virtual gallery

my art

gallery work

thanks for viewing my install for grad show one :]
my "webbed site" is pretty out of date and under construction.
there's like. a bunch of art i made during my time at SAIC that i havent processed yet lol

portfolio

Virtual Exhibitions on SecondLife

📄read_me.txt

they / themi claim no home town but i do have a home page. growing up queer somewhere vaguely midwestern, it wasn't exactly safe or welcome for me to express my sexuality or relationship to gender. i experienced a lot of targeted isolation from my peers, so i found better peers amongst the online communities i called home in the early 2000's. i constructed new modes of being through my avatar, my profile, the multiplayer online worlds i explored. i learned how to draw on a Wacom Graphire so I could draw and animate profile pictures for my BBS forum friends. the fine arts entered my life later in adolescence and provided a different way to find safety and community while being honest about myself, but that "me" remained moderated and separate from the unfiltered weirdo i was online.i've become a casual scholar of the wild wild west of the internet that we saw in the 'aughts. meme as an egalitarian format of collaborative art making and preservation of imagery that has a very short half-life online is especially interesting to me. i'm interested in the overlooked reality of the virtual, the materiality of data, and the life lived online.

CV🤍michael james roberts is a material ambivalent multidisciplinary artist/internet creature from somewhere vaguely midwestern, exploring the expanded field of painting and image-making through the sublimation of digital ephemera and art object. Topics include: light and projection, screens, the avatar, queering the GUI, meme as a communal art practice, sardonic esoteric humor, and catboys. They also work professionally in the gallery as both an installation and a curatorial assistant as well as a technology generalist and projectionist. They received their BFA in Studio Art from Texas State University in 2020, and a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate & MFA from SAIC in 2024.Education
2024 MFA, Painting and Drawing, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
2022 Post-baccalaureate Certificate in Painting and Drawing, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
2020 BFA, Texas State University, San Marcos (December 2020)Exhibitions
2024 Graduate Exhibition One, SAIC, Chicago IL
2022 Post-baccalaureate Yearly Show, SAIC, Chicago IL
2020 Conversations with the Void Thesis Exhibition, Texas State University, San Marcos TX
2020 Artopsy: Perceptions of the Body, Online Exhibition
2019 Hallway Exhibition, Texas State UniversityGallery/Curatorial Work
(Graduate Curatorial Assistant):
2024 Spring Undergraduate Exhibition, SAIC, Chicago IL
2023 Fall Undergraduate Exhibition, SAIC, Chicago IL
(Graduate Install Assistant):
2023 Jacolby Satterwhite: Spirits Roaming on the Earth, SAIC Galleries, Chicago IL
2023 Low-Res MFA Exhibition, SAIC Galleries, Chicago IL
2023 New Work Exhibition, SAIC Galleries, Chicago IL
2023 Spring Undergraduate Exhibition, SAIC Galleries, Chicago IL
2023 Graduate Exhibition Two, SAIC Galleries, Chicago IL
2023 Graduate Exhibition One, SAIC Galleries, Chicago IL

thanks for being a part of my final critique at SAIC. this has been a truly transformative experience for me. i sort of gave up on art after high school and tried to make a life for myself in hospitality management and various other professions i tried out. i had been in and out of community college for 3-4 years after high school and had enough credits to transfer, so eventually i took the leap, quit my job and transferred to texas state. i tried out all the basic studio classes they had to offer. painting stuck with me and i got deep into it for the 2 years i spent there. i graduated in 2020 (yeah.) but i didnt want to lose my momentum so i went after applications to grad school. i got rejected from 10 different schools (including this one) but luckily i was recommended for the post-bacc and i made it in! i had great (if somewhat brutal) advising my first semester that really heightened my artistic practice as i remade my portfolio for applications the following semester to get into MFA. during my time in PDTW and in Chicago i changed a lot. i was totally alone in a new place and i had to rethink how i saw myself and how i interfaced with the world around me. i became a lot more honest about myself, weirder, more articulate, and much more confident and capable through my experiences in this program as well as my experiences working in the SAIC galleries. i don't know where i'm headed after this. i don't feel entirely confident that i'm going to "make it" in the art world, whatever that means, but hopefully this funny piece of paper will trick someone into thinking i'm some kind of expert and let me be around art most days. or even teach someone about whatever it is i seem to know. anyway, tl;dr so long and thanks for all the fish, xoxo.

work in progress :3