Opening Reception July 22, 6-9pm

Skylab Gallery presents the solo exhibition, “soft craters in the yard,” by Cincinnati-born, Chicago-based artist Hope Wang. Wang’s work treats the architectural landscape as a living document of visual language where building facades become eroded, redacted, and defaced. She translates images of architectural “scars” in factory lots, construction sites, and city commutes through handweaving and printmaking.

“soft craters in the yard” features a series of textiles that draw on empty parking lots and facades of industrial buildings. The American Midwest is populated with large expanses of warehouses and manufacturing facilities, some abandoned and some still home to low-wage, grueling operations. These works reference the expanse of corrugated metal that becomes the horizon sky, and the golden-hour light casting shadows against buildings when shifts end and labourers have gone home.

Wang captures the weightlessness of one’s own experience between the bustling energy of city-life and industrial work, as well as the melancholy and uncanny brilliance of an empty lot where one’s existence might register again. Employing the repetitive and tedious processes of handweaving and printmaking, her work reflects the delirious, dissociative nature of mundane manual labour. Paired with dream-like weavings of elusive shadows fluttering against industrial buildings, vivid depictions of asphalt give the works gravity as Wang draws viewers literally to the ground. For her, parking lots, roads, and sidewalks have become sites of loss and longing. With the posture of a neck craned downward, she refers to the scars of recurring traffic left in the asphalt as wounds, treating the structural environment as something flesh-like: of body, of ghosts.

Compelled by the same metaphor, Wang employs the process of letterpress-printing to translate her poetry into visual objects. Manufacturing spontaneity and imperfection on a machine often used to mass-produce printed texts, the metal type was meticulously set and printed and then “misprinted” as if letters were shaken and lost over multiple runs through the press. Wang explores palimpsests through the materialisation of language, ghosting of tire marks, and ever-changing industrial landscapes of labour.