“the witch has to be brought back, I think, for the person to eat a significant portion of his or her shadow”

– Robert Bly

From the curator:

As night falls, I look outside my kitchen window and watch the dark gobble up the backyard. My cats pace the fire escape, one last reconnoiter before I herd them indoors. It’s a cold spring night in Chicago and it reminds me of the Canada of my childhood. When night fell in summer it was always sweater weather. I’d sit on the back deck on the patio mat, the lanterns glowing while I watched the sun settle itself into the horizon. Night fell at 10PM in Calgary, so I was often up past my bedtime, a certain thrill passing through me as it got darker and darker and the neighborhood cats darted between the yards. What happened in the shadows of night was a mystery I clung too with awe. It had a sound, a musicality; it had a smell; it had a texture. Like many things, I know “it” when I come across “it”. Night, dark, shadow – it wasn’t scary so much as otherworldly. Even as an adult I feel a thrill walking around at night, sensing at night, as though everything is heightened in the spare atmosphere of darkness.  

Pedro was telling me that shadows are like liquid. They flow over things, I guess. They don’t flow around them though. Last week I was on a crit panel where the shadows people’s work left behind were mentioned twice by panelists. There is an appeal there – towards the way something leaves its impermanent mark, a drawing that bodies temporarily make across space. As I wrote this I remember: right, that was what I was doing in grad school. I made drawings out of thread, but the shadows that they cast were the work. I stopped making those drawings in 2004. They were a lot of labor to make something fleeting. But isn’t that like life? You can work at something forever but it’s fullness fades faster than you had anticipated. That’s the practice of non-attachment I suppose – it’s all in appreciating the shadows.

Shadow is also about the light. That is something to consider because the light is the negative space. But we probably, usually, think of light as additive. It is after all, all the colors. But something flips when we contemplate a shadow – the light becomes the supporting actor. Or maybe that is too glib – perhaps they are in a bit of a dynamic – not struggle – but evolving partnership. They give and take as they leave themselves behind, underfoot or on the wall. Right now, a crisp shadow dances on the back of my house of the potted plants on the little table. The cracked, peeling house paint makes up the veins in the leaves of my unhappy Calathea. The shadow form of the plant makes it look a little better than it is in fact doing, which is maybe another thing about the shadows. The surface is gone and it’s all form. We can’t see the unhappy face on a silhouette. Or their joy. That is all hidden from us unless the evidence is in the body.

I knew nothing about the psyche until I was well into my adulthood. I didn’t know about shadow selves or about shadow work. Now I am a Jungian dilettante. Over the last decade I have been watching as shadow work has come back in style. We are in the grip of a Jungian renaissance. People are sitting with their dreams and their journals and surfacing the unacceptable parts that they buried deep into their subconscious. We are digging deeper into our selves, until the spade hits stone. Gathering up what we find in the darkness, and as Robert Bly wrote – learning to eat the shadows we find there.

The funny thing about shadow is that it seems easier to see the one others cast, than it is to see your own. I mean, in the Jungian sense. You have heard about projection I’m sure – that is the big shadow theory. That the things we accuse others of is the material we have stuffed inside our darkness. You can always see another’s acts of sabotage or jealousy or spitefulness clearer than you can see your own and the scale of our defensiveness when someone touches these parts of us should be the clue that our shadows have been found out. They hurt a little bit, that’s why we keep them hidden away.

Is it a coincidence that as individuals revisit Jung and archetypes and dreamwork and shadow work, that the United States of America has just opened its closet and let all of its shadows run free? The country’s jealousy, rage and selfishness tumbling into the light, and stumbling around, a ravenous, hideous beast that is trampling everything underfoot. A part of me is hopeful – that the shadow is no longer concealed – it is visible, ridiculous and unmistakable, so perhaps it can no longer be dodged or waived away. Some days it feels like a final test: can this country, as an organism, as a body, reckon with itself, honestly?

That is a huge subject of course; I’m not suggesting you will find it bouncing here between the art. But I am an advocate for contemplation. Technology has been stealing that away from us. We scroll, we glance, we are in a rush. We are mining for dopamine on our screens. I am worried about what richness is left in the margins by moving so quickly onto the next thing. That’s what this invitation to tête-à-tête-à-tête is about – I’m asking you to stay longer and not be in such a hurry. Not just graze the buffet.

Every time someone visits, we end up talking about art, attention and the state of the world. The talk moves easily which tells me something about how art can dislodge within us the little bits stuck between our teeth or under the nail that needed some light shed on them. It makes connections we didn’t expect if we let it wash over us for a moment. Yes, I believe that attention is generative, but I think it must be sustained. When we scroll past ideas on our screens or walk past them at the art fair, we are not feeding anything other than the devices that delivered the ideas to us. So yes, this is political. But it has more to do with what art can provide you, or the shadows can render, after you gift them your attention.

Shadow, the second exhibition at tête-à-tête-à-tête is on view May 9th-July 11.Curated by tête’s proprietor, Shannon Stratton, Shadow features work by Holly Murkerson and Robin Arseneault in the waiting room, with Cristina Umaña Durán in the reading room. Guests are invited to spend time with each other and the art in a tête-à-tête by artists David Sprecher and Neiva Mulhern as selected by curator-of-chair, Kelly Kaczynski.

Robin Arseneault is a graduate of the Alberta College of Art & Design (BFA, 1998) and the Edinburgh College of Art (MFA, 2005). She received the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award in 2008 and has been awarded grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and Alberta Heritage. Her practice is diverse, including drawing, photo-based imagery and sculpture, collage and the creation of artist-books. She has shown across Canada and in the USA, Scotland, Germany, Italy, and The Netherlands. Arseneault has work placed in private and public collections, including the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, Art Gallery of Alberta, Nickle Galleries, Scotiabank Art Collection, Fairmont Hotel Group, La Maison Simons Department Store among others. She recently completed her second commissioned public sculpture, called Balancing Act.

For over twenty years, Arseneault’s work has sat at the uncomfortable intersection of failure, abjection and humour. With a wide and changing use of materials like paper, clay, wood, brass, bronze, and found images and objects, she extends her materials past their boundaries, accentuating what is visceral and tactile within them. The images and sculptures that emerge often explore the uncanny, the tragic or the comic.

Cristina Umaña Durán is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans textiles, drawing, installation, sculpture, and performance. Her work investigates the internal human body, examining how it digests emotions, perceives time, and navigates grief. She studied Art History and Fine Arts at Universidad de los Andes in Bogota before transferring to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts (2017). In 2024, she completed the SOMA Educational Program in Mexico City.

Her work has been exhibited in Espacio Odeón (Bogota), ARTBO - Bogota International Art Fair (Bogota), SOMA (Mexico City), Croma (Mexico City), Salón ACME No. 11 (Mexico City), El Terreno (Guanajuato), FORO.SPACE (Bogota), Galería Casas Riegner (Bogota), Policroma Galería (Medellín), Cachorra (Bogota), Galería SGR (Bogota), El Arenero (Mexico City), Ely Center of Contemporary Art (New Haven), and Greendoor Gallery (Chicago), amongst others.

In 2020, she was nominated for the Young Art Colsanitas Award in Bogota, Colombia and in 2023 for the Sara Modiano Foundation Prize. She has participated in residencies, including Spudnik Press Cooperative (Chicago, 2017), Proyecto Nave (Ecuador, 2019), and ACRE Residency (Wisconsin, 2022).

Holly Murkerson makes photographic work that seeks to visualize embodiment and the porousness between body and environment, grounded in the materiality (liquid, mineral, animal, light), apparatuses (eye, room, womb, chamber) and slow metabolism of analog photography.

Based in Chicago, Illinois, Holly Murkerson received an MFA in 2010 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a Post-Baccalaureate in 2006 from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and her BFA from Florida Southern College in 2004. Past exhibitions include 65Grand, The East Wing at Goldfinch Gallery, Comfort Station, Rainbo Club, Heaven Gallery, Apparatus Projects, Roots & Culture, Julius Caesar, Andrew Rafacz Gallery (all Chicago), Rockford University Art Gallery, Rockford, IL, Neiman Gallery at Columbia University, New York. She has participated in residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, The Ragdale Foundation, and Oxbow School of Art and has received grants from The Illinois Art Council and the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs. From 2011 to 2021, she was a Co-Director of the artist-run space, Adds Donna.

David Sprecher is an artist and writer based in Chicago. He teaches sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Chicago Academy for the Arts and integrates art education into public primary schools through The Chicago Arts Partnership in Education. Recent exhibitions include Organs of Little Importance at Kobo Chika, Tokyo; Roaming Stone for the 2022 4Ground Sculpture Biennial, Minneapolis; Clean Grit with Ro Art Services, New York and Glossolalia at ACRE/Drama Club in Chicago. He's published writing in the Brooklyn Rail, Columbia Journal and Chicago Artist Writers and is a co-founder of the design collective ESSAY.

Neiva Mulhern is an artist living and working in Chicago, IL. She works in sculpture, photography and sound, and designs 3D models of large public sculptures for Floating Museum. She has exhibited in group shows at Sawhorse and By Bye Avondale and published audio work in A Row of Trees, The Journal of the Sonic Art Research Unit at Oxford Brookes University. She holds a BFA from the College of Fine and Applied Arts at UIUC.