Spudnik Press is pleased to welcome Chicago-based neon artist, printmaker, and metalworker Kacie Lees for a spring residency. During her time at the studio, Lees will develop a new body of work bringing together thermally-responsive inks and high visibility reflective fabrics.
Drawn to the visual language of early 20th century pseudosciences — including Rorschach ink blot tests and Thought Forms — her prints take on a nebulous, expressive quality that mirrors the uncertainty and wonder embedded in those early attempts to make the invisible visible. The resulting work is at once intuitive and investigative, evoking the turbulent, shapeshifting conditions of our early universe and inviting viewers to sit with ambiguity, pattern, and the limits of human perception. A public event will be announced in conjunction with the residency.
Lees will be in residence through May 13, 2026.
Kacie Lees is a Chicago-based neon artist, printmaker, and metalworker whose interdisciplinary practice explores nature and history through the phenomenon of light. Grounded in craft and informed by research into optics and chaos theory, she fuses time into matter, using light as both subject and medium to reveal shared atomic origins and ideas of universal interconnection. Fire and electricity are central to her process — from molten glass to radiant plasma, Lees creates sculptures that glow, existing somewhere between natural phenomena and human perception.
Lees teaches neon fabrication nationally at institutions including New York University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and strengthens the voice of glass craft through public workshops in Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Corning, and Seattle. She is the author and illustrator of Neon Primer: A Handbook on Light Construction, a 200-page, hand silk-screened technical manual that serves as a crucial resource to preserve material and fabrication history, define a contemporary visual language for neon, and expand its interdisciplinary reach.
Programs at Spudnik Press are partially supported by grants from the Illinois Arts Council Agency, the Driehaus Foundation, and the Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelley Foundation.