Graduate Photo Catalogue 2017

SCHOOL OF THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO P H OTO G R A P H Y D E PA RT M E N T A N N U A L G R A D U AT E C ATA L O G

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T H E R E A L I T Y C R E AT E D B Y R E P R E S E N TAT I O N 7

HYPERVISABILIT Y IS OVERWHELMING 9

ARTISTS 13

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T H E R E A L I T Y C R E AT E D BY R E P R E S E N TAT I O N

WILL WIEBE MARK BLANCHARD DANIELE VICKERS MICHELLE MURPHY

ALLISON GRANT

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According to the metadata, it was 7:30 pm on May 12, 2012. I was standing at a scenic overlook in Reno, Nevada, on the day a total solar eclipse would be visible across the American West for the first time in eighteen years. The park was packed. It is probably safe to say that a majority of us, myself included, had never witnessed a solar eclipse, but we knew just what to do. Find a friend, go to the highest point, and bring a camera. Tripods lined the overlook’s retention wall, smartphones sat readied in people’s hands, and point-and-shoots dangled from wrists. The more organized members of our impromptu group had special glasses for viewing an eclipse—spectacles that look like something you might find at the bottom of a children’s cereal box. I, of course, was among the unprepared who hoped to somehow stare at something that will blind you if you look at it directly.

The light was beautiful. Every blade of grass and every tree leaf stood on end, clinging to golden rays of misshapen sun. Even though I couldn’t look at the eclipse, the light, the smells, and the sounds transported me beyond the reality that I understand and exist within. In this moment, the act of seeing (literally and metaphorically) felt charged with cosmic mystery.

Faced with the incomprehensible magic of a natural phenomenon, I did what everyone around me was doing, what anyone would do. I took a picture. And I took another, and another.

Out of sheer impulse, I wanted to find a way to create a durable and longer lasting version of sublimity, as if such a thing might be easily lifted out of reality. The pictures that appeared on my screen looked conventional, which is to say that they looked nothing like what I was beholding.

They were just boring pictures of a desert mountain.

On my plane ride home, I fiddled with the photos, and I noticed something. As I pressed my fingers apart and zoomed in on one image, the lens flare was crescent shaped. I flipped to the next picture, and a crescent aberration appeared there, too, only it was slightly different. Like a

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sequence of filmstrip frames, the eclipse waxed and waned as I scrolled from one picture to the next. At 40,000 feet above the earth’s surface where I sat squished into the center seat of row 21 on United Airlines flight 381, the extraordinary elasticity of photography made the eclipse’s movement perceptible to me. Squinting at a tiny screen, time suddenly seemed to stretch out beyond my bodily and psychic experience and reveal aspects of existence that are invisible to the naked eye.

In this moment—when geologic time feels palpable—I know I am not a creature thinking thoughts specific to this age. It is rare moments like this one that remind me that time is vast and so cosmic that trying to understand it is futile. I go to work every day and I write about things in words that I sometimes think, as I write them, are quite well written and concise, and I begin to believe that I have figured something out. Something real. But it is not real in the geologic sense. I and all of my work and everything humankind has ever made will fall away long before the celestial movement that is traced out in my photographs stops repeating.

If some semblance of the crescent in my pictures is, in human terms, eternal, cyclical, and a historical, the pictures also resolutely establish time as linear. All photographs are anchored in a moment that has passed, as a relic of time’s relationship to human progress, not cyclic phases. And the irreversible, forward moving passage of time feels different for those of us who spend our days thinking about the geologic era of the Anthropocene. Every wondrous experience of nature’s infinitude is accompanied by the low-grade hum of our impending, selfinflicted obliteration. When humankind has destroyed the last pockets of wild plant life and nothing is left but durable plastic dioramas of the fragile and temporary [lifeforms] that will be lost to our rapidly changing and increasingly hostile environment, I wonder if people will look at the sky and feel the way I felt on the day of that solar eclipse. At the end of the Anthropocene, when the last humans stand at the gates of life and death, will they pull out their cameras and take pictures? Of course they will. But no one can stop time.

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DAVID YUN TIANA BIRRELL MARY ROLL ASHLEY GILLANDERS

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HYPERVISIBILITY IS OVERWHELMING

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ZURI WASHINGTON MICHAEL ASBILL SANTINA AMATO JEREMY HANDRUP MICHELLE MURPHY ZHIYUAN YANG WILL WIEBE DAVID YUN MARY ROLL JESSE MEREDITH

When my mother quit her job as a wedding photographer, she gifted me her 35mm Canon Rebel 2000. I come from a family of storytellers, yet the pictures that my mother made with her camera were not stories about her entrepreneurial spirit, which she used to start a business, support our family, and pay for her children to go to college. Instead, her pictures were lovely fictions of marital bliss filled with ideologies that conform to patriarchal sensibilities of womanhood. Brides, with sculpted hair and creamed skin, looked warmly into mom’s camera as they contorted their bodies into representations of femininity, purity, loyalty, and the many other myths that are so succinctly summarized in a photograph of a woman in wedding clothes.

With mom’s camera, I wanted to compose a hypertheatricalized vision of my own reality, one that would open up pathways to lesser-known aspects about the female body. I wanted to make pictures that were self-conscious, and revealing of their structure.

My skin, my hands, my hair, my breasts—no part of my body can be known to another person who does not see me through the memory of thousands of photographs. My mother’s camera gave me a space to speak in a larger way about a reality I’ve come to know above all others. The information in photographs is not physical, yet it is imposed on me, physically. The camera shapes me. It reduces identity to a series of surreal vignettes. It is, by default, the gaze of the Western audience, of the empowered male. I wanted to use my mother’s camera to critique these forces, and make apparent the ways we relate to our own bodies.

I began to photograph myself in the domestic interior spaces of my parent’s home and my home. I looked straight into the camera, and also out at the surrounding world, but always filled with self-possession. For me this body of work was a study of gender identity and space, my female body and mind, written out lucidly. If I could look powerful in my photographs, I could be powerful. When you believe something, you cause it to exist, if only to yourself. I wanted to

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RENLUKA MAHARAJ LINDSAY HUTCHENS ZHUCEN WEI DARRYL TERRELL TIANA BIRRELL

counter the pain of my feelings of displacement within the American Landscape, literally and figuratively. This project would be a diary of my skin, the organ that shelters and protects my interior self from the outside world.

When I started taking pictures, my skin hardened. I was a warrior, self-crafted and in control. My pictures were a form of independence, and a way to directly push back against an expectation for me to become a mother, follow a particular trajectory of womanhood, and become complicit in the cultural norms that surround me. Four months later, as I stared down at a positive pregnancy test, I was devastated. I did not want the baby. I wanted to be the strong and powerful woman in my photographs, free from the consuming burden of rearing a child.

As my belly swelled, I continued to photograph myself, but it wasn’t until after my daughter’s birth that I realized how powerful my body had become. For all of those months, I had been sheltering more than my own ego—there was a tiny soul inside of me, and I was her shield.

My daughter came six weeks early. The first time I looked at my fragile baby wrapped in tubes in an incubator, I couldn’t tell where my body ended and hers began. The nurses urged me to name her, but I couldn’t. You name the born, the living, and she was not yet born to me.

I began to photograph her. The photos were my lifeline—on the screen, I could see her.

She was no longer under my skin. She was visible. The photographer Arthur Ou once wrote that a photograph’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. He is right. The origins of the first pictures I took of my child were rooted in my sense of dislocation, but their destination and meaning led me to recognize my daughter’s autonomy—her personhood. Our bond is eternal, and the umbilical cord will never feel fully cut, but pointing my camera outward was the beginning of me separating from the human I was photographing, and relearning the boundaries of my skin.

I saw something else in those early pictures. Someday this innocent preemie would be a woman—and she would soon have to face a more complex history of oppression, of being disenfranchised. This fragile, beautiful body became real to me through photography, but photography would rob her of her agency and mold her skin into the stereotypes that define all

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women. No woman can raise her child outside of today’s image-saturated culture, where the limitations and divisions of capitalist and colonialist structures hold root. To make the first photograph of your child is to know her intimately, but also to know the strength she will need to swim against the turbulent waves of images that will relentlessly try to subsume her spirit.

That is the true pain of motherhood. Sooner or later, our babies have to become warriors and learn the art of hardening their soft skin into a suit of armor.

DAVID YUN MICHELLE MURPHY

*Editor’s note:

These fictional stories are

inspired by the author’s lived experience,

as well as conversations with and writings by graduate students in the Photography

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Department of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Direct quotes from students appear throughout the stories with annotation; however the meaning of quoted text does not necessarily reflect the intentions of the original author.

Allison Grant is a curator, writer, and artist living in Homewood, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. Since 2008, she has served as Assistant Curator of Education and Exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Photography. Grant holds an MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago and a BFA in Media Studies from the Columbus College of Art and Design. She teaches in the Photography and Art & Art History departments at Columbia College Chicago.

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My installation work Same Picture considers the distance between the realities of the 2003 invasion of Iraq

My works translate and reinterpret mediated

and their representation, with particular attention to the

images to map the space between individual experience

creative effect of that representation on the collective

and history. Newspaper photographs from the toppling of

American imagination. As Americans, we approach these

Saddam’s statue in Firdos Square take the scale of their

experiences of empire through the filter of Western

subjects, yet lose their verisimilitude; archaeological

power-knowledge, gaining fluency in the signifies of a

documentations of looted vases reemerge as 3D-printed

constructed environment. We rely on learned narratives

ceramics; fake mosques are produced for military training

because they offer to make the unknown legible, to

while real mosques are destroyed by military intervention;

“center” and empower Western understanding through

bunkers become dig sites become dioramas. By engaging

the accessibility of their authorial claims.

the varied media through which we represent the Other

Excavating the histories of the invasion, I

and manipulating it to my own ends through replication

uncovered a tangle of signs and referents, rather than a

and alteration, I disturb the truth-claims of the source

single reality. A crowd of Iraqis easily metamorphosed from

data. A collage of simulations becomes a representation

an enthusiastic “Other” welcoming the liberator-occupier

of reality.

to an antagonistic “Other” looting vases or mounting an insurgency; the image was but a screen on which to project a story that had already been told. My work, therefore, is an attempt to deconstruct the literacy of an all-knowing West, to reveal the mutability of fact and fiction within our discourse. The characters the viewer is called to enact

WILL WIEBE

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are but the cultural productions of American hegemony.

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WILL WIEBE

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WILL WIEBE

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All Images) Same Picture, 2016 mixed media installation dimensions variable

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establish a way that enables us to see ourselves for who we really are: as beings whose essence expresses

political climate within the United States. I explore

an individuality beyond archaic, arbitrary constructions

those topics under the framework of considering the

that inspire aggression and prejudice toward each other.

misrepresentations applied to persons of color in the

My goal further involves opening that psychological

United States that serve to demonize us. My practice,

space which allows us to reveal all that we can possibly

in response, has been a process of decentralizing those

discover concerning the mystery of the human being, by

representations and building a space that cultivates

accentuating to the public precarious ideologies we've

reconciliation of our identities and strategies of navigating

constructed that promote division and refute groups of

the systemic violence and aggression toward brown and

people's integrity of humanity, equality and access to

black bodies. My role as the artist involves ceaselessly

resources. This is the nature of my responsibility to my

warring with my society for its sake and my own, to

society as an artist.

MARK BLANCHARD

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I am committed to making work that is current and referential to the presently and historically tempestuous

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MARK BLANCHARD

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MARK BLANCHARD

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All Images) Untitled, 2016 CGI 360 °

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possible to come to know something. I grew up as a devout member of a very religious 21

community, but have since experienced an upheaval from that paradigm. Because of this, knowledge, epistemology, and the act of seeing (literally and metaphorically) inform my work.

DANIELE VICKERS

My work explores ways in which information can be interpreted and how it is

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DANIELE VICKERS

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DANIELE VICKERS

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DANIELE VICKERS

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1)

Symbolic Traversal Through A Plane , 2014 Inkjet print 23 x 20 inches

2)

Containment, 2015 Deskjet prints, water, tacks, glass bowls 27.5 x 30 x 12 inches

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Pulpit, 2015 Cyanotype on drawing paper 22 x 40 inches

4)

Remnant, 2015 Inkjet print 25 x 20 inches

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Space exploration continues without adequate diversity.

Congress redefines human life as beginning with fertilization, cloning, or its equivalent.

Population multiplies without trust or access to care.

Despite this the planet warms.

And the u n i v e r s e is expanding.

Imaging awkwardness or imperfection is a strategy to disrupt the perfect grids, sharp focus, and competitive 25

nature of capitalist systems.

Working through the performative, the iconic, and the indexical…I make interdisciplinar y work of macro & micro spaces. The references that I work to revision are rooted in power politics in American culture (Space exploration, our origin story, rearing, consumer products) and within hierarchies of artistic production (aesthetics, grids, ready-mades).

MICHELLE MURPHY

12 white American men have walked on the Moon.

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MICHELLE MURPHY

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MICHELLE MURPHY

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MICHELLE MURPHY

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1)

Journey to the Moon, a Herstory , 2016 Durational Performance at Links Hall, Chicago Photo credit: Emerson Granillo

2)

Make-up Moon, 2016 Pigment print

3)

Eclipse Sun/Son - Moon/Mom: a photographic performance about birth , 2016 Video Documentation

4)

Domestic Explorer, 2016 Safety Tent, site specific Installation, 2 feet from my back door

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and fragmentary viewing experience. In opposition to the conventional cinematic situation, the viewer must

between military power and consumer technology

move through the space to experience the work. The

and its role in forming contemporary subjectivity. I am

work hopes to provide a cognitive map of neoliberalism's

invested in using contemporary advertisements as

pervasive commodification and its effects on how we

material for their promissory, efficient, and cinematic

relate to our own bodies. Through deconstructing and

nature. Advertisements for fitness tracking products,

re-contextualizing the appropriated material, seemingly

smartphone GPS services, first person shooter games,

innocuous and apolitical mantras underlying the

Hollywood films, and the US Navy and Army play out in

advertisements like “work hard, play hard” or “no pain, no

the same sequence, blurring the distinction between

gain” take on more menacing overtones.

self-improvement and annihilation , agency and exploitation, security and insecurity. Multiple screens and objects interrupt the projection of appropriated advertisements to create a simultaneously absorptive

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Welcome to the Grind | The Enemy Within is a video installation that examines the relationship

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1)

OOTW (Operations Other Than War), 2016 Digital photograph

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Enemy Within (install shot), 2016 Metal, gel medium, cinderblock, plaster cast, video projection

3 a) Enemy Within (detail), 2016 Plaster cast, metal, video projection 60 x 48 inches 3 b) Enemy Within (install shot), 2016 Metal, cinderblock, plaster cast, video projection 12 x 9 x 6 inches 4)

OOTW (Operations Other Than War), 2016 Digital photograph

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effects that information has on a local landscape and

emphasize the materiality of information and its agency

economy. By looking at the materiality of Big Data via

within the landscape and within local economies. I

water resources, it can demonstrate how processing

use the desktop as a space to contemplate place, a

information has extended its techno-cyborg prosthesis

complicated web-of-sites, and as a tool to negate the

into our natural environment through capitalistic

perception of the Internet as ether. By including the

spatiotemporal relations. Because as Henri Lefebvre

network of rivers, dams, and pipes that contribute to the

states, “capitalism does not simply construct ideas

cooling of servers, I attempt to accentuate a network

about space; it creates actually existing, concrete

of the whole psychic and social complex of the global

spaces” (Morton 85).

central nervous system (McLuhan 4).

Using 65 megawatts of power and approximately 1.7 million gallons of water a day to cool the servers, the National Security Agency data farms suggest that “the 33

huge amount of water currently required to manage our digital lives is inextricably linked to values we uphold, such as power and control, assumed to be inherent to Big Data and deeply rooted into the provisions of nature, while never fully committed to them” (Hogan 7). By noting the materiality of information by means of water usage, the effect of the extensions of man emphasizes “the whole psychic and social complex” that is in play in information consumption.

Opening up the question of Information Theory to the materiality of Big Data, I question what it means to consider information out of its physical context now that our planet as entered the geologic age of the Anthropocene and can physically attest to the

TIANA BIRRELL

In this series titled, Water You Doing?, I seek to

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TIANA BIRRELL

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TIANA BIRRELL

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1)

Managing Water in the West, 2016 Inkjet print Dimensions variable

2)

Public Domain, 2016 Desktop Performance Video: detail Mac Desktop

3)

Jordanelle Dam, 2016 Inkjet print Dimensions variable

4)

“It Sure is iCloudy Out”, 2016 Desktop Performance Documentary: detail Mac Desktop

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as opposed to precise renderings produced from 3D

Artifacts of the Anthropocene, asks questions about

scans. I began to appreciate the abstract and vague

the future of our natural environment. It is driven by

interpretations of nature that I found, which reflected

research on plastics and their use as a stratigraphic

how our brains create false memories; when we

indicator of the Anthropocene, science fiction books

remember a person, place, thing, moment, etc. what

and films, research into memory distortion, and a

we are truly remembering is our last memory of it, not

personal affinity for geological displays in museums

the original interaction. I started to see the effects of

of natural history.

this distortion in the 3D forms and became curious as

While under the influence of various forms of science fiction, I started thinking about a potential

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to how it could play a part in the preservation of natural objects in the future earth scenario I was proposing.

future earth. I began to wonder how natural objects

The objects that I downloaded were then 3D

could potentially be preserved and remembered if/when

printed in ABS plastic in an attempt to create a durable

they go extinct. How do you preserve something so

and longer lasting version of an object that is fragile

fragile and temporary? How would technology play a

and temporary in our rapidly changing and hostile

part in future methods of preservation? How do we

environment.

remember something once original references are gone? In response to these questions, I began searching fo r 3 D re n d e ri n g s of n atu ral objects f ro m o p e n - s o u rc e websites, focusing on files that were created from memory,

ASHLEY GILLANDERS

My current body of work, temporarily titled

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ASHLEY GILLANDERS

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ASHLEY GILLANDERS

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1)

Detail image of rose from Untitled (grey steps), 2016

2)

Untitled (grey steps), 2016 ABS plastic, MDF, velvet 26 x 18 x 18 inches

3)

Detail image of coral from Untitled (grey steps), 2016

4)

Detail image of crystal from Untitled (grey steps), 2016

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the 3D manipulation of a 2D print. I brought information from the outside world in the form of geological points

trees blossom and nymphs and bees discuss the weight

(latitude and longitude), found objects from these

of the patriarchy. Red wine on white yarn like monthly

points, photographic documents, stones, crystals

blood. A neat closed circle broken by this outpouring.

and dried plants to my studio. These objects I gathered

Cyclical like Mother Moon and the seasons. Leaves

served as tangible references for the ideas I was

falling and being reborn in spring. Aphrodite at the gates

exploring. I found myself attracted to objects used as

of life and death symbolized by a vigina and by the snake

ingredients for potions and rituals as well as trash and

shedding its skin, shedding uterine walls. Resilience to

concrete. For me this body of work has been a study of

grow through and be molded by concrete, aggressively

gender identity and space; my female body and mind

groomed, beaten down, beaten back and still make 80

in reaction to recent political climates and the wholly

cents to their dollar.

new environment I was experiencing and exploring.

Enter the witch, black candles, amber, myrtle,

Working with these ideas and objects, I allowed myself

sage, an allegory for a woman with power. She lives on

the freedom to explore and create space, write about

the fringes, outcast. She is worshipping the Earth and

it lucidly.

burned at the stake for...anything.

In this body of work I attempted to explore several ideas: mapping, the allegory of the witch and its relation to feminism, urban naturalism, the photograph as talasman, the building of a shrine and

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Aphrodite shaving her legs in the plasticized sea, foam turning to white rose petals all around her. Myrtle

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MARY ROLL

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MARY ROLL

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MARY ROLL

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1)

Untitled (Installation detail), 2016 Oce prints, found objects Dimentions variable

2)

Untitled (Installation), 2016 Oce prints, found objects, black candles Dimentions variable

3)

Untitled (Installation detail), 2016 Oce print, black candle, wine soaked yarn, myrtle leaves in dish Dimentions variable

4 a) Untitled (Installation detail), 2016 Oce prints, found objects Dimentions variable 4 b) Untitled (Installation detail), 2016 Oce prints, found objects Dimentions variable

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Can I call these portraits? Throughout this

not knowing my family or really, being close to them.

process I’ve found it intriguing, trying to create

If you asked me to talk about them or their lives, I’d

depictions of the people closest to me by using such a

draw a blank. I wanted to start the insurmountable

formulated process. Images filtered through the lens of

task of changing that, and I

a scanner resemble cosmic maps

had to look somewhere. So,

and star charts. But instead of

I started looking backwards.

mapping existing structures I seek

I m a d e th e se p ie c e s to

to make tangible an intangible

remember us as we were. I

feeling. I’ve create talismans of

wasn’t nostalgic about it, but

my relationships. I imbued them

the results might carry a bit

with my own energies; they are

of sentimentality for me. I sat

an interpretation of my family no

with the thoughts, images,

longer removed from the objective

memories and experiences I’d

narrative I began with.

had with each family member,

I’ve sat with these objects

populated the canvas with that

longer than I’ve spoken to most of

data and painted or sewed until

my relatives, I’m not particularly

I couldn’t think anymore, until

close with any of them but I found

I’d traveled back to the beginning of our archive. I was

it easy to draw upon what little I remembered of them, to

inspired by Charles Gaines’ cornucopia of meticulous,

make a depiction of our relationship. The printed images

systematic creations, divorcing imagination from my

serve as a legend to read the objects.

hand as he had with his.

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This work sprouted from my own guilt, from

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ZURI WAS HINGTON

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ZURI WAS HINGTON

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1)

Untitled #5, 2016 Synthetic fibers, acrylic paint, upholstery thread 6 x 6 inches

2)

Map of Myself pt. 1, 2016 Tissue paper, sewing thread 8 x 8 inches

3 a) Map of my Mother, 2016 Tissue paper, sewing thread, plastic, foil 8 x 8 inches 3 b) Map of Myself pt. 2, 2016 Tissue paper, sewing thread 8 x 8 inches 4)

Map of my Father, 2016 Tissue paper, sewing thread, plastic, foil 8 x 8 inches

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private ventures. The larger body of work documents the spaces (fields, neighborhoods, and parking lots)

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affected by the development of a new Texas Ranger’s Stadium, half of which is being funded by the residents of Arlington, TX. This series seeks to examine questionable intersections of government and corporate interests, engaging photography to visualize the insidiousness Working in Arlington, Texas and Chicago, Illinois, artist

of this development.

Michael Curtis Asbill has developed a socially motivated

Hiding underneath this parking lot is the unstable

practice concerned with underlying structures of

ground, broken in order to fund it. Under the stadium

influence in the United States.

roof, men making money off investments others made

Proposition One (Texas Live!) is a series of photographs of a baseball stadium development

for them.

MICHAEL ASBILL

intended to bring attention to public funding of large

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MICHAEL ASBILL

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MICHAEL ASBILL

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MICHAEL ASBILL

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1)

Globe Life Park and an American Fence, 2016 From Proposition One (Texas Live!)

Inkjet print 16 x 24 inches

2)

Parking Median, 2016 From Proposition One (Texas Live!)

Inkjet print 16 x 24 inches

3)

Parking Lot Detail #24, 2016 From Proposition One (Texas Live!)

Inkjet print 16 x 24 inches

4)

Bulldozer #2, 2016 From Proposition One (Texas Live!)

Inkjet print 16 x 24 in

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warm water & sugar, the cells of yeast split & divide, just

artistic dialogue between performance, video,

as our cells split & divide once the sperm enters the egg.

sculpture, photography, and painting that is viewed

There is also a peak moment when dough is voluptuous,

through an emotional, psychological and/or corporeal

full, ripe, just before it begins to ‘die’, eventually

lens. Driven by process & directed by the work itself, I

drying out.

translate my own body’s experience of life: the way it

Requiring the action of my body, my paintings

moves, the way it feels, the way it is observed by others,

are records of an intimate act between surfaces:

the way it is perceived by the self, it’s relationship to

the surface of my body and that of the paper. The

the world and to others.

process begins by smearing paint onto my body and then pressing it against the papers surface. What is left behind from this intimate act is then subjected to further interference and disruption, resulting in

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opposing relationships between object/subject, figure/ ground through the tactile medium of paint and paper.

My latest video explorations appropriate amateur pornography found off the Internet. My aim is to re-contextualise the original video into abstracted forms and movements, allowing the viewer to renegotiate the meaning of the original and reflect on the psychosexual relationships between couples in an attempt to further understand gender dynamics within society at large.

I use bread dough within my practice as metaphor, allegory and meaning within a broader dialogue relating to birth, growth, time, sexuality, emotional & physical relationships, aging, death and decay. Bread dough has a life cycle, just like our bodies and once activated by

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My practice connects through an interdisciplinary

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1)

Rana, 2016 From Portrait of Women with their Weight in Dough Archival pigment print 40 x 26.5 inches

2)

Midnight Dinner, 2016 Video still Two channel video installation Duration 2:29

3)

Blue Room, 2016 Installation view Video Duration 0:45 Looped

4 a) Untitled (Fluid #1), 2016 Acrylic on paper 24x30 inches 4 b) Wandering Uterus 3, 2016 Ink and acrylic on paper 8.5 x 12 inches

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then eventually reperformed. By running the material through multiple levels of mediation and delay I found

my own reality. I often utilize myself, my family, and my

that the end product still maintained certain elements

partner as characters stuck in a perpetual mundane

of the initial moment of genuine improvisation while

performance of their existence. I am fascinated with the

simultaneously questioning its own authenticity. It is

day to day banalities that constitute a relationship, and

a strategy that I plan on using in my next piece which

I find that this material is generally under represented

will focus on reperformed family trauma.

in media and popular culture, which tends to favor more explosive and dramatic confrontations between partners and family members. It is important for me to present this material in a way that is reminiscent of television and cinema, but always slightly off, selfconscious, and revealing of its own structure.

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For the Interior photographs I used a black backdrop within the existing domestic interior spaces of my parents home and my own home. This serves to create a makeshift stage for us to perform the banal rituals of a domestic partnership, elevating these scenes to such an absurd level of production and detail that it at once valorizes and renders its content ridiculous. While the spaces themselves appear theatrical the props and furniture read more as genuinely lived in material which complicates the reading of the images as authentic or performed.

The two channel video piece Chores presents my partner and myself engaged in a back and forth conversation projected on opposing walls. The script for the piece was developed through multiple rounds of recorded improvisation which was later transcribed and

JEREMY HANDRUP

My work combines video, photography, and performance to create a hypertheatricalized vision of

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1)

Chores, 2016 Video excerpt Two channel video installation 7:41

2)

Interior (Living Room), 2016 Inkjet print 14 x 21 inches

3)

Interior (Parents’ Dining Room), 2016 Inkjet print 14 x 21 inches

4)

Interior (Bedroom), 2016 Inkjet print 14 x 21 inches

SCHOOL OF THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO

Given our current political climate at first I has always been so. Speaking about the immigrant’s place continues to be necessary and important.

My current body of work deals with the impact of colonialism and my place as a West Indian woman within the western landscape, predominantly the United States of America.

I am

second generation on the island of Trinidad and Tobago; 61

my grandparents born in India

became the main cash crop of the Caribbean.

Through the medium of photography along with elements of performance and installation my work challenges notions of race, class, and sexuality.

RENLUKA MAHARAJ

thought my work to be timely but then realized that it

arrived as indentured servants to the British when sugar

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1)

Untitled, 2016 Photograph 40 x 60 inches

2)

Untitled, 2016 Photograph 40 x 60 inches

3)

Untitled, 2016 Photograph 40 x 60 inches

4)

Untitled, 2016 Photograph 40 x 60 inches

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The images are urban abstract, more simply, street photography. However, compared to usual street photography, I focus on the point that people usually pass by and not give attention. Rather than seek for a different perspective to view the subject matter. Since being in a different country, and receiving different views from different people, I found that not only people but objects or the streets could be viewed in a different way.

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Meditation of the space with different time while observing the image, requiring the viewer’s own emotion to bring their own memory of similar experience of being in the space. Space and location is allowed for everybody however everybody experience different moment of the time. Sharing the emotion, thought or the experience of the moment that I experienced of a certain space or location, I wish the audience to to remind their own experience of the similar moment of the space or location.

YOUNGSUN CHOI

representing a subject matter in the image, I rather

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1)

Untitled, 2014 December

2)

Untitled, 2015 February

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Untitled, 2015 April

4)

Untitled, 2015 April

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Every person exists in a unique set of realities. ideology. Ideology dictates reality. When you believe something, you cause it to exist, if only to yourself. In this way, realities are formed. They surround, overlap, conflict.

Increasingly, we are categorized. We separate into divergent realities by the preference boxes we check, the information we subscribe to. We believe what we want to believe. Objectivity dies, or never was.

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This body of work explores the relationship between the physical spaces of the United States, its military, and civilian ‘patriot’ militia groups. Members of the patriot community have often served in either law enforcement or the armed services, yet maintain a high level of suspicion directed towards the federal government, alert for perceived violations of constitutional law. This blend of paranoia and selfrighteousness yields a uniquely American brand of defensive patriotism. Through this lens, I seek new understandings of the American landscape.

JESSE MEREDITH

Circumstance shapes perception, perception informs

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1)

LE B-27, detail, 2016 Pine, océ prints, staples, cotton bandana, LE B-27 police target 72 x 48 x 36 inches

2)

Scan For Threats, verso, 2016 Oriented strand board, océ prints, cinderblock, staples, foam board, concealment tape 48 x 19 x 12 inches

3 a) Patriot, verso, 2016 Oriented strand board, océ prints, staples, aluminum wire, Patriot fence electrifier 48 x 19 x 12 inches 3 b) Patriot, verso, 2016 Oriented strand board, pine, staples, aluminum wire, Patriot fence electrifier 48 x 19 x 12 inches 4)

LE B-27, verso, 2016 Pine, océ prints, staples, cotton bandana, LE B-27 police target 72 x 48 x 36 inches

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My practice contains video, photography,

the cognitions are the only thing that people can

performance and sculpture. All of my projects are based

utilize to sense, measure and category the world and

on my self-experience—moving from space to space.

other people.

To load and visualize my pessimistic attitude of the human cognitions, I made a shield-like structure,

in the series. In the picture, there is a shield-like

which is a representation of the cognition. I recorded

structure, which is made by paper from equal-sized

the process of wearing the shield down because it

books. Three of them display multi-perspectives of

represents the process of cognitive development.

the structure and three of them illustrate the process

Before I wear the shield, I am exposed to the world and

of wearing the structure.

I have more direct relationship to the world, but when I

I personally do not believe that human have any 73

“spontaneous” cognition. Since once a child is put into the human society, the child starts to be socialized, civilized, educated. The development of the cognition seems to help people to participate in the society and interact with other people, but I personally hold a pessimistic attitude to it. I think that the development of cognition is actually the one of the main causations of stereotyping and narrows the cognitions down, because

am wearing the seemingly secure shield, I am blocked from the world.

ZHUCEN WEI

This Human Being project is a series of photographs on inkjet paper. There are six photographs

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1)

Beging Human (the structure) #1, 2016 Digital photo 11 x 17 inches

2)

Beging Human #1, 2016 Digital photo 11 x 17 inches

3)

Beging Human #2, 2016 Digital photo 11 x 17 inches

4)

Beging Human #3 , 2016 Digital photo 11 x 17 inches

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lesson learned from my father – to touch the earth three times a day – as I wear his face over my own. In a nearly

video, and writing, I both inhabit and critique a clichéd

life size photograph of my mother taking part in the

middle-class American nuclear family structure. So

mold-making process among a sort of altar I built in

much in my work is motivated by and includes my own

her backyard, I present myself and any next of kin with

personal narrative, but in a broader sense and with these

the reminder that, “all this will be yours.”

works in particular, connect to our relationships with mortality and the illusion of images.

I became interested in the use of molding and casting, its inherent similarity to photography’s reproducibility through negative and positive, and both medium’ historic connections to mortality both within and outside of an art context. I set about making molds 77

and casts of both my parents’ faces and my own with the tradition of death masks in mind. The two-sided wearable faces reference the death mask, but are used as a tool to perform an immortalization rather than act as a stationary memento.

Through a time-based video work, I use physics and a mirror to reveal as much as possible about one of my masks contrasting the youthful interior – a representation of my own face – to its aging exterior – a representation of my mother’s face. Despite many layers of disclosure, a jarring illusion repeatedly disorients the viewer through my act of mediation. In a photographic series I record myself enacting a ritualistic

L I N D S AY H U T C H E N S

Through my art-making practice using a combination of performative and narrative photography,

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1)

for when dad is gone 01, 2016 Archival inkjet print 16 x 24 inches

2)

for when dad is gone 02, 2016 Archival inkjet print 16 x 24 inches

3)

"all this will be yours", 2016 Archival inkjet print 42 x 60 inches

4)

my mask mom’s mirror, still, 2016 Digital video 2:49 loop

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What’s Your Favorite Color? always answer it based on my mood,or what I was going through in life. The way I look at color was formed during primary school, Warm Colors = Happiness, Darker and Cooler Colors = Sadness, or a state of stillness Bright Colors = Urgency With This current body of work titled “Blk Boy Colored” I am using my memory of color, how it was introduced 81

to me, as well as how it has been integrated into my life.

I am using color as a visual filter for personal narrative to evoke memory, emotions and thoughts. This work inspired by not only my personal narrative but also by current contemporary media, and film. Looking at the visionary artist Hype Williams and his use of color when documenting black people (women to be specific), as well as the way he manipulated light to show the variations of black skin when in a dark space. Also inspired by the 2016 film “Moonlight” which original titled is “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue” and the way the film dealt with trauma, queerness and persona narrative, but also the way in which is was put together in ways that the viewers are informed without having to endure the trauma that is implied in the film.

DARRYL TERRELL

Growing up, I was always asked this question, and I would

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1)

The Day Vincent Killed Diane, 2016 Archival inkjet print

2 a) The Day Sam Died...I Became Homeless...It Snowed, 2016 Archival inkjet print 2 b) The Night I Won Prom King…They Boo’ed Me, 2016 Archival inkjet print 2 c) The Day I Was Told I Couldn’t Go Back, 2016 Archival inkjet print 3 a) The Day I Jumped For My First Pair Of Jordans, 2016 Archival inkjet print 3 b) The Day My Test Results Came Back, 2016 Archival inkjet print 4)

The Day I Learned It Was Wrong To Be Me, 2016 Archival inkjet print

DARRYL TERRELL

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I am a visual artist from Beijing, China who makes work drawing from personal experience and self-identity.

I investigate and construct alternatives to normative definitions of gender, cultural difference and social status through photography, video and performance. I use strategies that encompass masquerade, dress up and photography studio to the domestic space. The locations and strategies are combined to point to how subjectivity shifts and is performed.

Firstly, the tension between China’s patriarchal culture and emerging feminist politics; secondly, an unsuccessful heterosexual marriage; third; my queer identity and lastly, my position as an only child. Each 85

image is constructed collaboratively with my parents and they are given full directorial control of the image.

In the photographs each parent performs the role of the opposite parent, and I play the other in mundane domestic scenes. The result are images which refer to family albums but are presented as a series of surreal vignettes. Our self portraits cross boundaries of gender, culture, and familial roles. I challenge the gender stereotypes in my personal performances and express my dilemma situation in the family.

The narrative that is distilled in these individual photographs exaggerated traditional gender role of the nuclear family and question how heteronormative ideas shape the “happy� imagination.

Z H I Y U A N YA N G

role exchange. The setting in which I work range from the

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1)

A Family of Three, 2016 Inkjet print 24 x 36 inches

2)

A Family of Three, 2016 Inkjet print 24 x 36 inches

3)

A Family of Three, 2016 Inkjet print 24 x 36 inches

4)

A Family of Three, 2016 Inkjet print 24 x 36 inches

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I present varied forms of red in my works, to provoke senses and actions. Red is now. Now is changing.

In the flow of the changing red, I explore the ambiguity of a cybernetic vision: visible alerts and invisible allergies are stimulating in a new nature, while an increasing amount of construction is happening inside physical bodies.

Raised in the 1990s in Shenzhen, China, I grew up with a seascape of imported western cultures and waves of Internet information.

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1)

2—3 )

Elevator, 2016 Video instillation Alligator, still, 2016 Video

4)

9 (set of 9), 2015 Archival inkjet print 48 x 36 inches

SCHOOL OF THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO DEPA RT MEN T OF PHOTOGR A PH Y MASTER OF FINE ARTS 2 0 17 EDITOR ALLISON GRANT P R O J E C T C O O R D I N AT O R AIMÉE BEAUBIEN P R O J E C T A S S I S TA N T L I N D S AY H U T C H E N S DESIGN CHRISTOPHER CUNNINGHAM

PRINTED IN CHICAGO USA

A L L A R T WO R K © 2 0 17 T H E A R T I S T S A L L T E X T S © 2 0 17 T H E AU T H O R S TYPESET IN COOPER HEWITT