Field Notes Fellows
2016–17

UChicago Fellows

Joshua Babcock (PhD student, Department of Anthropology) works at the intersection of language, visual media, and the built environment. His current work investigates the changing relationship of the Singaporean state to its citizenry through the multimodal and multimedia production of the Singapore “nation brand,” a corporate-style regime of managed reputation or image applied to the nation-state. After receiving a BA in Anthropology from UChicago, he worked for two years in marketing communications, graphic design, and UX/UI design roles at arts and culture institutions throughout the City of Chicago.

Ted Gordon (PhD candidate, Music) is a musicologist and musician living in Chicago. After earning a BA in the Humanities from Yale in 2008, he worked for five years in music publishing in New York. His work, both scholarly and musical, responds to the fantasy of an “American experimental music tradition” by asking questions about identity, ideology, and desire. His dissertation project revisits experimentalism in the San Francisco Bay Area throughout the 1960s and 70s, considering intersections between music technology and systems thinking. He performs improvised music with electronics and viola in Chicago.

Northwestern Fellows

Daniel Dehaan (PhD candidate, Music Composition) is a composer, performer, and educator. He focuses on digital music creation and performance and regularly creates and performs music designed to be site and system specific, crafting unique experiences for each performance. His works emphasize the physical presence of the audience and utilize specially designed multi-channel speaker installations to envelop his audiences in the sonic experience. From the KROME Gallery in Berlin, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., to the Centro Cultural de España in Costa Rica, Daniel’s music has been performed at venues all over of the world.

Esau McGhee’s (MFA ’13, Art, Theory & Practice) interdisciplinary art practice is a critique of image construction found in landscape. Using photography, found objects, collage, and sculpture, McGhee's works physically embody conventional strategies of representation, class, and race construction. After receiving an MFA from Northwestern University’s Department of Art, Theory & Practice, McGhee went on to be a HATCH resident at the Chicago Artists Coalition. He has also turned out challenging exhibitions such as Economy of Movement at Harper College (Palatine, IL), Blackitolism at Sector 2337 (Chicago), and 80 Blocks from Tiffany’s at Elastic Arts (Chicago). He has also exhibited in New York City and Los Angeles and currently lives and works in Chicago.

Jessie Mott (MFA ’09, Art Theory & Practice) is a Chicago-based visual artist. Mott works primarily in drawing and painting and is best known for her watercolors of hybrid animal creatures. Her collaborative animations with the artist and writer Steve Reinke have screened widely at national and international venues, including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, VIDEOEX International Experimental Film & Video Festival in Zürich, and the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Germany. Her drawings were featured in Reinke’s video program in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. In addition to maintaining a studio art practice, Mott is an emerging social worker (MSW in progress, Loyola University Chicago) who is passionate about using art as a tool for connection and healing within underserved communities, particularly regarding HIV/AIDS and homelessness.

SAIC Fellows

Frances Lightbound (MFA '16, Printmedia) is an artist based between Chicago and Glasgow. Working primarily in printmaking, sculpture, and installation, her work examines symbolism and authority in the built environment and issues relating to the division of space and property. Her work has been exhibited in venues in the US and UK, with upcoming projects including exhibitions at DEMOproject (Springfield, IL) and Uri-Eichen (Chicago), as well as Chicago Artists Coalition, where she is a 2016-2017 HATCH artist resident.

Michael Rado (MFA '16, Printmedia) is originally from the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio, and currently lives and works in New York City. Rado’s interdisciplinary work spans sculpture, installation, and video, and critically celebrates the spirit of his middle-class heritage, prodding at themes of privilege, privacy, and sovereignty. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan, with a focus in Graphic Design and Printmedia. Rado’s recent work has been exhibited at a range of venues in Chicago, notably at EXPO Chicago, Pulaski Park with Fieldwork Collaborative Projects, and at Edra Soto and Dan Sullivan’s East Garfield Park gallery, The Franklin.

Nathan Tedeschi (M.Arch ’15, AIADO) currently works in the field of architecture. He holds a position at Sarfatty Associates where he works in various design fields, including hospitality, office, and the service industry. While at SAIC (2013-15) Tedeschi held several teaching assistant positions in the Contemporary Practices and AIADO (Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects) departments. Lessons involved various forms of working methods covering all types of media creation from the design world. His studies involved exploring some unique opportunities. These included working on the design of the 2014 SAIC Fashion Show as well as participating in the ’14-’15 GFRY Studio Program at SAIC. Tedeschi’s main interest in architecture is the study of urban public space. He spends much of his free time exploring the city and collecting experiences from the richness of the urban fabric. 

UIC Fellows

Sherwin Ovid (MFA candidate) was born in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, in 1978. He received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007 and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he received a Lincoln Fellowship in 2013. His work explores the limits of social boundaries and their perpetual transformation. As an interdisciplinary artist his practice is rooted primarily in video, painting, and drawing. Ovid has exhibited with Gallery 400 (UIC), Iceberg Projects, University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, and Cleve Carney Gallery.

 Javairia Shahid (PhD student, Art History) is an architect and historian based between Chicago and Islamabad. She has a graduate degree in architectural history and theory from the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University. Graduating with gold medals from her undergraduate institution in Pakistan, Shahid has been the recipient of the Fulbright Scholarship, the William Kinne Award, in addition to numerous research grants. Her research considers the relationship between development and the environment in South Asia, with particular regard to epistemological disjunction of two entangled projects: the present-day production of global heritage, and the historic-colonial-Modernist “other”ing of nature and ecology.

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