March 28 – August 19, 2020

Kaplan Gallery

Mia Eva Rollow’s nomadic, globally-engaged art practice connects individuals and communities in the creation of collaborative poetic actions that address resistance, community, and transformation.

While living in Mexico for over a decade, working and learning from the art of the Zapatistas, Mia became familiar with Mayan Shamanism and Cosmology, and connected her life-long supernatural experiences to this broader, and traditional, context.  She began creating deeply experimental and surreal artworks alongside communities and individuals as an elaborate strategy to create transformation through psychomagic acts, a phrase coined by Alejandro Jodoroski in his book Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy.  Psychomagic is “a healing path using the power of dreams, theater, poetry, and shamanism, and which shows how psychological realizations can cause true transformation when manifested by concrete poetic acts.”

From March to May 2020, VisArts will present an exhibition of Rollow’s multi-media installations, sculpture, drawings, and performances from her community-based work in Mexico, India, and Palestine.

Artist Bio:

Mia Eve Rollow, native to Chicago, is a multidisciplinary artist.  After receiving her Master of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009, she moved to Chiapas Mexico where she, alongside Caleb Duarte, Founded EDELO, a Spanish acronym for (Where the United Nations Used To Be). EDELO was a house of art in movement and an international artist residency of diverse practices in San Cristobal De Las Casas, Chiapas, México. The project challenged the traditional artist residency and art spaces in that it placed residents alongside rural autonomous communities that have been using performance, theater, poetry, and a rich visual culture to demand drastic social, political, and economic change. The space invited collaborators to live and create within a period of time. Residents were from PHDs to jugglers, contemporary artist, activist, educators, rural farmers, and autonomous rebel community members. Presently EDELO Migrante, now a conceptual space, forms collectives of artistic collaboration with diverse communities; art that is for and from the people.

Please see her work at:   Miaeverollow.org & www.edelo.org