural and synthetic. Lasserman's paintings extend the exhibition's interest in parallel states, allowing contradictory conditions and images to exist simultaneously rather than resolve into a single point of view. **C.C. Ann Chen** begins with slow observation of the land and seascapes of the Maine coast. Using rocks found on beaches in York, Maine, Chen creates viewfinders paired with commercial paint swatches, exploring the act of looking and the translation of observed color. Playful and participatory, the viewfinders invite visitors to look through the gallery and its south-facing window, connecting the exhibition space to the landscape beyond it. Chen's work makes the act of seeing itself part of asking viewers to slow down, shift perspective, and recognize how perception shapes our understanding. **Monika Plioplyte**'s Chorus is an installation of double-sided mixed-media drawings and collages that began as a series of self-portraits. Scanned and manipulated images of her own face and body draw on mythological bird-women, including the Siren, Harpy, and Alkonost. The work is presented here as an installation in which these figures function as a chorus, a collective voice, that the viewer can walk amongst. While the Sirens and Harpies of Greek mythology embody danger, seduction, and destruction, the Alkonost of Slavic folklore is a benevolent figure whose song brings comfort, joy, and forgetfulness of worldly sorrows. By bringing together contrasting mythologies, Plioplyte creates an uncanny environment where opposing narratives coexist, and multiple perspectives can occupy the same space without being reconciled into a single story. Across the exhibition, the artists demonstrate what can happen when different ways of seeing are placed in conversation. The exhibition offers a model grounded in attention, curiosity, and coexistence. As a new group of members within Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago, Chen, Lassman, Lee, and Plioplyte also extend the organization's artist-run ethos: a commitment to creating spaces and ideas where artists can encounter one another and build community through independent practices held in common space.