At EXPO CHICAGO, Artadia will be presenting two separate large-scale installations by Jim Duignan (2008 Chicago Artadia Awardee) and Jillian Conrad (2012 Houston Artadia Awardee).

Duignan, a professor of Visual Art in the College of Education at DePaul University, will be showing his recent work, Lifeboat. His work pieces together materials from Chicago’s quietest spaces gathered over time from sites that are as sacred to him as they are secret. Through the mosaic of material and its long history as sites of interest, a token is revealed in the form of a boat that serves as a sublimation of formidable narratives long since forgotten. Conrad, an Assistant Professor in the Sculpture Department at the University of Houston, will be showing her recent work, Long Division. Using experimental compositions of unconventional materials such as “blobby bits” and scraps of cloth, Conrad hopes to draw formal connections between lines in terms of language, protocol, and other paths and signals of communication that her project traces before the viewer.