In Horizon Lines: Reimagining Potentiality, artist and curator Anju Lukose-Scott explores the horizon line as not only a vanishing point but also as a marker of potential: a boundary between what is and what could be.
In the local landscapes of the Midwest and the Great Plains, the horizon stretches wide and uninterrupted, creating a dialogue between land and sky that is both expansive and intimate. The enormity of Lake Michigan introduces a tension between the known and the unknown. In the vastness of outer space, where the ‘horizon’ is bent into planetary curves or vanishes altogether, there is a new kind of potential: one unbound by terrestrial limits. Through visual abstraction, the horizon dissolves as a fixed reference and reconstitutes itself as a conceptual one. What does it mean when there are multiple horizons? What becomes of potential when it is completely ungrounded, detached from any sense of place or scale?
Over the course of Horizon Lines: Reimagining Potentiality, the horizon line becomes a universal subject. Work by artists Zarouhie Abdalian, Frederick Bailie, Hai-Wen Lin, Nazafarin Lotfi, magicfeifei, and Anika Steppe and from the Joel Snyder Materials Collection challenges us to rethink the horizon line: how can we arrive at a place dependent on distance? Can we collapse the horizon line, fold it, touch it, move through it? For Lukose-Scott, the horizon line emerges as a tool for rethinking boundaries and borders, time and space, inviting us to arrive at the convergence of the present and the future.
Curator
Anju Lukose-Scott, AB’26, AM’26
Artists
Zarouhie Abdalian (b. 1982) lives and works in New Orleans. She has exhibited at venues including Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the 2017 Whitney Biennial, MASS MoCA, and the 12th Istanbul Biennial. Solo exhibitions include Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London; Altman Siegel, San Francisco; Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans; and LAXART, Los Angeles. Abdalian received a 2017–2018 Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant and a 2020 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. Her work is held in collections at the Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. She has been featured in publications including Artforum, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Art in America. Abdalian teaches at her high school alma mater, the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts.
Frederick Bailie (b. 1999) is an architecture graduate student from Cleveland, Ohio, at the University of Illinois Chicago. His work focuses on political economy.
Hai-Wen Lin (b. 1994) is an artist living somewhere beneath the sky. Their work explores constructions of the body and the attunement of oneself to the environment. Lin is an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and received a M.Des in Fashion, Body and Garment from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They received the Museum of Art and Design's 2025 Burke Prize, are a 2025 Luminarts Visual Arts Fellow. Lin has exhibited work at the Chinese American Museum of Chicago, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, and the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft.
Nazafarin Lotfi (b. 1984) is a Chicago-based multidisciplinary artist working in drawing, painting, sculpture, and community organizing. Her practice embraces subtle forms, absence, and ambiguous materiality to trouble the status quo and point to alternative realities. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA from the University of Tehran. Her work has been exhibited at venues including Artpace, Phoenix Art Museum, Sun Valley Museum of Art, and Regards Chicago. Lotfi is the 2023 recipient of the Eliza Moore Fellowship for Artistic Excellence and has received support from the Andy Warhol Foundation, Arizona Commission on the Arts, and City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs. She is the founder of Hamrah Arts Club, a creative mentorship program for refugee-status youth.
Anju Lukose-Scott (b. 2004) is a curator and artist in Chicago. Interested in the relationship between place and object through reproductive media such as photography, they aim to create and transform artifacts and memory through artmaking grounded in research. Lukose-Scott’s recent work focuses on bodies of water as temporally and historically ambiguous Black spaces. They will receive an MA and BA in art history and curatorial studies from the University of Chicago in 2026.
magicfeifei (b. 1998) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Chicago. Her practice spans between photography, sculpture and performance. Her practice weaponizes cuteness through magic to challenge and subvert conventional social norms. Employing humor, irony, and deliberate embarrassment, she creates seductive yet discomforting narratives that twist the ordinary into the uncanny, confronting indifference and revealing uncomfortable truths. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from the University of Chicago is currently a teaching fellow in UChicago’s Department of Visual Arts.
Anika Steppe (b. 1991) lives and works in Chicago. Through photography-based work, Steppe uses repetition, layering, and opacity to isolate the relationships between the viewer, the image, and the environment. She holds a BS in Photography from Ithaca College and an MFA in Studio Art from the University of Texas at Austin. Solo exhibitions include stop-gap projects in Columbia, Missouri and Courtyard Gallery in Austin, Texas, among others. She has also exhibited at Vox Populi, Mana Contemporary, and Purple Window Gallery. Steppe was an artist-in-residence at Interlochen Center for the Arts, Casa Malo, Monson Arts, and Vermont Studio Center. She also works collaboratively and exhibits with Marta Lee under the moniker Frances Brady.
Support
CWAC Exhibitions is organized by the Department of Art History’s Visual Resources Center. Additional support provided by the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities, the Center for the Art of East Asia, and the Department of Visual Arts. Installation support, preparation, and fabrication provided by the curator, Anika Steppe, Noël Da, Libby Konjoyan, and Evan Da Yu Ling with special thanks to Process/Process.
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Accessibility
CWAC Exhibitions is committed to accessibility for all our exhibitions. However, the second floor of the Cochrane-Woods Art Center is accessible only by stairs. To request an accommodation or alternative format, please email visualresources@uchicago.edu.