No one is ever truly gone. They’re just logged off for now.

In our turbulent era, the digitized formation of human connection- social, artistic,

material, spiritual, or otherwise- creates a frictionless immediacy through which a

persistent feeling of personal dislocation quietly seeps. *Until We Meet Again* at Tiger

Strikes Asteroid, Chicago functions, not only as a group show but also as a living

diagram of aesthetic and personal affinity. Not the self-serving affinities of market

alignment in a shared attention economy, but something more fugitive and layered: the

groundwork of intuitions that bind artists across interstates, institutions, and timelines,

even as the surface of arts discussion and distribution flattens under the weight of an

all-encompassing churning algorithm.

The show is the latest thread in a multi-year entanglement between two artist-run

collectives: Hyperlink, a “nebulous” entity formed in Chicago at Zhou B Center in 2014

and now loosely based in the vibrant Denver scene, and the Tiger Strikes Asteroid

network, whose signature distributed model-spanning Philadelphia, New York, Los

Angeles, Chicago, and Greenville, SC-has decisively resisted the strict verticality of

formulaic institutional centralization. What emerges here is not so much a

"collaboration" in the brand-partnership sense, but a deliberate negation of siloed

authorship. This is a show on infrastructure-in addition to the theme at hand- one whose

materials are people, habits, relationships- whose importance reveals upon closer

inspection, of how each part relates to a whole, however fleeting.

Running from March 29 to May 10, 2025, the exhibition centers itself around a theme

that comes off less a curatorial premise and more as an ambient pressure:Longing, not

as a sentimental motif, per se, but as a organizing principle-of artistic labor, of

friendship, of geographic and psychic distances stretched by innumerable screens and

interfaces in the hazy chaotic atmosphere of living in times of extreme crises. The

exhibition is described as the "second phase" of an ongoing exchange, but its energy

feels more like the recurrence of a signal in the noise or the echo of a wave rather than

the logic of linear sequencing and narrative. An inner logic and strange frequency all its

own.

To call the works "responsive” to the theme would be reductive. Rather, they seem to

enact and embody longing- its tensions, delays, rhythms, and ghosts- the physical

feeling of detachment.

Anchoring the room is Tali Halpern’s *anxious-avoidant trap*, a frenetic tapestry pulsing

with the emotional logic of relational parasocial push-and-pull, reads like an exploded

diagram of attachment theory rendered in textile form, a visual staccato haunted by

tense absence outside the fraying selvedge of the image. More directly manipulated by

hand is the sketchbook splayed on the adjacent wall open to a page exhibiting the same

brash transposed compositions as the textiles, smaller but carrying the same

immediacy.

Similarly, Donovan Footes meticulous collages featuring material lists as varied as what

is being depicted. They exist somewhere in the realm of advertising drawings from a

bygone golden era turned psychedelic, exuding an acidic hauntology of splintering

futures, man in suit shuffling through different hats while we glimpse into Mr. And Mrs.

Campbell secret intimacies. American ideals turned into dream-like foreboding

scenarios.

Likewise, adding to the mix is a raucous altered magazine cover, by Donald Fodness

recalling Robert Heineken’s legendary popular culture magazine edits, and maybe

Canadian group General Idea’s FILE magazine. However, here it aligns also with

another history of image redirection with a more mutant bodily aberration spanning

counter culture comics, MAD magazine, Basil Wolverton, and, of course the Chicago

Imagists and Destroy All Monsters, and many a gross out comic zine artist of indie

bookstore variety. It’s always a feat to render a grotesque off-putting rotten faced visage

into one that’s charming and fun that you want to go out drinking with.

Switching to lens-based moving-image, in the opposite corner, a smallish flat screen

gives respite to the myriad material variety of texture and tactility pervasive in the show.

Tobias Fike and Matthew Harris, long-time co-conspirators in performative gesture,

contribute *Confined*, a two-channel video born in pandemic conditions. Its premise-a

Zoomed duet in which the artists snip and tear through stretchy synthetic seeming cloth,

constraining their heads obscuring their faces as a strange unsettling choreography,

blending in the background of a green screen,-manages to be both unnervingly

tragicomic and sweetly tender, like Beckett with strong Wi-Fi. I couldn’t help but match

the labored irregular breathing patterns in my own lungs sighing relief on the video’s

conclusion.

Theresa Anderson’s sculpture *sack/ 13/ site conditioner* traffics in corporeal residues.

Made from stockings, "dragon skin," and pigmented foam, the work leaves behind a

shell of intimacy- a worked over surface encrusted in a ragged latex whose surface

facture as like a waxed over encaustic matte pigment that’s allowed to harden - the

implied negative space that carries a weight of what once was pliable, living. One

senses in her process a kind of archaeological tenderness, a mourning in the form of an

indeterminate mass, a tight black strap defying its want for gravity.

Also defying gravity are silhouettes of striding figures in the work *Soul Shiners Tribute*

by Daisy McGowan bring to mind individual frames of stop motion animation seen all in

their entirety. A unique continuity of figures in the space of Futurism but not unlike the

Nancy Spero pictogram language or the headless lumbering iconography in Marina

Abakanowicz sculptural work. Seen here hanging in a more vivid, vibrant way and

exhibiting a proud forward motion instead. I can imagine this troupe marching lockstop

together forever.

Meanwhile, Miller & Shellabarger-whose practice has long centered on the labor of

mutuality-bring their signature blend of endurance, dry humor, and radical intimacy.

Their collaborative performances, often absurd in scale and tender in tone, parse the

mechanics of togetherness and apartness. In a show concerned with the psychic

architecture of connection, they operate like a compass. The tintypes’ delicately and

darkly reflective, lightly sparkling surfaces shimmer with muted pleasure, refracting into

a razor-sharp, indexical link to a timeless, light-filled aura of harmony.

Sonya Bogdanova’s work asserts a directness of material in the space; her stoneware

speaks with the blunt tactility of clay, an obdurate trunk-like monolith, warmed and

softened by a familiar earth tone surface and slight wonkiness showing evidence of the

hand. The feeling of weight and solidity reveals around the back a hollow enclave into

which a depiction vaguely resembles a sort of Nordic animism, watchful and wary.

David Lee Csicsko print *The Lobster and the Moon* and Summer Ventis’ Mixed media

2d *Water Systems Triptych* hint at vast worlds in their titles with an illustration of

abstract iconography holding closer to the self in the careful delicate renderings of

unknown figures, characters in an animated world frozen in time for inspection.

Ian Fisher, whose commitment to painting clouds, can lend a certain universality to

relatable content for views/viewers. Not quite as monumental as Ken Fandell’s epic

cloud photos, Ian’s paintings hold the wall decisively. However, in the context of this

group exhibition, these clouds fall a little to the side to make room for others.

Successfully, the painting *Atmosphere No 183* 2025 is a quite modest affair, and holds

the wall not as a picture window enveloping a space but as a portal or aperture as one

might lazily look out a plane window or daydream from your office into the middle

distance, not looking at anything in particular. Somehow, a picture that could easily be

slotted in a conversation about air and environment/ecology, this picture in its sincere

application of paint leans more personal intimate connectivity to the subject and

transmission to the individual viewer, than tropes of the sublime and beauty.

Another gentle invocation of nature and environment, albeit in a more abstracted and

mediated manner, is Kathryn Wingard’s Resident_11, a collage combine of three

sections, all sparsely populated with one section lightly grazed seemingly with white

chalk, while another depicts an elemental and mildly disorienting image of some

unknown natural occurrence. The balance of the elements here are nuanced, subtle,

and powerful despite a light touch of material intervention.

Lastly, you find tucked around the side, the namesake artwork of the show *Until we

meet again* by Xi Zhang-a near perfect encapsulation of the emotional register inherent

in the show, disconnection, isolation, in a troubled unstable environment. The modest

painting, holds both its artist’s interiority close at hand in the flowing acrylic overpainted

brushstrokes depicting the lone unidentified vessel, colorful with pattern on its hull. It

floats there stoically in a hazy yet colorful sea, sky, and clouds at just after golden hour,

when a foreboding darkness sets. The ship has two figures gazing into the distance,

barely rendered, to a small blot of the sun at the top left corner, content to take in the

scene for what it is until whatever is we’re headed toward is here. Shadows of the

palette and brushwork of a mid/late Edvard Munch, expert mood bringer, this piece

resonates, in its small way, the hopeless optimism inherent in a show with this premise.

What’s at stake here is not merely the careful staging of an exhibition but the modeling

of an alternative art ecology-one that resists the anesthetic emotional smoothness of the

lumbering institutional circuit. Hyperlink and TSA do not propose utopia. Rather, they

offer rehearsal spaces: for shared authorship, for cross-city alignment, for forms of

connection that feel neither ornamental nor obligatory. Their collaboration is, in a sense,

an everyday poetic practice.

In a time when collectivity is increasingly co-opted as aesthetic or market strategy or

threatened to extinction by administration, *Until We Meet Again* offers something

quieter, and thus more urgent: an exhibition as infrastructure of feeling. A study in the

tensile strength of relationships, both present and imagined. A temporary scaffold

erected not to last forever, but to hold us-just long enough-and then you log back in...

Brandon

Chicago 2025