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

Through idiosyncratic siting and citing, we offer an articulation of the spaces between spaces. Using video, photography, sculpture, installation and performance, liminalities in language, home, identity, and humor are traced. Unnaming the nameable, we think through the way these ideas, images, and objects feel and feel through the way they make us think.

Interested in the futile obsession to define one’s identity, Elena Feijoo investigates the social and political constructs that are used to determine cultural legitimacy within differing but often overlapping communities. Drawing from her personal experience as a child of culturally diverse parents, Ms. Feijoo creates mixed media sculptures, videos, and installations that attempt to illuminate the physical, mental, and emotional space in between established cultural communities.

Embracing video, performance, text, occasional objects, and the overlaps and gaps thereof, Jesse Malmed works and plays in creative reading, studied density, the one-liner, choirs, screen texts, the bootleg, the cover, jokes, speculative etymologies, citation, and the human voice.

Julie Potratz is a performance artist whose skits, videos, and celebrity impersonations, humorously investigate themes of identity, power dynamics, personae, and all the psychological bumps and bruises acquired along the way. Her work merges the body and sculpture, by utilizing hand­made props and wearable sculptures, in a way that makes these two components inseparable.

Focusing on the actions or instances that create, define or give importance to space, Jonathan Loïc Rogers works in photography, video, and installation too.

Elena Feijoo, Jesse Malmed, Jonathan Loïc Rogers, and Julie Potratz.