Graduate Photo Catalogue 2018

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MASTER OF FINE ARTS I N P H OTO G R A P H Y

SCHOOL OF THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO

2018


CONTENTS

Foreword

Rachel Adams

5

Artists by order of appearance

Colin Roberson

10

Daniele Vickers

14

Maria Escudero

18

Mary Roll

22

Ashley Gillanders

26

Brittany Laurent

30

Caroline Wood

34

Zhucen Wei

38

Xavier Robles Armas

42

Yitian Yan

46

Jake Silby

50

Rian Allen

54

YoungSun Choi

58

CĂŠleste Cebra

62

Jeremy Handrup

66

Travis Mitzel

70

Jesse Meredith

74

William Wiebe

78

Zuri Washington

82

Guanyu Xu

86

Acknowledgments

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NOW HERE, THEN THERE

smadA lehcaR

Rachel Adams Photography is, and has been since its conception, a fabulously broad church. Contemporary practice demonstrates that the medium can be a prompt, a process, a vehicle, a collective pursuit, and not just the physical end product of solitary artists' endeavors.

Charlotte Cotton1

The bombardment of the photographic image in our everyday lives is substantial. While the medium has existed for less than two centuries—a youngster in the history of art—the expansiveness and evolution of photography has been quite dramatic and impactful, and the definition has been altered and augmented since that first photograph taken in 1826/27. The medium has grown and expanded with the influx of new technologies (even before the word digital was part of our vocabulary). Photography, in a way, has had multiple lives. This evolution has infiltrated contemporary culture and likely most of us regularly take it for granted. However, with something as beautifully complex as photography, artists continue to both open up and reassess the process and structure of making pictures. Even with both its acceptance as fine art and the infinite number of amateur photographers these days, the medium continues to exist in a state of anxiety—never quite fitting in with those that came before. It is constantly adapting through technological advancements and exploring all avenues in its relationship in regards to other art forms.

1) Cotton, Charlotte. "Nine Years, A Million Conceptual Miles” Aperture Foundation. Accessed March 14, 2018. https://aperture.org/magazine-2013/nine-years-a-millionconceptual-miles-by-charlotte-cotton/.

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Important to note, photography can act as a tool, a medium, an object, a practice or a combination of thereof. Without attempting to fully define its parameters, as a medium it is clearly expansive, diverse, and subjective. During my studio visits with the photography graduate students and again after spending time with their work, it was reinforced that this is a time of transition and anticipation. As a cultural producer in 2018 —regardless of being an artist, curator, musician, dancer—the rampant rhetoric surrounding the current political climate and the heft of headlines referencing immigration, civil rights, climate change and gun control that bombard on a daily basis are somewhat inescapable. Of course, this falls in line with history: creatives have continually responded to social, political and cultural issues of the time. Is this different in 2018 ? Does the fast access to information at our fingertips and the incessant images flashing in front of our eyes all day provide more fodder to create? Does it make more people turn inward to investigate themselves and their personal surroundings? The pages of this book highlight a variety of ways to work photographically. The artists represented here challenge the conventional means of photography through material and technological investigations, as well as cropping, altering, and remixing the image. However, ultimately “images are mediations between the world and human beings,”2 and each artist’s practice allows a glimpse into these mediations. The multifaceted practices and variety of the work reproduced here highlights the vitality of photography as a medium. This catalogue celebrates the diversity in representing personhood in 2018. It showcases artists striking out on different chords, creating work that questions the diverse factors that shape our lives individually and collectively.

2) Flusser, Vilém,. Towards a philosophy of photography. (London: Reaktion Books, 2014.), 9.

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ARTISTS


nosreboR niloC

Colin Roberson

Feel like I put other people on the line, a feeling reinforced by galleries and museums that want consent forms. My fear is that I gain consent with my looks. some underlying sexual desire provides access to others’ private spheres or to a shared moment in another’s night. I have this anxiety about being alone that I’m always hoping to cure with my face and my body. Like if you want me you won’t want to lose me and you’ll work to keep me around. Certain men I meet I invest in then obsess over I change for them and learn from them Becoming self-aware through the union and inevitable separation Will I always be trapped between the binaries together — alone youthful — aged content — craving

Balanced embrace on Halstead the night before Market Days. Wish I had that. Silver gelatin print 20 x 24 inches 2017

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nosreboR niloC

Boy statue in Prague park. Watched leaves dance all around falling from trees as if I were walking through a leaf filled snow globe. Silver gelatin print 20 x 24 inches 2017

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Luke the chef. I was surprised how much he liked this picture. He posted it on Scruff. I think he looks incredibly morose and pensive; but maybe the aura of introspection helps him nab fuck buddies. Silver gelatin print 20 x 24 inches 2016

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srekciV eleinaD

Daniele Vickers

My work seeks to respond to the in/visible ways in which religious and educational institutions establish authority and maintain power. My work is deeply informed by my time as a missionary for the Mormon church in the Philippines. While the complicated institution of my upbringing maintains an opaque hierarchy, I seek ways of destabilizing a culture of partitioned authority and monopoly on the transcendental. In this case, experiencing the eclipse in August of last year became a pointing, an opening up, a tangle. By destabilizing the language present in these works, I’m interested in pushing up against an unexamined use of language that perpetuates a culture of control through religious justification. Instead of a stratified, celestialized afterlife, I’d rather know when the bodies in the sky (the sun, the moon) tell us something different about ourselves. These images came about from acknowledging the certainty of the sun in my uprooted and unstable existence. What does the sun say again and again?

Sun Poem 3 Silver gelatin print 10 x 8 inches 2017

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srekciV eleinaD

Sun Poem 2 Silver gelatin print 10 x 8 inches 2017

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Sun Poem 1 Silver gelatin print 10 x 8 inches 2017

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oreducsE airaM

Maria Escudero

Serie Doméstica (2016), a work in progress, poses the ambiguous intimacy Ecuadorian women still share around the colonial legacy of domestic work. Historically rooted in the slavery of Indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian women, it is still regarded as menial, sex-based and racialized labor. Paralleling the endless cyclicality of cleaning chores, I recursively photograph my subjects within service rooms; an empleada or maid and her employer´s daughter renegotiate the portrait as an image of images. The more I strive to divulge through the lens, the more muddled and complex the image becomes. Re-photographing, editing, and printing are exercises of distortion that subtract resolution and problematize visual information. There is no endpoint to the series; repeated indefinitely, the process would eventually blackout the image. Rather than pristine surfaces, photographs are potentially malleable objects. For each, I incorporated different forms of intervention, aiming to reflect a trait about the domestic worker: shredding for Diana, sowing for Olga and ironing for Cynthia. Fragmented discourses emerge to construct images beyond a single plane. Ultimately, photography´s materiality elicits a confrontation with the underlying social fabric woven into the pictures as visibly and historically unresolved. It is recognition that recalibrating and reevaluating are only but unceasing attempts to illuminate the meaning of realities that are not superficially discernible.

Serie Doméstica: Olga, Clara y el Divino Niño Archival pigment print 17 x 11 inches 2016

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oreducsE airaM

Serie DomĂŠstica: Mande y Diga Archival pigment print 11 x 17 inches 2016

Serie DomĂŠstica: Olga Costurera Archival pigment print 17 x 11 inches 2016

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lloR yraM

Mary Roll

3 Haikus These images, the moth and the melon, I sold to a band.

Rich dad poor dad. What does it mean when it’s nothing we had?

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck Trump.

Studio Install Shot 2017

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lloR yraM

Horizons 2017

New Ruins 2017

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srednalliG yelhsA

Ashley Gillanders

Working between sculpture and experimental approaches to photography, I focus on exploring the space between the natural and the artificial. While earlier work uses the Anthropocene, references to the landscape and organic objects as tools to explore these ideas, current works in progress use draped fabrics rendered in a 3-dimensional virtual space. The curtain, used as a threshold on a theatrical stage to distinguish reality from non-reality, functions as a metaphor in these works to explore illusion and the spatial complexities created between virtual and non-virtual space. The curtain also functions as a reference to its use in trompe l’oeil painting, where they often hang “in front� of paintings, establishing a tension between recession and protrusion, and generating a push pull effect between depth and surface. These works consist of images rendered in Maya, printed onto photographic paper and often re-photographed with additional images printed layered on top of them. By bringing these objects out of the virtual space, a crossover of elements happens. The non-virtual space begins to interact with its virtual elements (shadows, light, movement, etc.), and the line between their spaces of origin begins to blur.

Untitled (stage 3) Archival pigment print 40 x 30 inches 2017

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srednalliG yelhsA

Untitled (stage 2) Archival pigment print 40 x 30 inches 2017

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Untitled (stage 1) Archival pigment print 40 x 30 inches 2017

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tneruaL ynattirB

Brittany Laurent

Photographs appear as both authentic and illusory images in which fiction and reality meet, meanings shift, and past and present fuse. Time, memory, and history always play a key role. By contesting the division between the realm of recollection and the realm of experience in my own work, I amplify the perception of the viewer by creating compositions or settings that generate tranquil images and leave traces and balances on the edge of recognition and alienation. My collected, altered and own works are being confronted as aesthetically resilient, and act as thematically interrelated material for memory, projection, and preservation. By applying abstraction, I absorb the tradition of remembrance and elegy art into my daily practice. This personal follow-up and revival of a past tradition is an act of meditation. The results are deconstructed to the extent that meaning slips and possible interpretation becomes multifaceted.

Caverns of the No-Life Digital C-print 2016

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tneruaL ynattirB

Strophe and Antistrophe diptych Digital C-prints 2015

The Space Between Neighbors Digital C-print 2015

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dooW eniloraC

Interrupt (detail) Letterpress, pigment print on translucent bond paper 36 x 29 inches 2017

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Caroline Wood

My work exists in the intersection of analogue and digital photographic practices and explores questions of place, history, and visual information in public spaces. By appropriating the surfaces of signs and advertisements, and creating new objects from them, I employ these layers of mediated information in order to document and create environments, focusing on spaces of visual quietness or ambiguity—objects where information once was or will be again. The work prompts the viewer to consider their physical and emotional relationship to urban structures, and to question their relationship to the histories of the places they inhabit. The print quality echoes the material of images that would be in a public space—wheat-pasted layered posters on a wall—and references the deterioration that is present in the work. This work is both about the experience of walking through a city and observing the proliferation of visual information, and also about seeking out spaces of quietness, emptiness, ambiguity, and places with a visual history that is obscured.

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dooW eniloraC

Window Archival pigment print 15 x 22 inches 2017

Columns Archival pigment print 22 x 33 inches 2017

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ieW necuhZ

Zhucen Wei

I constantly struggle with the incompatibility of intuition, perception, and rationality. In my everyday life, symbols of the man-made were overpowering and I decided to visualize my feeling of this symbolic violence. I utilized books to make a shield-like structure, which is a representation of the process of cognitive development. Before I put on the shield, I am exposed to the world, and I have a more direct relationship with it, but when I am wearing the seemingly secure shield, I am blocked from the world. After I finished the book sculpture named Being Human, I started to think about how would it feel if I took a walk outside without anything destination in mind. I covered my body with a sweater I knit. I took a one-hour-long walk from my apartment. Because I could barely see through the hole I made in the sweater, I concentrated on my feet and my body temperature. It was akin to walking meditation. It was a freezing raining day, and there were some pebbles and twigs that clung to my feet, and it hurt, but I could not think of anything but the feeling of my body. I followed the orientation of the wind, and finally, I reached Lake Michigan. Walk Like A Human Being Human #1 Archival pigment print 10 x 13 inches 2017

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ieW necuhZ

Nowhere #3 Archival pigment print 10 x 13 inches 2017

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Being Human #3 Archival pigment print 10 x 13 inches 2017

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samrA selboR reivaX

Xavier Robles Armas

My work stems from the personal relationship I developed with the day-to-day objects found on my mother’s vanity. Women in my family as well as the entrepreneurial women in my neighborhood played an extensive role in thinking about how I consume images. By interrogating ingrained systems and structures in the mundane—whether visible or not—I appropriate a commercial sensibility to present disruptive images, objects, and visual and physical experiences to an audience. Through installation, sculpture, painting and photography I engage active spectators. In moments of longing, in moments of desire, and in moments of unfulfilled cravings, engaging a human touch and caress in my work becomes important. Unlike refined commercial production, my work engages in consuming mass communication by chewing it, and regurgitating it in order to achieve a human gesture either inserted by me or asked by from the viewer. As a photographer, maker, and designer I create a language almost common to the everyday individual in order to retrain their gaze as I prompt them to look and think twice.

Untitled Archival pigment print 2017

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samrA reivaX

Tender Archival pigment print 2017

Longing Archival pigment print 2017

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naY naitiY

Yitian Yan

I present varied forms of color red in my works, to explore the fluidity of the current: visable alerts and invisible allergies are stimulating in a new nature; lights are constructing the borders of the seen and the unseen. Now is everchanging while a horizon stays still. Through my performance and installation works, I create tensions in dialogue with architectures, to connect horizontal and vertical distances, providing protential speed, amphasizing interpeople heat, in a co-existing ambience. During the moments when language becomes traces of subjective movements in space, air is moved, winds accur, among bodies, through structures. The wind is what I am always seeking for.

“_0” from photo set “9_0” Archival pigment print 36 x 48 inches 2015

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naY naitiY

Untitled Archival pigment print on vellum 80 x 60 inches 2017

“9_” from photo set “9_0” Archival pigment print 7 x 11 inches 2015

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ybliS ekaJ

Jake Silby

Broadly, my practice involves articulating perceptions of place and landscape. Following the 2016 US election, I have been intrigued by the increased interest in my home country of New Zealand as an idyllic escape from its outcome. Through examination of images and language pertaining to tourism and real estate, I aim to dissect the screen-based experience of landscape and the ideals it helps perpetuate. Recent discussions around foreign ownership of land in New Zealand have been a further influence, facilitating questions such as: “who has the right to own land? And where?” “What dictates ‘sensitive’ land?” And “who does land truly belong too?”

Postcards (Matukituki Retreat, corrupted .jpeg file) Fifty 6 x 4 inch postcards on Pebble Tile 2017

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ybliS ekaJ

Untitled (Lake Mckay Station) Archival pigment print 2017

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Untitled (Wainui Station) Archival pigment print 2017

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nellA naiR

Rian Allen

Is a person’s identity merely the result of those who raised them, or is it impacted by the conditions in their environment? My interests lie in exploring how the norms of a society impact an individual, I have been surveying the factors, which contribute to a person’s perception of gender through examining personal spaces and consumer products, often used to reinforce an individual’s idea of themselves. This gives the viewer the opportunity to acknowledge the absurdity of some of our gendered associations. I aim to create a dialogue where the viewer can question how they have come to interpret gender, revealing that those who have not questioned their gender identity often do not think of themselves as gendered beings. This asks the viewer to question their assumptions concerning how they believe a man or woman should be represented, and strives to represent gender as a fluid spectrum, not a binary model, where an individual’s understanding of their own gender grows and changes as they do. My work reflects the variety of social and cultural factors that comprises an individual’s understanding of gender to create more inclusive conditions that resist society’s current ideals of normalcy, passing, and fitting in.

Did You Leave Your Hair There? Archival pigment print 15 x 12 inches 2017

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nellA naiR

In Denim Archival pigment print 15 x 12 inches 2017

In Sateen Archival pigment print 15 x 12 inches 2017

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iohC nuSgnuoY

YoungSun Choi

Life is full of ubiquitous experiences that most of us share, but that tend to be passed by and not remembered. However, these shared moments still make up who we are individually as well as collectively. I photograph these moments, which require patience and time to capture this passed by feeling. I use film to imitate the process of waiting, viewing the image as it develops, enduring time, being patient. For me, the act of taking a picture or viewing it is akin to Buddhist meditation—both require persistence and understanding. In our fast-paced world, I want people to pause and find a serene moment in the everyday. This means I regard the photograph not only as a visual image but also as an intimate object akin to a family portrait or scrapbook to collect. It is something to remember, highlighting a moment from the past, freezing time to make the experience special. I choose to show my photographs in different formats such as picture books, postcards and sometimes installation to embrace the ordinary, commonplace and everyday feeling outside of traditional gallery context. Books then allow the viewer not to feel any pressure about how to deal with artwork in a white cube; it is a comfortable, portable and democratic means for everyone to see and even own art. Mailing a photograph as handmade postcard challenges the convention that art is too precious to be reproduced for sharing.

Untitled 2017 C-print Dimentions variable 2017

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iohC nuSgnuoY

Untitled 2016 C-print Dimentions variable 2016

Untitled 2017 C-print Dimentions variable 2017

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arbeC etseléC

Céleste Cebra

The Walks The Walks (2017) spans Chicago’s Historic Parks and Boulevard System* as well as part of the lakefront. Walking allowed the artist to contemplate a range of issues including the immediate urban context, larger concepts of urbanity, the manner in which green spaces connect to the broader territory, and transitory areas in a contemporary urban society. Urban planning and rules of compliance have determined the delineations illustrated via sidewalks, roads and fences, demarcating different zones and their varying purposes. These linear manipulations of the urban landscape have served to either keep people out or moving—devices that determinedly affect the flow of pedestrians.

detail from Walk C Archival pigment print 2.3 x 3.5 inches 2017

The Walks amassed a large volume of fragmented imagery by employing the automatic timer of the camera, set to predetermined intervals. The method provided a mode of distancing the artist from the image making. Ultimately, the artist worked in tandem with the camera, allowing elements of chance to creep in and permitting the unexpected. The multitude of cards stacked and sorted by walk (A, B, C or D), allow for a non-sequential experience of the journeys in the palm of a hand. The cards can be jumbled, skipped over, shuffled and rearranged, allowing the viewer a certain freedom of experience.

*The four walks totaled twenty-four miles starting in Logan Square moving south via the green boulevard spaces and through Palmer Square, Humboldt Park, Garfield Park, Douglas Park, McKinley Park, Gage Park, Sherman Park, Washington Park, Midway Plaisance and up to 41st Street Beach.

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arbeC etselĂŠC

detail from Walk C Archival pigment print 2.3 x 3.5 inches 2017

The Walks (A, B, C & D) 680 Archival pigment prints 2.3 x 3.5 inches 2017

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purdnaH ymereJ

Jeremy Handrup

August 21, 1998 tells the story of one night from a family vacation nearly twenty years ago. The story is told from each family member’s perspective, showing not only the disparity between each person’s account, but also how memory becomes more of an expression of power and control than of objective truth. In this work, I aimed to explore the psychological and narrative history of my own family’s history with depression, alcoholism, and destructive behavior. I pair source interviews with members of my immediate and extended family with images of their present lives. The work exists somewhere between staged photography and documentary film, focusing on specific events from my family’s past but using the lens to show the crafted nature of narrativizing one’s own experience.

“August 21, 1998” (Video Still) Archival pigment print 9 x 16 inches 2017

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purdnaH ymereJ

“August 21, 1998” (Video Still) Archival pigment print 9 x 16 inches 2017

“August 21, 1998” (Video Still) Archival pigment print 9 x 16 inches 2017

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leztiM sivarT

Travis Mitzel

There is trouble looming for many species. As the Earth’s temperature continues to rise the temperature shift will exacerbate habitat loss, fungus lethal to amphibians will spread, human migration / development / war, acclimatization of invasive species and many other factors will place immense pressure on current ecosystems. To help visualize these ominous threats I would attach a balloon to a 3D ragdoll model of a modern animal species. The balloon would pull the model toward the sky while the weight of the model would eventually lead to an uneasy balance. This tension is expressive of the hard to imagine threats acting upon animals.

Pleistocene, Anthropocene, is this scene? (Installation Detail) 15 video shorts, computer monitor, floating shelf, mac mini, beats pill, live moss. 2 x 6 feet 2017

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Pleistocene, Anthropocene, is this scene? iIs a series of video shorts documenting my attempts to respawn and reanimate extinct species in a digital environment. I was interested in respawning megafauna species whose extinction histories all implicate man as an accomplice to their demise. What I found upon respawning these animals is that they would lay flat without my support on one of the articulation points. I would hold the model and try to support it and attempt to help it regain control over itself. However the lack of a skeletal structure proves too much for these animal models and their forms lay back down and do nothing similar to their actual counterparts.

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leztiM sivarT

Crocodile and Balloon Archival pigment print 30 x 24 inches 2017

Elephant and Balloon Archival pigment print 30 x 24 inches 2017

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htidereM esseJ

Jesse Meredith There is a positive relationship between power and fear. Tracing fear in social systems across divergent realities can articulate this relationship. My practice functions as a mirror in which a viewer must navigate their own position in existing systems of power and judgement. My process involves intensive field research in which I engage directly with communities to build an internal understanding of a situation. Using these experiences as reference points, I work to complicate popular conceptions of social structures. Currently, I am investigating right-wing mentalities and the environments in which they thrive. Using the visual vocabularies of suburban architecture, shooting ranges and signage, I examine the cultural production of fear and how fear, in turn, produces its own culture. Assertive language is abstracted from political intentions, mundane American landscapes are scrutinized to reveal underlying fears that govern public and private spaces, self-defensive training illuminates self-fulfilling violence through normalization. The work openly communicates in more than one direction to question and dismantle fear and its sources.

Perforated Barrier Archival pigment print, OSB 20 x 26 x 1 inches 2017

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htidereM esseJ

Again Again Again Again Cotton hat One size fits most 2017

Obstacle To Exchange Archival pigment print, OSB, pine, latex paint 28 x 24 x 6 inches 2017

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ebeiW mailliW

Copper 100% (Jiangxi Copper Corporation, Guixi) 2017

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William Wiebe

The Tell is an ongoing project comprising photographs, sculptures, and video that investigate the material legacies of September 11th. The project attempts to decipher the traces left by the event on contemporary political discourse through site and material, even as it disputes the truth-claims of those forms with its own juxtapositions and fictions. The former Fresh Kills landfill, a burial site for the wreckage of September 11th, offers the site of disposal as a site of inquiry. Approached as an archaeological tell, the landscape becomes an archive. Excavation Record, the suite of images from which these are taken, imagines the cross-contamination of histories through seriation, interweaving materials to assess present conditions. These pieces invoke the contingent structure of ideology through relationships of material: copper ore extracted from Afghanistan to be minted as ingots at the Jiangxi Copper Corporation, which owns the extraction rights to the copper ore contained at Afghanistan’s oldest Buddhist site, Mes Aynak, and a piece of lapis lazuli equivalent (in price) to an illicit medallion minted from World Trade Center steel. Through their considerations of materiality, these pieces critique the mechanisms by which myth imbricates and constrains political identities.

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ebeiW mailliW

Blue Lapis Lazuli Rough Specimen With Pyrite Crystal - 1.6 lb Large Afghanistan, $29.95 (crazybodies) 9/11 anniversary meallion with recycle steel from the world trade center, $29.95 (deniskozak) 2017

Copper 57.7% (Mes Aynak, Afghanistan) 2017

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notgnihsaW iruZ

Zuri Washington The legacy of Ancestral Memory runs as a through line for all my work, both directly and subconsciously. Through my research into the spirituality of West Africa that survived into Black American traditions, my own personal family history, and the blending of my art practice with my spiritual one, I project unsteady images with conviction. The contrast of black and white, on and off, a simple binary, serves as the foundation for understanding the mechanisms at play. It becomes memory. The lines, stitches and sigils form a portrait, one both fundamentally different yet wholly similar to the pictures in my head, pictures in my hands, in books, on my phone, and wherever else they exist. The materiality is familiar yet different, cloths like bed sheets, starched itchy tulle from wedding dresses, soft screens like the ones with holes in them in my grandmother’s house. Through the hand I fortify these memories, and subsequently my relation to my family, my ancestral ties, and a historical insistence that cannot be easily swayed. These portraits—fragments of memory crystalized in threads and soft ever collapsing structures—exist both as physical objects and as images based on their proximity to one another. The binary nature of photography, exposed and unexposed, is endlessly reproduced through the alternation of fabrics and the care given to lighting the installation space. Filtered again through the lens objects become subjects again, sections strung together to create a map of the installation itself. Each iteration is informed by the last, each iteration is different, and each iteration cannot exist without the other.

Stand In Fujifilm Instax Polaroid 2017

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notgnihsaW iruZ

On the Other Side (Installation Detail) Reflective plexiglass, chalk, yarn, pins, photographs 2017

A Chance Encounter (Installation Detail) Archival pigment print, chiffon, chalk drawings 2017

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uX uynauG

Guanyu Xu

I was born and raised in a conservative family in Beijing, China, where expressions of overt non-heteronormative behavior were forbidden. It was not until my arrival to the United States in 2014 that I finally had the courage to reveal my homosexuality. My exposure to American culture as a teenager through films and TV shows planted an American Dream in my mind. However, I came to realize that this perception was not entirely accurate. My study of American history has resulted in my knowledge of deep-rooted anti-Chinese sentiments. Specifically, regarding sexuality, the dominance of white, macho gays has meant that I became an undesirable alien in this “land of freedom.” In my series One Land To Another, I present my personal journey in the United States in a half documentary and half fictional narrative to examine the intersectionality of race, sexuality, and citizenship. I intersperse self-portraits of my staged death and American landscapes, with images in which I perform acts of intimacy with other gay men. The presence of my Asian body disrupts the dominance of queer aesthetics, which privilege a narrow, white, “masculine” homonormativity. My confrontation and exploration allow a diverse representation that usually is underrepresented. Ultimately, through the exploration different cities in the US, the work will offer an alternative representation of gay men that is seldom found in the mainstream. Sea (Lake Michigan) Archival pigment print 28 x 35 inches 2014

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A Good Asian Boy Archival pigment print 32 x 40 inches 2015

Display Window Archival pigment print 24 x 30 2015

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AC K N O W L E D G M E N T S

Thank you to all artists in the MFA Photography program at SAIC for their hard work and contributions. Thank you Rachel Adams for the time spent learning about each artists through studio visits and interviews. Thank you AimĂŠe Beaubien for organizing the production of this catalog.

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SCHOOL OF THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO

Master of Fine Arts Department of Photography

2018 Editor

Rachel Adams Senior Curator of Exhibitions University at Buffalo Art Galleries Buffalo, New York

Project Coordinator

Aimée Beaubien Faculty, Department of Photography School of the Art Institute of Chicago Chicago, Illinios

Designer

Christopher Cunningham Loupe LLC

Printed in Chicago U.S.A. All artwork © 2018 the artists All texts © 2018 the authors Typeset in Trade Gothic


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