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

Artists: Elena Feijoo, Jesse Malmed, Jonathan Loïc Rogers, Julie Potratz

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 the 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 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. 

Artist Websites:

Elena Feijoo

Jesse Malmed

Julie Potratz

Jonathan Loïc Rogers

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

Born in Canada, Elena Feijoo also has obtained citizenship in the United States and European Union. She earned her BFA in Sculpture at the University of South Florida in 2011.

In addition to his creative work, Jesse Malmed writes for publications like Bad at Sports, CINE-FILE, YA5, The Incite Journal of Experimental Media, OMNI Reboot and curates Trunk Show, showing artist-commissioned bumper stickers on a mobile exhibition space, The Nightingale Cinema, Deep Leap Microcinema and at spaces like the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Gallery 400 and Links Hall. A native of Santa Fe, Jesse earned a BA in Film & Electronic Arts from Bard College.

Julie Potratz is originally from Sumner, Iowa, and she received her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2008. Her work has been exhibited at Roots and Culture, Deitch Projects, Slow Gallery, Greenhouse Theatre, Cabin Exhibitions, Antena Gallery, Crimson Glow, The Paragraph, and Falmouth University in Cornwall, U.K.

A proud Memphian, Jonathan Loïc Rogers earned his BFA from the Memphis College of Art and Design.

Artist Websites:

Elena Feijoo

Jesse Malmed

Julie Potratz
Jonathan Loïc Rogers