Field and Stream of Consciousness

Press Release

Opening Thursday, October 16, 6-8pm

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery is pleased to present Field and Stream of Consciousness, a project space exhibition by Chicago-based artist Ann Toebbe, her first with the gallery. 

Across seven works, Toebbe charts the passage of time through depictions of her home and a rural Indiana farm acquired by her ancestors in 1874. Oil and gouache paintings show an uninhabited house surrounded by working farmland, scenery reconstructed from extensive childhood memories and visits to the vacant building as an adult. Omitting documentary details one might expect in a photograph, Toebbe articulates the landscape as if seen in a dream, instead featuring subtle references to cycles of crop cultivation to situate the images within a lexicon of personal history. Mining parallel themes of isolation and belonging, Toebbe ruminates, through her own autobiographical explorations, on how our relationships with locations shift and grow more complicated over time.

Incorporating collage elements for which the artist is well known, the exhibition’s interior scenes transport the viewer to her longtime Chicago home. Toebbe, examining the diaristic aspects of domestic spaces, presents accumulations of wear and tear as evidence of lives lived and choices made, mirroring her own progression through life. Beneath a magnifying glass, seemingly mundane facets of day-to-day living speak not only to anxieties in the face of aging, but also the joy and comfort of knowing oneself. Viewers encounter a worn out mattress with dual indentations and a fern atop a heater which, in spite of drying out each winter, revives and persists. Such details hint at the ways our decisions, some haphazard and others deliberate, play out over the longer term, pushing us to adapt and evolve or, embracing established rhythms, persist contentedly.

Ann Toebbe (b. Cincinnati, OH) lives and works in Chicago, IL. She received her BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1997 and earned her MFA from Yale University in 2004. As the recipient of a DAAD Scholarship, she studied at the Universität der Kunst, Berlin in 2004-05. Further grants include a Jacob K. Javits Foundation Grant, Pollock Krasner Foundation Grants in 2005 and 2015, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Grant in 2015, and a Chicago DCASE and Illinois Council for The Arts Grant in 2017. She has had institutional solo and two-person exhibitions at the Heimbold Visual Arts Center, Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY (2019); The Arts Club of Chicago, IL (2018); and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL (2011). Institutional group exhibitions include Institut Valencià d'Art Modern, Spain (2025); NIU Art Museum, Dekalb, IL (2024); Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn Harbor, NY (2019); Children’s Museum of the Arts, New York, NY (2019); Fralin Museum of Art, Charlottesville, VA (2018); Rowan University Art Gallery, Glassboro, NJ (2016); and Elmhurst Museum of Art, Chicago, IL (2013).