Gallery 901
KARSYN PRESCOTT
JULY 5 - 30, 2025
“Unstraightened: Queer Growth in Crooked Places”
Opening Reception - July 5, 2025 | 5 pm - 8 pm
"Karsyn Prescott (he/they) is a transdisciplinary artist and emerging art therapist whose work explores the intersections of queerness, disability, and trauma. Rooted in personal narratives—scars, surgeries, and survival—Karsyn uses humor, irreverence, and found materials to center what is often unseen: dysphoria, embodiment, and emotional complexity. He is currently pursuing an MA in Counseling: Art Therapy at Adler University, where this exhibition also serves as his Social Justice Practicum project.
Unstraightened is a body of work that reclaims the messy, tangled process of healing. Through sculpture, painting, and mixed media, it speaks to the lived realities of being trans and disabled—on both micro (individual) and macro (systemic) levels. Drawing from his own experience navigating care systems in Miami, Florida and now Evanston, Illinois, Karsyn contrasts resource accessibility, community belonging, and the politics of visibility in different regions. This show is both personal and political: a space where scars are emphasized, not erased, and where survival becomes its own form of resistance."
HOPE WASHINUSHI
August 2 - 31, 2025
Dark Night of the Soul
Opening Reception - August 2, 2025 | 5pm - 7pm
Dark night of the soul is a period of profound emotional and spiritual crisis.....death, loneliness, isolation, emptiness, worthlessness & despair where it disconnects and engulfs the soul. You embrace and engage with the darkness, feeling its comfort as it begins to connect and deeply root into your being. Tethered and bound, it shreds everything you love as the darkness takes it away, blinding everything from the light.
The darkness doesn’t just come upon you, but infiltrates you, offering its cold comfort. Not as a visitor, but as something that becomes part of you. That feeling of being bound to it, like the light is a distant memory you’re not even sure you want anymore… because the pain has become familiar, almost sacred in its own way.
It’s an intimacy of suffering—where the soul is undergoing a quiet, invisible death, and yet, sometimes that total obliteration is the beginning of something unnameable, something more true than anything that came before - Truth, realization & Love.
Artist Statement – Hope Washinushi
Hope Washinushi is a graduate of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied foundry and fabric printing. She is the owner of Yasuko Design, creating murals, mosaics, and fabricated art for clients across the Chicagoland area. She also serves as the Creative Director for Open Studio Project, where art becomes is a tool for healing and connection.
This is my first solo exhibition — a deeply personal offering shaped by grief, resilience, and love. It holds the weight of caring for aging parents through their final days, the quiet ache of watching children navigate mental health struggles, and the shadow cast by Metastatic Breast Cancer.
For a long time, I tucked these emotions into compartments, hidden and unspoken. But something within has stirred — a whisper urging me to open those sealed spaces. Through this work, I begin to sift through the darkness, to honor it, and to let in the light.
This is not just art. This is release. This is remembrance. This is the beginning of healing.