What Holds and What Breaks: 2024 McKnight Visual Artist Fellows

“What Holds and What Breaks” explores fragility and strength in contemporary society through the work of Rachel Breen, Sophia Chai, Dahn Gim, Alison Hiltner, R. Yun Matea, and Chris Rackley. These artists delve into how social, perceptual, ecological, and technological systems shape our lived experiences. Through research-based and materially driven practices, they examine instability, contradiction, and collapse, while also envisioning new ways of sensing and connecting.

Working across sculpture, installation, photography, video, and participatory formats, the artists engage with themes of transformation, fragmentation, and process. Rachel Breen uses reclaimed clothing to critique global labor systems through repetitive acts of unmaking and mending. Sophia Chai approaches photography as a linguistic expression, returning to her earliest memory of learning to read her mother tongue, Korean. Dahn Gim reconfigures found objects and personal effects to reflect cultural hybridity and displacement. Alison Hiltner creates speculative environments that simulate organic systems with synthetic components to explore community synthesis. R. Yun Matea incorporates archival materials and lived narratives to examine personal history and institutional memory. Chris Rackley reconstructs participatory spaces that address utopia and alienation embedded in childhood memories of American shopping malls.

Together, their practices offer a meditation on fragility and resilience, inviting viewers to pause, reconsider the conditions we inhabit, and imagine what else might be possible when the familiar begins to break apart.