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Chad Wys
Chicago, IL
“I was born in Illinois in the fall of 1983. From an extremely early age picture books devoted to 19th and 20th century painting were more valuable to me than any toy. The impressionists were my idols and museums were my arenas. This naive fascination with art and its history would persists in varied degrees throughout my adolescence, contributing to a full-blown vocation in adulthood. I would go on to graduate from Illinois State University in 2011 with a Master’s degree in Visual Culture, a discipline with a multi-pronged emphasis on art history, visual theory, and philosophy.
From this initial exposure to recent art history I began to realize my own creative urges had always been active beneath the surface; in some ways dormant but in other ways persistently developing and sparking out. I had been active in graphic design since I first touched a computer at the age of seven or eight, I had always drawn but not well, and during my undergraduate years studying literature and art history I had even begun to paint in earnest—at first landscapes and later nonrepresentational abstractions. But art-making as a critical tool for grappling with socio-political concerns had never been a consideration of mine. It was in graduate school that I developed a use for visual art, with a distinctive vocabulary suitable for not only sharing ideas but provoking serious deliberation in the viewer, as a means to finally manifest my complicated philosophical concerns about objects and images—and indeed art itself.”
From this initial exposure to recent art history I began to realize my own creative urges had always been active beneath the surface; in some ways dormant but in other ways persistently developing and sparking out. I had been active in graphic design since I first touched a computer at the age of seven or eight, I had always drawn but not well, and during my undergraduate years studying literature and art history I had even begun to paint in earnest—at first landscapes and later nonrepresentational abstractions. But art-making as a critical tool for grappling with socio-political concerns had never been a consideration of mine. It was in graduate school that I developed a use for visual art, with a distinctive vocabulary suitable for not only sharing ideas but provoking serious deliberation in the viewer, as a means to finally manifest my complicated philosophical concerns about objects and images—and indeed art itself.”
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