Present Relief Paintings in Memory in Transformation in Chicago

Amplitudes, 40x80 inches, Acrylic on Canvas, Zelene Jiang Schlosberg, 2026

Zelene Jiang Schlosberg will present Amplitudes (2026) and Entwined, Ascending… #1 (2025) in Memory in Transformation — Bodies and Posthuman Imaginaries, opening September 18, 2026, at RHAA in Chicago. On view through October 11, the exhibition explores relationships among the body, memory, technology, and emerging posthuman experience. An opening reception will take place on Friday, September 18, from 6 to 9 p.m.

Jiang Schlosberg also serves as a co-curator of the exhibition, which brings together 18 artists working across painting, video, digital art, installation, and performance. Her own contributions examine how bodies and their surroundings reshape one another as technology changes human perception and experience.

Through cutting, painting, stacking, and positioning canvases, Jiang Schlosberg has developed a form of “relief painting” situated between painting and sculpture. The wall, light, and physical space surrounding each work enter the pictorial field, joining color and form to construct a folded experience of time and space. Openings and layered surfaces make the work’s relationship to its environment an active part of the composition.

“I imagine the body as a sensing architecture—an unstable system through which signals, memories, technologies, and environments continually pass, altering one another,” Jiang Schlosberg writes in her artist statement.

Her antennaed figures embody the convergence of human and machine and the increasingly blurred boundary between them. Their antennae function as extended organs of perception: like receivers, they connect the body to the external world, allowing it to reorient itself within complex structures of space and time. Within abstract environments, these figures seem both to move and to linger, inhabiting the past while pointing toward the future. Time bends and intersects around them, suggesting trajectories of movement as well as traces left by memory.

The two paintings approach the relationship between body and architecture from different directions.

Entwined, Ascending...#1, 24x20x1.5 inches, Acrylic on Canvas, Zelene Jiang Schlosberg, 2025

In Entwined, Ascending… #1, bodies are dispersed throughout a modular architecture, as though perception has overflowed the body and diffused into the surrounding environment.

In Amplitudes, architecture enters the body. Enlarged limbs, hands, chairs, cables, and miniature figures extend across four panels, while cut openings allow the actual wall and ambient light to enter the work. Measuring 40 × 80 inches, the acrylic painting makes the boundaries among body, machine, and external space increasingly uncertain.

Together, these works bring Schlosberg’s exploration of material and spatial relationships into the exhibition’s broader inquiry into human transformation. They ask how human beings have already changed in a world profoundly altered by technology, and what further transformations may lie ahead. As memory and the future intertwine within folded time and space, the paintings consider the new modes of perception and survival emerging amid abundant information and accelerating rhythms of life.

Exhibition: Memory in Transformation — Bodies and Posthuman Imaginaries

Dates: September 18–October 11, 2026

Opening reception: Friday, September 18, 2026, 6–9 p.m.

Venue: RHAA

Address: 3217 S. Morgan St., Chicago, IL 60608