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The School of Art & Art History welcomes you to join us for the reception of The Crystalline Regime, the second in a series of three UIC MFA Thesis Exhibitions in Studio Arts, Photography, Moving Image, and New Media Arts. Artists Nicholas Ballesteros, Timothy McMillan, Monica Nydam, and Jimmy Schaus will present artist talks in the Gallery 400 lecture room at 5pm.

Art is searching…

Terms are entered into Google and images defined. Possibilities open up in which an image of one’s own physical body can create a populous of digital bodies, a virtual Adam’s rib. The real and the searched take on each other’s identifying marks and can be reversed.

The crystalline image occurs when an actual image crystallizes with its own virtual image. When they come together they de-solidify; the actual becomes dark and the virtual becomes limpid.

Our bodies open portals to other realms. In a soft control society, people we know become characters, actors, personas that speak in cipher. They exist in a circuit where the real and the imaginary, the actual and the virtual, chase after each other, exchange their roles and become indiscernible.

The image search becomes the conceptual edifice for the canvas. Personal moments captured in the cloud allow us to be visitors to our own reality, outside of linear time. When will this dissonance disturb our narrative? The painting becomes a threshold between the private and the seeking public.

When a memory or experience becomes a form can it have emotions? All of the sculptural form’s borrowed parts, well-worn and nostalgic, hold an uncanny energy. Self-analysis takes shape through these formal elements; hazy mental images face objecthood.

The crystalline regime stands in for its object, and creates it; this is the regime of the imaginary.