The Artists in Conversation with Anton Stuebner, Thursday August 15 at 6:30 pm. RSVP here.
& other complications features a range of work from drawing to painting to sculpture, from abstract to representational. Though each artist has a distinctive visual language, Boyle, Heibel and Tripodi all share an expansive, inventive style with a keen interest in materials and conceptual ambition.
As a whole the exhibition presents recognizable forms in distinctive palettes triggering a momentary disorientation in the viewer before any conceptual evaluation begins. Intuitively familiar, yet wholly original, these artists playfully challenge our preconceptions.
Claire Boyle, Rachel Heibel & Sam Tripodi are 2024 MFA graduates of School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).
“Claire Boyle’s paintings of hedonistic behavior — lounging, sunbathing, or enjoying a magnificent feast — reveal the darker side of pleasure. The characters in these paintings transform into strange and alien beings, leaving the viewer to wonder, Is that my fate? Boyle’s paintings pose the question, ‘Are we really who we think we are?’”
“Sam appears to be skeptical of intention, grand design and preconception. Instead we get drawing and painting that behaves like sculpture. What we are seeing are discoveries of subjects in ways that show us their weight and nature and object-ness.”
“Sculptor Rachel Heibel mines the varying intersections of earthen materials and their viable functions, examining the possibilities of uniquely glazed clay-builds with introductions of complementary appointments. The results are both alien and familiar, beckoning participation as well as distant observation.”
All photos Shaun Roberts
artists BIOS
CLAIRE BOYLE is a painter based in Oakland and Chicago. She recently received her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Working primarily in large-scale oil paintings, Boyle depicts moments of celebration and social ceremony, teasing out the exuberant, unhinged, and often unsettling spirit of these gatherings. She draws inspiration from medieval image-making, before the discovery of perspectival space, where things often feel at once wrong and charmingly human.
RACHEL HEIBEL (b. 1999) is a Midwestern native and a recent Bay Area transplant. She completed her BFA at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and finished her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 2024. She was SAIC's recipient of the Visionary Scholars Award along with the Graduate Professional Development Award. Her work has been included in various solo and group exhibitions since 2021.
SAM TRIPODI (b. 1966, Los Angeles) is an interdisciplinary artist exploring personal memory at the intersection of consumption and the environment. At the age of 8, Sam’s parents relocated their family from Los Angeles to still-developing central Florida, where her father, a trained packaging designer, had taken work as a Disney Imagineer. The experiences of growing up in a rural cow town overtaken by the tourism industry and witnessing a dramatically changing landscape along with personal trauma, significantly influence Tripodi’s work. Formerly an accomplished corporate designer working at the crossroads of business and emerging technologies, she felt a persistent tension grow between the desire for aesthetic and functional ideals and the weight of consumption these designs demand.
Sam earned her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2024, where she received the Visionary Scholars Award and was selected to receive the 2024 SAIC Berlin Photography Residency in Institut für Alles Mögliche. She received a dual BFA in Graphics/Packaging from Art Center College of Design 1989, and studied drawing at the Royal Academy of Art, London in 1985. She lives and works in San Francisco CA.
The exhibition—& other complications—will be on view through 17 August 2024.
CVs for Claire Boyle; Rachel Heibel: & Sam Tripodi