As a continuation of Art in Resonance, The Peninsula’s global program celebrating and nurturing contemporary art, The Peninsula Chicago is pleased to present an art exhibit titled Building Images, with works by Chicago artist Robert Chase Heishman. The exhibit is located in the hotel's fifth floor main lobby through March 2023.

Building Images is an exhibition of constructive photographs that reveal aspects of their own making and contain embedded personal references throughout. Using colored pieces of tape, various objects, and specific lighting conditions, Heishman builds spatially – utilizing the forced perspective of the camera to flatten dimensionality into an image-form. This interest in building images is a gesture of connecting to Heishman’s family lineage – his father and grandfather were both bricklayers – and also a meditation on the labor involved in image construction. 

More broadly, in a time of increased cultural/societal image use and fluency, Heishman believes it is important to consciously focus our awareness on how images are constructed, can be manipulated, and the underlying power dynamics of images in today’s world. 

Unique to this presentation at The Peninsula Chicago is a series of smaller collage works that act as footnotes to the larger photographs, showing peripheral behind-the-scenes views, as well as other image content that has personal significance to the artist.

This exhibition was made possible through a partnership with LATITUDE Chicago, where Heishman was an Artist in Residence in 2019.