Follow Your Arts
"Chimera: Indeterminaé"
by ian cooper (kaelin)
Chimera: Indeterminae is a multimedia exhibition that explores the ways queer and trans individuals cultivate power, resilience, and survival through transformation. Drawing on the mythological figure of the chimera—a creature composed of disparate parts into a singular, formidable body—the exhibition positions hybridity not as fragmentation, but as a spiritual and generative force.
This body of work reframes the chimera as a metaphor for queer and trans embodiment: identities that are often constructed through assemblage, adaptation, and self-determination in response to social, cultural, and political pressures. Rather than conforming to fixed or legible forms, the works in this exhibition embrace indeterminacy as a site of strength. The term Indeterminae suggests both the refusal of categorization and the fluidity of becoming—an existence that resists containment and instead thrives through constant reconfiguration. Like the chimera, these identities gather strength through multiplicity, supposed contradiction(s), and reinvention. Survival, in this context, becomes an act of creative synthesis.
The exhibition will feature 10–15 works spanning mixed media sculpture, painting, and video. These pieces will incorporate collage, digitally embedded textures, and visual languages that evoke hybridity—layered surfaces, fused forms, and bodily distortions that blur boundaries between human, animal, and mythic entities. Furthermore, the artworks will explore transformation and flamboyance as both a strategy of survival and aesthetics.
Chimera: Indeterminae ultimately constructs a speculative, mythic space in which queer and trans bodies are not only preserved but exalted. Through these works, transformation is rendered sacred, and hybridity becomes a mode of resistance—an assertion that power lies not in coherence, but in the ability to exist across, between, and beyond imposed boundaries.
Gallery Hours:
Monday 9am – 5pm | Tuesday – Friday 9am- 1pm
ian cooper (kaelin)
Ian Cooper, (known as KAELIN), was born in 1996 in Chattanooga, TN. They received their BFA in Studio Art-Printmaking from Middle Tennessee State University (2018), and their MFA in Studio Art-Printmaking from Illinois State University (2024). They have worked as an elementary school art teacher and graphic designer in Nashville, TN. They lead a collaborative team of artists for their project Occentatia, focused in creating accountable/ safe(r) spaces through fantasy and queer world-building. Ian has been published in national and international journals such as: the Fredericksburg Literary Review Magazine, the Santa Ana Review, and the Mid America Print Council Journal. Their work is part of the permanent collection at University Galleries of Illinois State University in Normal, IL. Outside of galleries and publications, Ian, (KAELIN), works as a drag performer in Peoria, IL, other surrounding central Illinois cities, and Chicago, IL.
Artist Statement:
My work situates queer and trans bodies within an ethereal and mythic framework. Drawing from fantasy and intentional world-building, I construct paradisiac spaces and figures in which queer and trans embodiments are presented as chimeric forms. These hybrid figures resist singular or fixed definitions of identity, instead emphasizing transformation as a sacred and generative condition.
Fantasy functions in my practice not as escapism, but as a critical and purposeful methodology. Through the elevation of gender-expansive bodies, my work challenges dominant cultural narratives that position queer and trans identities as atypical. By operating within imagined spaces, I invite viewers to engage with concepts of the sublime, power, and divinity of self as instilled constructs grounded in lived experience and personal agency.
