A cavern. In the middle, a boiling cauldron, the last in a series of three UIC MFA Thesis Exhibitions in Studio Arts, Photography, Moving Image, and New Media Arts featuring artists Liz Cambron, Sara Condo, Grace Cross, and Rachel Glass.

Setting the stage for the well-known three witches scene in Macbeth: A cavern. In the middle, a boiling cauldron. Employed as a stage direction for an exhibition, it positions artworks in a scene of film and video installations, photographs, and performance ephemera that visitors enter into. The works in A cavern. In the middle, a boiling cauldron exists as both apparitional forms—referencing memories, dialogue, and social movements—and possess kitschy, eccentric materiality.

Casting a backdrop more vivid than the white cube, an exhibition composed as a theatrical space proposes an experiential connection to storytelling, filmmaking, and the ritual of performance. A free-form hex on convention, on a canon, these works pose an opportunity to visually resolve and represent such complex issues as race, feminism, and cultural borders being surfaced by crossover genres. Allegorizing everyday and the mythic in the same space, a visual narrative emerges from intersectional perspectives.

Eliciting the three weird sisters of Macbeth acts as a provocation to foreground female experience, otherness, and the unrecognized. Through art’s metamorphic activity, traces of these experiences can be transmitted into the culture and open its boundaries. Witchcraft can be enacted as a form of protest, a call to action, in a ritual space that considers the future and transformation.

Liz Cambron is a film and video maker based in the Midwest. Her work bridges both fiction and non-fiction, centering/decentering gendered relationships, power systems, and the subjectivities produced by suffering. She refers to her current work as poetic ‘protests.’

Grace Cross (b. Zimbabwe, 1988) is a trans-global material painter, fiber, and video maker who enacts symbols rooted in African cosmology that question ideas of home, labor, gender roles, and security of space today for the foreign body; making for shifting recipes that address the repercussions of colonial heritage.

Sara Condo (b. 1987) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago, IL. Born and raised in Cicero, IL, she is a third­ generation Lithuanian­ American who uses personal narratives and mythology as a living site for exploration into the complexity of socio­economic class, psychology, and gender. Using photography, video, sound, computer programming, and sculpture, her work depicts the meditative moments present in our everyday lives that illuminate truths of the human condition. Condo studied Media Arts at DePaul University and received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute in 2009. Most recently, she has been traveling to the American West to various intentional communities and plays in a band sometimes.

Rachel Glass (b. 1987) is an artist and filmmaker based in Chicago, IL. Working in the experimental and personal documentary and collaborating with nuns, neighbors, lovers, and tweens, she contends with whiteness and its effect on our historical and contemporary narrative. Glass studied Anthropology at Grinnell College, receiving a BA in 2009.

Liz Cambron, Sara Condo, Grace Cross, and Rachel Glass.