Gallery 400

Featured artists share their experiences and methodologies of how observation and investigation are part of contemporary artistic practice. Steve Roden, a California-based sound and visual artist, uses a highly interdisciplinary approach to art making, examining source material under self-imposed restrictions. Steffani Jemison creates work concerned with black history and vernacular culture that is steeped in methodological responses to found, partial narrative texts. Chicago-based artist Jessica Hyatt explores the lives of other Jessica Hyatts, and in doing so, creates a dialogue between the individual(s), Jessica Hyatt, and the singular Jessica Hyatt name. UIC faculty member in the School of Art and Design and longtime Chicago resident Julia Fish intensely examines the physical spaces located within her home, repeatedly and systematically capturing and recreating these elements to the point of abstraction. Each artist’s idiosyncratic approach of observing and understanding his/her distinct subject matter reveals the artist's own subjectivity through this process, and discloses how each artist, the observer, is ultimately part of what is being observed.