The Simple Good in Chicago – A Group Art Show at The Emily

‘ENDLESS IMAGINATION, 2025 
Acrylic Paint, Heavy Duty Modeling Paste on Canvas// 48” x 48” 

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Jason Hayth is a multi-disciplinary visual artist based out of Chicago whose work reflects identity, culture, and the unseen stories of underrepresented communities. Hayth’s work consists of both traditional acrylic on canvas, sneaker art, wood working, and digital paintings in photoshop. A bi-racial Black and White artist, Jason’s journey has never fit neatly into any box—something he once saw as a curse but now embraces as a unique perspective that fuels his creativity.

Acrylic paint, paint markers, oil pastels
18” x 24”  // $400 

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Born in the Philippines and based in Chicago for over 13 years, Timothy Jimenez is an artist whose work defies traditional paths and embraces raw, unfiltered imagination. With no formal training or art school background, Jimenez began drawing and painting from a young age, guided purely by instinct and passion. His creative journey has taken many forms—screen printing, graphic design, and illustrations for independent clothing brands—but the throughline is clear: a deep fascination with the macabre and the fantastical. Horror motifs, medieval weaponry, and the animated creatures of his childhood—particularly Pokémon—fuel his bold visual universe. The result is a body of work that blends nostalgia with menace, innocence with edge, all rooted in the mind of a self-taught visionary.

Teresa Nelson’s love for art was solidified when they did their first stick and poke on their twin bed in their childhood home in Albany Park, Chicago.  

Now 6 years later at age 21, their art has expanded from quick doodles to their signature intricate stippling style on paper and their hand poked tattoos.  

Acrylic, Aerosol on Canvas 
38” x 72”  //   $6,000 

Stephen Eric Lee (E.LEE) is an artist and muralist based in Central Illinois. His work probes the very foundations of how we experience art: its emotional pull, its power to confer status, and the curious ways we assign value to it. Through a signature trompe l’oeil technique, he breathes life into flat surfaces — inviting viewers into paradoxes of presence and absence, where the invisible becomes visible, and humor undercuts expectation. 

E.LEE creates immersive installations and public murals that spark conversation and delight. Simplification and the viewer’s point of view are his guiding principles: each piece designed to subvert what we think we know, then gently reveal something unexpected. 

E.LEE earned his BFA from Millikin University in 2002 and has exhibited in Chicago, New York, Miami, Atlanta, Paris and Brisbane. His murals adorn walls across the United States and around the world—from London, Bristol and Amsterdam to Barcelona, Nagoya and Osaka—each one a playful meditation on space, light and the stories just beneath the surface. 

This painting centers on a ceramic vessel inspired by the forms and symbolism of traditional South Korean ceramics, which have long held both practical function and spiritual significance. 

Heo reimagines this vessel as a metaphor for the emotional weight that can be carried through the rhythms of daily life. Though weathered and seemingly on the verge of collapse, it continues to stand, quietly resilient in its fragility. The imagery depicted on the vase reflects the internal struggles that often go unnoticed, inviting viewers to consider what it means to acknowledge one’s limits and still endure. Blending cultural reference with autobiography, The Deepest Breath becomes both collective and intimate, speaking to the tension between breaking and holding on, between inherited histories and the ongoing challenges of our present. 

‘HANG ON’, 2025 
Oil stick, crayon and acrylic on canvas // 30” x 40”
$5,500 

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David Heo’s practice unfolds at the intersection of contemporary aesthetics and personal mythology, constructing a visual language that merges graphic precision with painterly restraint. His compositions -- flat yet dynamic, stylized yet intimate -- mediate between the immediacy of print culture and the tactile nuance of hand-drawn forms. Figures emerge from fragmented spaces, caught in a liminal tension between assertion and erasure, presence and myth, evoking the transience of memory and the constructed nature of cultural identity. Navigating a lexicon that bridges traditional Korean iconography with the ephemeral textures of contemporary urban life, Heo examines themes of nostalgia, dislocation, and desire. His engagement with opacity and transparency, surface and depth, recalls Matisse’s chromatic clarity while positioning itself within a more introspective negotiation of selfhood. At its core, his work grapples with the fluid boundaries of identity, informed by the symbolic depth of Korean art, the analytical framework of Jungian psychology, and the broader tensions of Eastern and Western heritages.