Beautiful Snail
May 6–June 12, 2022
The University of Chicago’s Department of Visual Arts and Logan Center Exhibitions present the 2022 MFA thesis exhibition Beautiful Snail featuring works by Sophia Anthony, Caitlyn Au, Scott Vincent Campbell, Soo Jin Jang, Miles MacClure, Elissa Osterland, Abigail Taubman, and Wilson Yerxa.
Gallery hours:
Tues–Sat 9am–9pm
Sun 11am–9pm
Presented by DoVA and LCE with the support of UChicago Arts.
Sophia Anthony is an artist living in Chicago, IL. Working primarily in oil paint and drawing, her practice pulls from found imagery, translating digital and ephemeral photographs into multi-modal works that examine the performance and aesthetics of masculinity as it stems from classical Hollywood. She received her BFA in studio art and a BA in physics from Southwestern University, graduating summa cum laude in 2019.
Caitlyn Au is an artist whose work engages the zones of entanglement between thing and person, object and subject, body and embodiment. She treats making as a process of knowledge formation. Her iterative reworking of videos, structures and objects yields material knowledge of the entanglements between persons and things.
Scott Vincent Campbell (b. 1983, New York, NY) is a visual artist and curator. He earned a BA in Fine Art from Haverford College in 2005, and currently lives/works between Detroit, MI and Chicago, IL. He was the first Ford Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit in 2017. His work explores one’s sense of self and how it is influenced or mediated by the ways other people see us.
Soo Jin Jang is a Chicago-based artist. Her work crosses a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, and installation.
Miles MacClure’s (b. 1996) art practice considers, but is not limited to; a nearing invisibility of AI-generated products in physical forms, the shrinking uncanny valley, the half-life of one’s athletic career, a convergence of high and low cultural outputs, and involuntary speech acts. The objects and images he makes are pawns; moving from one end to the other, one square at a time.
Elissa Osterland’s practice listens, closely. Through image, object and live performance, materials surface what is often overlooked, attempting to make space for new ways of seeing. Elissa’s recent work has been exhibited locally in Chicago at The Hyde Park Art Center, The Smart Museum of Art, Goldfinch and Produce Model Gallery. She holds a BA from Cornell University.
Abigail Taubman’s practice works through photography, video and sound to slow down and investigate the layers that shape place. This deep looking is born out of walking, a tool used to poetically consider, question and engage with landscapes both past, present and future. Abigail holds a BA from Pitzer College, and has recently exhibited at the Smart Museum in Chicago, IL.
Wilson Yerxa is a drawer and painter with a background in poetry and theater.
Logan Center Exhibitions presents contemporary art programming at the Logan Center Gallery and throughout the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago. Reflecting the spirit of inquiry at the university, Logan Center Exhibitions focuses on open, collaborative, and process-based approaches to cultural production.
“Focused on making, the Department of Visual Arts is one of the many specialized knowledge communities at the University of Chicago, one of the world’s great research institutions. We aim to stimulate and provoke both graduate and undergraduate students, encouraging the development of independent and challenging thought as expressed and inscribed in the visual arts… Our faculty, diverse in its pursuits, is critically engaged in dialogue nationally and internationally. Our students benefit from this dialogue, and are also encouraged to pursue areas of overlap with the many other disciplines represented at the university…” —Jessica Stockholder
UChicago Arts initiatives join academic departments and programs, professional organizations, and student arts organizations to forge an integrative model for practice, presentation, and scholarship.
