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Tala is a gallery and contemporary art space in the West Town neighborhood located at 1644 W. Chicago. Containing a gallery, library and listening room, and atrium marketplace for artist made goods, the gallery acts as a platform for emerging and mid-career artists Chicago-based and internationally. Proposing confluence between a commercial art model alongside a community-based program, Tala pursues a new model of contemporary art that centers gathering as essential to expand the capacities of artists, writers, organizers, and curators to shape new realities.
𝓑𝓵𝓲𝓷𝓴𝓮𝓭 𝓣𝔀𝓲𝓬𝓮 is the first solo exhibition in Chicago of Los Angeles-based artist Vani Aguilar. Showcasing the artist’s trajectory with new and previously made works, the exhibition calls back to the phrase “Blink twice and you’ll miss it”, a figure of speech signaling moments of remembrance and awe.
Working across airbrushed acrylic and colored pencil drawings to create chrome-like scenes that invite moments of pause, Aguilar negotiates themes of transformation and remembrance in the contemporary rapidly changing urban landscape. In this body of work, Aguilar sheds light upon the beauty of their communities and the environments that they exult in. Amidst the changing cultural landscapes of Los Angeles and Chicago, they draw upon friends, front lawns, construction sites, and dogs at play to remember and reimagine moments of vitality, celebration, and brilliance—blink twice and you’ll miss it.
Vani Aguilar is a Los Angeles based Chicanx painter who was born and raised in Pasadena, California. They attained their BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and their AA from Pasadena City College. Aguilar’s work reinterprets traditionally Chicano modes of image making to insert contemporary conversations of queer belonging in a moment of rapidly changing demographic shift in major cities. Vani has received several awards including Ox-Bow’s Latinx Artist Visibility Award, SAIC’s IDEA grant, and Watershed Center for Ceramic Art’s Zenobia Award.
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