2017 MFA thesis exhibitions

Gallery 400
College of Architecture and the Arts
University of Illinois at Chicago
400 South Peoria Street (MC 034)
Chicago, IL 60607

artandarthistory.uic.edu

The School of Art & Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago is excited to announce our 2017 MFA Thesis Exhibitions.

Featuring artists: Jose Luis Benavides, Alexander DeGraaf, Caleb Foss, Lorenzo Gattorna, Chris Hoag, Zachary Hutchinson, Billy James Joyce, Nellie Kluz, Michael Lopez, Liz McCarthy, Roni Packer

All exhibitions to take place in Gallery 400, an integral part of both the University of Illinois at Chicago’s and the city of Chicago’s vibrant contemporary arts scene.

2017 MFA thesis exhibition 1:
Adaptations for the Understudy
Reception: March 17, 5–8pm
Exhibition: March 14–18

The first in a series of three UIC MFA Thesis Exhibitions in Studio Arts, Photography, Moving Image, and New Media Arts featuring artists Jose Luis Benavides, Lorenzo Gattorna, Liz McCarthy, and Roni Packer.

A mood of reverence imbues the assembled works of Adaptations for the Understudy, a feeling of deep history and geography traversed. The body is not a fixed or immovable object, instead asserting itself in many environments within the exhibition: the body contained within a cultural context, the institutionalized body, the body transmuted into form, and the body interacting with the natural world. This body has a physical agency; it’s surroundings shape it and it shapes its surroundings. Moments of muted and amplified subjectivities, bodies and actors shaping the content of their own surroundings gives quiet power to the works in Adaptation for the Understudy. Processes of translation, re-enactment, and making material surface human energies that make likenesses of themselves.

2017 MFA thesis exhibition 2: 
Favorite Spring Candles
Reception: March 31, 5–8pm
Exhibition: March 28–April 21

The second in a series of three UIC MFA Thesis Exhibitions in Studio Arts, Photography, Moving Image, and New Media Arts featuring artists Chris Hoag, Zachary Hutchinson, Nellie Kluz, and Michael Lopez.

An expansive survey of material debris, subjectivities, gestures, and ontologies, Favorite Spring Candles reminds us that the desire to possess and process things remains mysterious. If the rapidly arriving future promises intangibility, dismantling, and schism, what can we do now to bear witness to the human need to relate and to create systems that give meaning? When the apparatus for understanding is material, hierarchies of meaning issue from the arrangement of constituent parts. A foggy conjecture between disparate elements can create a gratifying order between chosen subjects. The impulse to pin down eludes these non-linear, liquid, modular, and performative works, but perhaps providing decipherability is irrelevant when details so minute and particular are amplified. These artist-created systems use the absurdly idiosyncratic to reveal something profound about the everyday. The works in Favorite Spring Candles use this position to point to how life and meaning persist within confined constraints and limited representational systems.

2017 MFA thesis exhibition 3:
Ghost Pattern Waves
Reception: April 7, 5–8pm
Exhibition: April 4–8

The final in a series of three UIC MFA Thesis Exhibitions in Studio Arts, Photography, Moving Image, and New Media Arts featuring artists Alexander DeGraaf, Caleb Foss, and Billy James Joyce.

The artists in Ghost Pattern Waves make their mark through a variety of means, a series of inputs, which make up a whole. Creating systems for response and translation become necessary siphons for information in a digital age. Fortunately, the humanistic and the sublime prevail despite the conditions of their creation. Ghost Pattern Waves encompasses an expansive view of the input, from audience responses, to personal data, to IRL experience, that make up the material of a work of art. What these works uncover is profoundly more human than what we perceive their chosen interfaces capture, and, bracingly more elusive, imaginative, and transcendent.