Framing History with Material at "Recalled/Extracted"

By TEDDY SANDLER August 23rd, 2026

Try not to be fooled by a frameless art exhibition at 1709 W Chicago’s framing showroom. Ground zero for Chicago’s West Town Gallery scene, there are three devout galleries, an office for an artist-run campus, plus the new satellite location of Verge Frames on one floor of the building. It seems like with each operation’s graduation, another business comes to nest. By my estimate, 95% of Verge Frames’ one-room is for sale. Counting the works from the artists Jiaming You and Frank Vega, in their exhibition “Recalled/Extracted,” all but a singular candle. Don’t fret if that piece calls to you, across the room a pallet of candles is available for purchase. This is not to demonize the business of fine art, but rather the reality for artists born outside the US who wish to be majority artists and a recognition with less institutional funding, the survival of the arts is now the market's imperative. Of the few able to make a living from this malnourished profession, their works are beautiful and their alliance with Verge Frames pathognomonically “Recalled/Extracted.” 

Beauty, famously in the eyes of the beholder, is subjective. Each frame and each iterative piece in the exhibition’s series remain true to themselves. For the scientific arrangement of You’s birds and harmonious geometries within Vega’s wood, there is an Aristotelian beauty. Both series are extracted from a larger form. You opts to laser-cut their birds from various materials, allowing a surgical precision that taxidermies their shadows. Disenchanted by the material culture of woodworking, Vega transmutates the Balsa tree, native to the American tropics, into abstracted figures. Sculptural, their bodies are imprints, gestural offerings from a larger sheet or slab of possibilities. 

Storming the gallery by air and land, the pieces seem to surge from the beyond. The "Murmuration" series by You comes as a site-specific flock. Each flat piece, a bird's side profile - wings projected continuously over and into bodies and beaks, other times distinct when they reach for the heavens. All in flight, they arc across the wall at eye level. In a nearby drawer, glass stickers patiently await their activation, which, if hung on the exterior, would prevent migratory bird collisions. Starlings made of multicolored acrylic layered with mirrors reflect or tinted translucent hang from hidden magnets, mediating their surroundings. The starlings are windows onto and in themselves; a gateway to reflective relationality. Etched are ancient Tian Wen Tu images and love letters from Chicago social workers Bernie Lo and Albert Wong like visible veins. These social creatures migrate like You, in search of home.

Installation view of "Recalled/Extracted" at Verge Frames, Photo credit: Tom Van Eynde