The second in a series of five UIC MFA Thesis Exhibitions in Studio Arts, Photography, Moving Image, and New Media Arts.

Yell Me About Myself: What do We/Us sound like now that We have
Become
How you forget this, Protect Me from what I want what I can ’t have
Straight on until morning (A Ritual in Self-Seduction)
Grasp the Vacuum Again And Already it Might Be Nice
This should all be read allowed

Where bodies hit words / Where words hit bodies
Where mine / myself are always This / Yours
We / Us are forever You / Yours

Chris Little: My work is about gender, artifice, mediation, meditation, appropriation, self-awareness, and actualization, as well as body image, insecurity, isolation, voyeurism, semiotics, demystification, authenticity, superposition, paranoia, dystopia, superficiality, loops, shadows, and echoes. In other words, the poster would read “Comedic, Tragic, and Utterly Semiotic.”

Hanna M. Owens: My work finds words for the intersection at which the political and social collide with the intimate. I am most concerned with what happens in the 6-8 cubic inches of air that hover immediately outside of our skin and my efforts fall under the same umbrella: language, the body, and intimacy. I believe that the best stories are about conflicting feelings.

Nicholas Rigger: My creative research explores past and present American attitudes towards homophobia, queer culture, denial, and repression. I turn to myself and my own experiences as sources of reference and inspiration. I call into question what steps I took as a young person, consciously or unconsciously and that I ’m still enacting and performing to alter and conceal my identity. As a person who experiences discrimination, I feel it is paramount to be a representative of those who don’t have a strong voice in society and to use that as a force for change.

Matt Shaw: I am intrigued by indirect information that is not totally stable, especially in the forms of absence and the unknown within particular geographies and temporalities. As an articulation of this investigation, I blend storytelling and experimental narrative with nostalgia for (and documents of) a natural and local history. My past and current work are concerned with methods of electronic communication, woodland, and coastal mythology, intentionally isolated individuals, unsolved mysteries, and places located within foggy locales.

Chris Little, Hanna M. Owens, Nicholas Rigger, and Matt Shaw.

The 2014 MFA Thesis Exhibitions are supported by Gallery 400 and the School of Art & Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago.