Join us in the 100 West studios showcasing two-months of residency work by painter Erick Hernandez from Brooklyn, New York, and photographer/sculptor Kaja Joo from Vienna, Austria. At 4pm in the first-floor woodshop we feature nonfiction writer Jackson McGrath from Chicago, Illinois. Reception follows. Across the street in Anteroom is an installation of nineteenth-century Odd Fellow paraphernalia. Our Bookstore for publications by residents and their recommendations is open 10am - 4pm.
12:00 - 4:00 PM
100 WEST - 100 W. 3rd Ave. second & third floors
ERICK HERNANDEZ – Painting - Brooklyn, New York
KAJA JOO - Alternative Photography, Installation, Sculpture - Vienna, Austria
ANTEROOM - 411 N. Beaton St.
‘Belonging’ - 19th-century Odd Fellow paraphernalia
BOOKSTORE - 201 N. Commerce St.
books by residents and their recommendations
4:00 - 4:30 PM
100 WEST - first floor presentation, reading
JACKSON MCGRATH – Writing - Chicago, Illinois
reception follows across the street behind Anteroom
KAJA JOO
Alternative Photography, Installation, Sculpture - Vienna, Austria - 2nd floor studio
KAJA JOO - Alternative Photography, Installation, Sculpture - Vienna, Austria
Kaja Clara Joo's practice questions the nature and psychology of our surrounding matter and the myths embedded within them. In an age saturated with images and objects, narration has become not just a supplement to the visual, but its most essential material. There are no “neutral” elements. Every material carries cultural weight, political history & social resonance. The Austrian- Korean artist manipulates them to reveal fragility beneath solidity, or the tender unknown beneath the known.
Over the past year, she has been building a personal archive of geological scan data acquired from borehole companies in Germany, Austria, Slovakia, South Korea, etc.. These visual materials, generated through technologies such as infrared imaging and ground-penetrating radar, offer abstract glimpses into the earth’s depths.
At Corsicana, she would like to work with on-site materials and historic photographical printing techniques, which require only sunlight for exposure, to create new sculptural images. While still exploring how best to translate these scans into form, Corsicana’s history, shaped by oil and industrial memory, offers fertile conceptual ground. Texas, with its borehole industries and layered geology, could open new dialogues between surface and depth, myth and matter.
Kaja Clara Joo graduated with honors in 2024 from the University of Applied Arts Vienna where she studied Fine Arts Photography. Her expansive, transdisciplinary works explore both physical and narrative boundaries. Cultural, social, and political behavioral patterns, as well as human interventions in the resources and the surrounding environment are central concerns in Joo´s artistic practice. Often site- and space-specific, she creates meticulously staged sculptures that span the artist's intended narrative across the space.
Her solo presentations have taken place at Sotheby's Art Quarterly Austria, MQ Artbox, Bildraum 07, Periscope Salzburg, Gallery Monitor in Czech Republic, SPARK Art Fair; SWAB Art Fair Barcelona, etc.. She has been awarded grants and residencies, amongst them: START- scholarship for emerging artists by the Austrian Ministry of Culture (2024), the Lee Ungno Museum Residency in Hongseong (2024), the MMCA Residency by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul (2025), etc.. She will open her Solo- Show “The Last Citadelle” at the Korean Cultural Forum in Austria and the duo- show “The Stain of Place” at the Kunsthalle Kosice, both in 2026.
ERICK HERNANDEZ
Painting - Brooklyn, New York - 3rd floor studio
Taking root in highly temporal narrative settings like the death of a loved one, the length of a subway commute, the confines of a waiting room, or the impact of a car crash, Erick Alejandro Hernandez’s (he/him) practice explores how traditional techniques like oil painting and drawing can shift material forms in order to hold complex individual and collective histories.
Guided by questions around individual and collective loss and mourning, Hernandez works rhythmically with varying modes of paint application, collage, and approaches to scale that range from small to monumental. Often, his works are formed slowly and gradually by gluing fragments of painted canvas together, allowing a state of constant renewal where edges are never fixed.
He works iteratively and associatively to develop form and content, taking cues from psychoanalysis, history, literature, and his own experiences. The resulting works are investigative allegories exploring individual and shared experiences like grief, assimilation, and exile.
Erick Alejandro Hernández is an artist from Matanzas, Cuba, based in Brooklyn, NY. He received his BFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design and his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University. Hernández has been a fellow at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Yaddo, Macdowell, Mass MoCA, The Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, and The Bronx Museum, among others. Hernandez has had recent solo exhibitions with DIMIN, Murmurs, in addition to recent group shows at Perrotin, The Mistake Room, Wilding Cran, and Island gallery.
JACKSON MCGRATH
Nonfiction - Chicago, Illinois - writing studio
Jackson McGrath is a writer of experimental nonfiction interested in aesthetic philosophy and the natural sciences. His work explores how culture constructs images of the world and how these images shape material realities. While at Corsicana, McGrath is researching the thirty-some historical communities named “New Hope” in Texas, exploring questions of mediation, authorship, and abstraction.
Jackson McGrath is a writer and artist in Chicago, Illinois. He received his BFA from the Cooper Union and holds an MA in English and an MFA in Creative Writing from Northwestern University.
BOOKSTORE
All books by our artists & writers 20%-off through the holidays.
Our Bookstore brings the books and printed matter by our residents back to here - two blocks from 100W, where germination, writing and final edit fed these publications across the last twelve years of residencies. This collection by our alumni is a wonderfully eclectic spread of poetry, play, essay, novel, nonfiction, memoir, art, translations, with recommended titles, their sources and inspirations, contemporary hits, classics, children’s, a Texas section, and local authors. It’s where literature you first heard read aloud at Open Studios becomes available. All profits support our nonprofit mission.
Open Thursdays, Fridays & Saturdays 10a - 4p | 201 N. Commerce St.
