On View: July 31st, 2026 - September 20th, 2026
Artists: Victoria Fuller, Rashel Gordin, Azadeh Khastoo, Lauren Iacoponi, and Yvette Kaiser Smith
Knots brings together artists who use tying, looping, weaving, binding, and repetition as both material process and metaphor. Across sculpture, fiber, found objects, mathematical systems, bodily forms, and participatory performance, the exhibition explores the knot as a structure of connection and tension—something that holds, protects, restricts, remembers, and transforms.
Long used as tools of survival, craft, and labor, knots carry rich symbolic meanings. They can signify the power of unity while also suggesting pressure, obligation, and entanglement. Requiring both control and release, knots embody tension, resiliency, and the potential to unravel. For some artists, knots emerge through systems of geometry and organic forms; for others, they speak to the joy of family, heritage and community, the challenge of migration and the anxiety that simmers beneath it all. Together, the works reveal how individual strands become larger networks of relationships, histories, and shared experience.
By foregrounding the knot as both form and metaphor, the exhibition invites viewers to consider the forces that bind us, the structures that sustain us, and what must be loosened, repaired, or reimagined.
Knot United
Knot United is an interactive installation about connection, participation, and community.
Using rope and knots as a shared language, the artists invite us to contribute to an evolving tapestry by tying a knot of our own. Each knot represents an individual action, but together they form a larger network shaped by everyone who takes part.
As the work grows, it becomes a visible map of collective presence, illustrating how individual lives and experiences intersect.
Knot United challenges us to consider our place within a larger community and reminds us that even small gestures can contribute to something larger than ourselves.
Rashel Gordin
Rashel Gordin is a Chicago-based artist working across photography, bookmaking, performance, collaboration, and public-facing participatory projects. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has been involved in artist-led initiatives throughout the city, including work connected to Real Art Production Co.
Her practice often uses humor, the body, and social observation to explore themes of gender, intimacy, power, and public perception. Her book project Dick-tation, a collection of anatomical drawings focused on the male form, was featured in the Chicago Reader in June 2024.
In 2025, Gordin began a collaboration with artist Azadeh Khastoo on Knot United, a participatory performance project exploring connection, tension, and belonging through the shared act of knot-making. The work has been presented at Agitator Gallery and Epiphany Center for the Arts in Chicago. Her work has also been included in group exhibitions such as What Immigrants Bring at Agitator Co-op Gallery.
Through both individual and collaborative projects, Gordin continues to create work that invites participation, reflection, and dialogue around how people connect in shared spaces and within society.
AzI Khastoo
Azadeh (Azi) Khastoo is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist, photographer, and socially engaged practitioner. Born in Iran and immigrating to the United States at age 19, her work is shaped by experiences of migration, cultural translation, and belonging, with Iranian cultural references, collective memory, and relational traditions woven throughout her practice.
Khastoo holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her artistic practice began in photography with a focus on social issues such as immigration, education, and identity, and has since expanded into performance, installation, and participatory projects rooted in dialogue and human connection, examining relationships between self and self, self and others, and self and place/objects through the body, gesture, and shared action.
Her performance work includes Home!!, and she is a co-creator of Knot United, a collaborative performance project with artist Rashel Gordin that engages audiences through rope, movement, and collective action. Khastoo is also a co-founder of 15ē (The 15th Element), an ongoing artist gathering and salon dedicated to collective witnessing and exchange, and the founder of Circle of Trust, a women-centered space for dialogue and mutual support. In parallel with her art practice, she produces handcrafted knitted works under Azi Originals and leads Azadeh Coaching, extending her interest in care, labor, and material intimacy into functional forms and practices that shape both objects and inner landscapes.
Collaboration Artist’s Bio
Azi and Rashel have been collaborating for over two decades on projects mirroring global issues. Their journey began at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where their mutual passion for creative expression and social justice took shape. Together, they have explored themes such as the feminine and its evolving role in society, the complexities of immigration and emigration, fundamental human rights, and the existential threats facing humanity. Drawing from their backgrounds in art, design, and activism, Azi and Rashel transcend traditional boundaries, blending art, design, and advocacy to ignite dialogue and inspire meaningful change.
Yvette Kaiser Smith
A longtime resident of Chicago, Yvette was born in Soviet-occupied Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1958. She holds a 1990 BFA from Southern Methodist University focused in sculpture and photography, along with a fellowship to Yale School of Art Summer Program, which was anchored in painting; and a 1994 MFA in sculpture from the University of Chicago. Her extensive exhibitions list includes regional museums, art centers, commercial, alternative, and university galleries throughout the United States. Recent local exhibitions include solos at Harper College, Evanston Art Center, one River School of Art + Design, Ignition Projects, and St. Xavier University; and two-person exhibitions at Alma Gallery, OS Projects, and Fermilab. Exhibitions abroad include U.S. Embassies in Moscow, Ankara, and Abuja; the National Art Museum of China in Beijing; alternative galleries in London, Rome, Madrid, Berlin, Jena Germany, Veliko Tarnovo Bulgaria, and Pouch Cove Newfoundland; art fairs in Berlin, Luxembourg, and Milan; also Bridges Mathematical Art Exhibitions in Linz and Stockholm. Kaiser Smith created site-specific commissions for Facebook Chicago, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Rosewood Hotel Abu Dhabi, and PricewaterhouseCoopers in NYC, among other clients. Her awards include The Working Artist Grant; Illinois Arts Council’s Artist’s Fellowship Award and Governor’s International Arts Exchange Grant; three CAAP Grants and one IAP Grant through City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs; and several awards of distinction for group exhibitions over the years. She has been awarded residencies by Ragdale Foundation, Illinois; ARV.International, Vishovgrad, Bulgaria; Pouch Cove Foundation, Newfoundland; Brashnar Creative Project, Skopje, Republic of North Macedonia; PADA Studios, just outside of Lisbon, Portugal; and Cultural Hub Croatia PROSTOR in Split.
Victoria Fuller
Chicago artist Victoria Fuller has an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her inflatable sculpture, “Bring Back the Extinct Northern White Rhino,” was featured in an exhibition about animal extinction at The Buffalo Museum of Science, and had a solo exhibition of her work at the Susquehanna Art Museum in Harrisburg, PA, in 2022-2023. Several of her artworks are in the collection of Artemezia Foundation Museum in Bisbee, Arizona. In 2020 She was awarded the Dean Alan Olson Purchase Award at the Rockford Art Museum, and awarded Best of Show at the 2021 Evanston and Vicinity Biennial, Evanston, IL. In 2019 she was awarded the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) Independent Artist Project Grant and an Illinois Arts Council CAAP Grant, in 2009. She also received fellowship awards from Illinois Arts Council and from the Colorado Council on the Arts and Humanities. She completed artist residencies at both Ragdale Foundation and Sculpture Space. Her large-scale public sculpture “Shoe of Shoes” is in the collection of Caleres Shoes in St. Louis. Her sculpture, Global Garden Shovel, was commissioned by Sound Transit in Seattle. Other commissions were by Comed in Chicago, and Arts in Transit in St, Louis, and Live! by Loews Hotel, Arlington, Texas, and Delta Airlines Star Lounge. Her large-scale public sculpture, titled “Canoe Fan,” was purchased by the city of Ann Arbor and installed in Gallop Park. She has been featured in Sculpture Magazine, Bad at Sports, Hyperallergic, Scientific American Blog, Seattle Times, Chicago Tribune, and Western Art and Architecture Magazine.
Victoria Fuller's series of garden hose knot sculptures, called "What Knots," gets its inspiration from mathematical, molecular, DNA knots, sailor and Celtic knots. She uses man-made appropriated objects, in this case garden and air hoses, to create knot configurations, some of which occur in the organic, mathematical, and scientific world. Fuller’s knot sculptures are influenced by knot theory, a branch of mathematics that examines how knots behave and interconnect. In a sense she is using the linearity of garden hoses and air hoses to create three dimensional drawings. The bright color of garden/air hoses that she uses attests to their artificial fabrication and hardware store origins and unwittingly reveals a facet of our consumer culture. She liberates these objects from their everyday functions by combining them in unexpected configurations where they become a design element in her artworks, losing their original purpose.
Lauren Iacoponi
Lauren Iacoponi (Ike) is an artist, curator, and arts administrator living and working in Chicago, IL. Iacoponi is the Director and Founder of Purple Window Gallery and the Director and Co-founder of Unpacked Mobile Gallery. She is the Assistant Curator at the Ukrainian Instituteof Modern Art and previously served as the Director of Exhibitions at Columbia College Chicago.
Iacoponi received her MFA from Northern Illinois University with a Certificate in Art History and her BFA from Columbia College with a Minor in Art History. Iacoponi has exhibited at Hokin Gallery (Chicago), C-33 Gallery (Chicago), Studio Oh! (Chicago), Elephant Room Gallery (Chicago), Ground Level Platform (Chicago), Beverly Arts Center (Chicago), Zhou B Art Center (Chicago), ARC Gallery (Chicago), Gallery 214 (DeKalb), Annette and Jerry Johns Gallery (DeKalb), Terrain Exhibitions (DeKalb), Gallery UNO (Berlin) and Becco Gallery (Kansas City). She has exhibited solo and two-person exhibitions at the University Club of Chicago and Purple Window Gallery (Chicago). She has curated exhibitions at Rubberneck Gallery (Chicago), MdW Fair 2022 at Mana Contemporary Chicago, BOCCARA Art (Miami), Heaven Gallery (Chicago), Mies van der Rohe's McCormick House at Elmhurst Art Museum, and STNDRD Exhibitions (Granite City, IL). Upcoming exhibitions include ‘Home Grown Vol. III’ at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art (Curator, July 2026), and Heaven Gallery Chicago (Exhibiting Artist, July 2026).
Her curatorial mission includes gallery accessibility, the importance of art as experience, and strengthening the relationship between institutions, society, and artists. She produces inclusive, intersectional exhibitions and public programs that uplift the diverse communities of Chicago and the greater Midwest.
Iacoponi has an upcoming visual art residency at Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, IL (September 2026). She received an Individual Artists Program Grant from the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (2025), in support of the satellite exhibition ‘Home Grown Vol. III’ inside of Unpacked Mobile Gallery touring public parks and community gardens in July, 2026. Naomi Elson and Iacoponi partnered with the Lubeznik Center for the Arts (LCA) in 2025 and were awarded project grants from Michigan City Community Enrichment Corporation (MCCEC) and Cleveland-Cliffs Foundation to support Unpacked Mobile Gallery’s exhibition and tour, ‘Color in Transit.’ Unpacked is partnering with LCA in fall 2026 with additional support from MCCEC.
Azadeh Khastoo: @azikh, @knot_united_project
Rashel Gordin: @sheldin, @knot_united_project
Yvette Kaiser Smith: @yvettekaisersmith
Victoria Fuller: @victoriefullerstudio
Lauren Iacoponi: @lauren.ike
