1) Kelly K. Jones, Photography
My Mother and Donna by Kelly K. Jones
“I am one of the few white people in my neighborhood. As a white woman born, raised and continuing to live in a predominately African-American community, I explore my transient cultural identity through photography. I spent much of the last year-and-a-half making photographs of my friends and family members in abandoned city lots in North Lawndale, our neighborhood. Navigating between record and metaphor, images of my community and personal landscape allow for an investigation of my surroundings, my relationships and my identity.”
2) Sophia Rauch, Painting
Buttersworth Ostoff by Sophia Rauch
“My paintings are executed directly on the wall with rollers or squeegees. …The work I am presenting at the MFA exhibition is in response to the work of the artists in my curatorial group, Craig Buttersworth, Nick Ostoff and William Sieruta, and our space in the Sullivan Galleries. I began my project by painting placeholders for their works directly on the wall, photographed the installation, duplicated my paintings on an external wall of the gallery and then painted out the originals. My installation will include a large wall painting, a photograph, and a placeholder painting.”
3) Michael Webster, Sculpture
Ex nihilo by Michael Webster
“An often told Chicago narrative is one of singular architects creating visionary plans for the city. In Ex nihilo, I wanted to engage this idea of architect as visionary, but to reverse its course, and take the past as our subject. After finding unusual ruins buried within a forest preserve in the south suburbs, I asked 6 Chicago architects to draw their interpretations of the site’s past. These drawings envision the site in a variety of ways, raising questions of how form and function are entwined and histories are constructed.”
4) Gillian Riley, Painting
Elephant In The Room by Gillian Riley
“I come from a place that believes art is a spiritual and psychological quest to welcome the unborn into the world. Nothing is too precious it cannot be changed. I had thought we could define relationships by acknowledging the spaces between things. But I have come to realize the space between is defined by points of connection. We can create a delicate web of understanding by taking a whole, separating out components, and rearranging them into an entirely new but related thing.”
5) Charles Schneider, Ceramics
Chicago Monument Installation: The Divided Line in the Form
of a Square (The Practice of Memory) by Charles Schneider
“My sailing project, The Divided Line in the Form of a Square (the practice of memory), was conceived as a site-specific performative installation for the outdoor public sculpture exhibition, Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi in Sydney, Australia. My aim for the MFA Exhibition at Sullivan Galleries is to create an experience that is the functional equivalent for Chicago viewers.”
6) Katie Short, Ceramics
Everything We Knew Is Wrong by Katie Short
“‘Everything We Knew Is Wrong’ is a study of objects as alchemical materials, destruction as a means to creation and visualization of a shifting vision of reality. Melting glass around other found objects is a way of incinerating material while simultaneously preserving the remnants within, both cathartic and sentimental.”
7) Andrew Barco, Sculpture
The Air-Loom by Andrew Barco
“This project is a response to my research on an 18th century psychotic, James Tilly Matthews, who believed he was persecuted by what he called an “Air-Loom,” a pneumatic device that could influence his thoughts and world history. I’m particularly interested in this machine, which marked the moment, at the turn of the industrial revolution, when people stopped being possessed by demons and started to be possessed by technology. This object is a piece of a larger project, which might be called a pneumatic history of culture — moments in politics, philosophy, or science when air was either remembered or repressed as a material participant in the unfolding human drama of our shared life on this air-enclosed planet.”
8) Zia Anger, FVNM
Always Always, Anne Marie by Zia Anger
Take your friends and family. Make something: As Anne Marie cares for her ailing father she becomes pregnant. She embarks on a talismanic journey in search of her mother, who vanished after her birth. This is the beginning. (21 minute excerpt. RED, Hi8, 16mm and Super 8mm film, transferred to Blu-ray.)
