UIC MFA Thesis Exhibitions in Studio Arts, Photography, Moving Image and New Media Arts.

Melina Ausaikitis, Daniel Baird, Aay Preston-Myint and Brittany Ransom

April 5-9
Opening reception: April 8, 5-8 pm.

Aay Preston-Myint reconfigures and disrupts familiar objects and sites to depict a critically queer space: a proposition about bodies and relationships in our present and future, in which new iterations of violence and hierarchy compete with new iterations of expression and identity.

Melina Ausaikitis surrounds her audience with the interior of her head through performance, singing, and drawing. Moments of ecstatic aloneness are presented to the open air in all their shrinking and earnest uncomfortableness.

Daniel Baird creates work that is invested in the interplay between technological advancement, preservation and time.

Brittany Ransom makes work that probes the lines between human, animal, and environmental relations. Her work explores our society's dependence on emergent technologies and the conflicted relationship to nature, calling for a paradoxical co-evolution between the two.

Jesus Duran, Raquel Ladensack, Paul Nelson, Min Song and Latham Zearfoss

April 12-16
Artist Talks: Wednesday April 13, 5pm
Opening Reception April 15, 5-8pm.

Jesus Duran creates while meditating on the effects technology has on social constructs, behaviours, physical actions and the sense of self.

Raquel Ladensack creates photographs and 16mm films that explore absence, shifting perspectives, and temporal frequencies.

Paul Nelson makes a lot of certain things.

Min Song makes two- and three-dimensional work that deal with space and surface.

Latham Zearfoss's work often centers on reclaiming historical and mythological texts, and revising them to incorporate radical notions of love and sex, possibility and probability.

Rebecca Beachy, Mike Gibisser, Chris Meerdo and Joe Pankowski

April 19-23
Artist Talks: Thursday, April 21, 5:30pm
Opening reception April 22, 5-8pm.

Christopher Meerdo's work is located in the space between the absence and revealing of memory, its authenticity confirmed or denied through the use of photography, sculpture, and moving images.

Rebecca Beachy explores human processing, material intimacy and traumatic affect in the context of an ambivalent relationship with nature through sculpture and installation.

Mike Gibisser uses the poetics of the moving image while drawing on
scientific and cultural phenomena to investigate the nuance and
instability of time, memory, and affect.

Joe Pankowski has developed an ever-expanding daydream in countless
drawings, and has brought these to life using stop-motion animation and
out-dated technology to emphasize the mechanical absurdness found in his sketchbooks.

Claire Arctander, Tim Nickodemus, JD Pirtle, Stephanie Tisza and Michael Radziewicz

April 26-30
Artist Talks: Wednesday, April 27, 5:30pm
Opening reception: April 29 5-8pm.
Stephanie Tisza will hold a special screening on Friday, April 29th, 7pm

Claire Arctander gets into exquisitely rough things.

Tim Nickodemus paints fragmented images from the body which lie between
the visual and the tactile.

JD Pirtle works equally as an artist, programmer, and creative
technologist to focus on visualizations and sonifications that bridge the
void between convention and technological horizon.

Stephanie Tisza makes videos that depict the poetics of place, character
and mood.

Michael Radziewicz makes sculpture and photography and lives by C.R.E.A.M.