Favorite Spring Candles 2017 MFA THESIS EXHIBITION 2

The School of Art & Art History welcomes you to join us for the reception of Favorite Spring Candles, the second in a series of three UIC MFA Thesis Exhibitions in Studio Arts, Photography, Moving Image, and New Media Arts. Artists Chris Hoag, Zachary Hutchinson, Nellie Kluz, and Michael Lopez will present artist talks in the Gallery 400 lecture room at 5pm.

An expansive survey of material debris, subjectivities, gestures, and ontologies, Favorite Spring Candles reminds us that the desire to possess and process things remains mysterious. If the rapidly arriving future promises intangibility, dismantling, and schism, what can we do now to bear witness to the human need to relate and to create systems that give meaning? When the apparatus for understanding is material, hierarchies of meaning issue from the arrangement of constituent parts. A foggy conjecture between disparate elements can create a gratifying order between chosen subjects. The impulse to pin down eludes these non-linear, liquid, modular, and performative works, but perhaps providing decipherability is irrelevant when details so minute and particular are amplified. These artist-created systems use the absurdly idiosyncratic to reveal something profound about the everyday. The works in Favorite Spring Candles use this position to point to how life and meaning persist within confined constraints and limited representational systems.