Gallery Photos by Ricardo Adame

Marlee Chlystek
Kingdoms

Kingdoms showcases a selection of paintings and drawings from Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist and dancer, Marlee Chlystek. Kingdoms focuses on fleeting feelings, rumination on mortality, joy, and fear. Chlystek uses constant change, reflection, and music to inspire her works creating an otherworldly, abstract view on life.

Chlystek describes her process starting with visualizing feelings in time,
thinking of their motions and capturing that into her pieces. The work is often flipped, twisted, and rotated during its development, recording the change and shift in the work with the fleeting emotions they are inspired by. Chlystek often paints en plein air, binding the temporary certainty of nature to her work. Kingdoms reconsiders ideas of permanence both metaphorically and practically as Chlystek states she, “start(s) every idea with a pen and paper to inspire myself to make a permanent line mean something completely different by the end of the process.”

Chlystek claims the idea of what she calls kingdoms has always resonated with her. To her, kingdoms are what we live in. They are brief and transient. They encompass everything and can be anything. Everyone experiences their own kingdom and they overlap with others. They are constantly shifting and can be seen in many different ways from different angles. Chlystek’s body of work is an expansive, never-ending, ever-shifting delineation of the kingdoms she experiences. Her paintings are fruitful and larger than life granting the power to see into a vast stretch of connection.

These works can also be seen as mirrors. They are meant to show harmony and reflection, not perfectly but as a caricature. They contain the essence of what is felt, quirks and shapes. Kingdoms have no limits and put no frames on the art itself, advocating for works' potential to grow and change with any context. Kingdoms is a small selection of Chlystek’s visual compositions and they are not only to hang on the walls, but to invite all forms of creativity along with them. Music, dance, and language all walk closely with these works. The abstraction Chlystek constructs are building blocks to add on to and they play with other pieces. These visuals are fragments set in time but are free and capable of changing, being attached to and detached from other forms of expression.

Zoey Dalbert,
Visual Arts Curator

Marlee Chlystek is an experienced illustrator, designer, visual poet, explorer, avid music curator, dancer, pupil, and a loving friend. Her movement is from the heart. Her visions are representations of the kingdom. Marlee’s artistic process suggests a reflection of our mortality ~ the art being constructed of gathered materials, fleeting feelings, and connecting the joys and the fears of living in the kingdom.

https://marleegracechlystek.cargo.site/paint @marleechlystek