Art & Art History
Yell Me About Myself
The second in a series of five UIC MFA Thesis Exhibitions in Studio Arts, Photography, Moving Image, and New Media Arts.
Artists: Chris Little, Hanna M. Owens, Nicholas Rigger, Matt Shaw
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.
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.
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.
Artist Websites
Chris Little Tumblr
Hanna M. Owens
Matt Shaw
Nicholas Rigger
The 2014 MFA Thesis Exhibitions are supported by Gallery 400 and the School of Art & Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Chris Little
1986 – Born in Louisville, Kentucky
1998 – My first French kiss; her name was Angel
1999 – Attended a Limp Bizkit concert
2006 – Watched Neil Young perform “Keep On Rockin’ in the Free World”
2012 – Michael Stipe of R.E.M. re-blogged an image of mine from tumblr
2013 – Learned what “Ad hoc” means
Hanna M. Owens was born in Vermont in 1987 and raised in Maryland. She graduated summa cum laude from Towson University in 2011 holding a BA in French Literature and Fine Arts. She studied French and Wolof in Senegal as a 2009 Benjamin A. Gilman scholar and taught English for the French Ministry of Education’s TAPIF program in 2011-2012. Her work has been exhibited and performed at spaces including the Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland Institute College of Art, Maryland Art Place, Institut Für Alles Mögliche (Berlin), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Links Hall (Chicago), Defibrillator Gallery (Chicago), Floristree (Baltimore), Load of Fun (Baltimore), and Little Berlin Gallery in Philadelphia. Her work has been published online on Internet Poetry, The Jogging, The Present Tense (May 2014), and on the cover of the Institute for International Education’s 2010 publication Open Doors.
Matt Shaw was born in Poughkeepsie, NY. In 2007 he graduated high school and moved to Bar Harbor, ME to earn a BA in Human Ecology at College of the Atlantic. He would live there for the next five years before moving to Chicago, IL for his MFA at UIC. Following an infatuation with cartography, letter-writing, beach-combing, and long walks in the woods with friends, he has turned to art as the attempted articulation of his situation.
Nicholas Rigger was born in Coon Rapids, MN. He graduated from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in 2010 with a BA in Studio Arts. Upon graduation he moved to Philadelphia to continue his education at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In 2012, he moved to Chicago to pursue his MFA at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Artist Websites
Chris Little Tumblr
Hanna M. Owens
Matt Shaw
Nicholas Rigger