KAJA CLARA JOO - Alternative Photography, Installation, Sculpture - Vienna, Austria
ERICK ALEJANDRO HERNÁNDEZ – Painting - Brooklyn, New York
JACKSON MCGRATH – Writing - Chicago, Illinois
KAJA CLARA JOO – Vienna, Austria – 2nd Floor Studio
Kaja created a site-specific, immersive installation that transforms the studio into a tense, dreamlike landscape featuring suspended cyanotype photograms made from on-site materials. Drawing on Corsicana’s layered geology, oil history, and rhythms of perpetual motion—trains passing, weather shifting—the work allows viewers to assemble a narrative from fragments of matter, movement, and memory that speak to geological and industrial afterlives.
Kaja Clara Joo's practice questions the nature and psychology of the matter that surrounds us and the myths embedded within it. Often site- and space-specific, her expansive, transdisciplinary, staged works probe physical and narrative boundaries. Austrian-Korean, Kaja studied Fine Arts Photography at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. She has been awarded grants and residencies including from the Austrian Ministry of Culture (2024), the Lee Ungno Museum in Hongseong (2024), and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul (2025). She has been building a personal archive of geological scan data acquired from borehole companies in Germany, Austria, Slovakia, South Korea, and elsewhere, exploring abstract glimpses into the earth’s depths.
ERICK ALEJANDRO HERNÁNDEZ – Brooklyn, New York – 3rd Floor Studio
Erick developed a series of paintings conceived in direct response to the site, constructing compositions that extend and contract across the room. He made several life-size rubbings of the studio windows, using their imprint to define the space for some of the works. Continuing an ongoing investigation into symbolic topographies—an underground, middle ground, and sense of an “above”—the paintings register a sustained tension between presence and erasure, reflecting the convergence of layered histories and the charged calm of a place shaped by what once passed through it.
Erick Alejandro Hernández is a painter whose practice examines how traditional techniques—painting, drawing, and collage—can be reconfigured to hold complex individual and collective histories. Working rhythmically across varying scales and modes of application, he builds work through brushing, staining, sealing, and gluing large surfaces. Often referencing psychoanalysis, literature, history, and personal experiences, the figures that populate his paintings allegorically explore forms of grief, memory, exile, and mourning. Born in Matanzas, Cuba he received his BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University. He has been a fellow at Skowhegan, Yaddo, MacDowell, MASS MoCA, the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, and The Bronx Museum, among others. erickalejandrohernandez.com
JACKSON MCGRATH – Chicago, Illinois – Writing Studio
Jackson worked in residence on two manuscripts. One, a collection of short essays, draws on archival and field research into the numerous historical communities in Texas named “New Hope,” exploring questions of mediation, authorship, and abstraction in American place-naming. The second manuscript is a meticulous triptych of longer essays on obsolete modes of representation for imaging the world—miniature ship models, medieval itinerary maps, and natural history dioramas—woven together through image and text to form formally experimental essay-poems.
Jackson McGrath is a writer of experimental nonfiction interested in aesthetic philosophy and the natural sciences. His work, engaging with text as an object rich with formal possibility, explores how culture constructs images of the world and how these images shape material realities. Jackson received his BFA from the Cooper Union and holds both an MA in English and an MFA in Creative Writing from Northwestern University. jacksonmcgrath.com
Open Studios, February 21, 2026
Photography by Trey Burns, Documentarian, with support from the Corsicana Visitors’ Bureau.