Michelle Graves will have completed an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts and Media, Columbia College Chicago where she received the full Folletts Graduate Fellowship May 6, 2012. She was president of her departments student organization, IMAGe Unit, from 2011-2012 and secretary 2009-2011.
  Her artwork is text-based speckled with the utilization of a technological skill-set. The text is informed and influenced by an interdisciplinary research practice of neuroscience, anatomy, quantum physics, existential and phenomenological philosophy, empiricism, religion and, of course, the infinite mysteries of death and consciousness.
   She thrives in Chicago as freelance graphic/web designer, Photoshop retoucher and will be teaching Photoshop and the CS suite at Columbia College Chicago and Lake Forest College in the Fall of 2012. She is also assistant to media artist and University of Chicago DOVA Assistant Professor, Jason Salavon.
   In her spare time she was a founding board member (2007), former Marketing Manager (2007-2009), and current participating skater for the internationally ranked Chicago Outfit Roller Derby League.

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MFA Thesis Statement, 2012:
“The Principal fact about modern man’s life is that it is ‘a mess,’ ‘a confusion,’ ‘a chaos’ …to find a form to accommodate the mess, that is the task of the artist now.” - quote by Samuel Beckett. I personally get caught up in the fascination with technology, constant access to the internet and social networks and the overload of unnecessary information that is our modern chaotic society. I have been searching for a calm within the chaos. It has been a cyclical journey of hyper-analytical self-reflection. This Hegalian-esk cycle consists of experience, emotional reaction and hyper-analyzation, with the latter being a main source of material for my art making. All the while, my body exists in the present. My heart pumps my blood energizing my brain and the rest of my organs. But, the most important semi-controllable essential bodily function vital to the process of energizing blood cells and relaxing the body is, breathing. Therefore, a way for humans to find a calm within the chaos despite our modern chaotic society is to focus on the breath. I challenge myself to remember to breathe. Subsequently, I challenge my audience to transgress, cross the boundary past all distractions into the self, find a self-awareness, a calm within the chaos, through the simple use of the breath. For my current project, I have created an opportunity for the viewer to pause and reach a personal association with breath or breathing. This installation guides the viewer through a variety of entry points like handwritten text pertaining to breath, video projection of specific vocabulary pulled from the handwritten text, and most importantly an interactivity utilizing the viewers breath to trigger the videos. The title is Transgression Through Your Breath, with transgression meaning to cross the boundary, past all distractions, into the self. I use this term in reference to Bell Hooks and a quote from her book, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics, page 133. “To transgress I must move past boundaries, I must push against to go forward. Nothing changes in the world if no one is willing to make this movement.” A large source of material for this installation’s language comes from my interdisciplinary approach to research. I focused on aspects of breath and breathing through the lenses of anatomy, neuroscience, quantum physics, phenomenological and existential philosophy, empiricism, and Kabbalistic thought. For the interactivity of the installation, the viewer is required to blow across a sensor triggering a specific video for the projection of moving text. The trigger is almost simultaneous to the breath interactivity simulating words coming from the viewer’s breath. The triggered text video is loosely associated with the strength of the viewer’s breath. My goal is that by providing an opportunity for the viewer to interact with their own breath also provides an opportunity for them to think about their own breath. This is a form of self-awareness and a key element in the initial steps towards transcending the calm within the chaos.

Artist Statement, 2011:
It is my goal in art making to organize my personal experiences in a poetic, scientific, and philosophical approach. In these methods, I create visual work that is based on my personal 'existential' theories that have been developing since 2003. I attempt to communicate to the audience an honest sense of my experiences and the process, or train of thought, within them. I believe that we all have a unique, individual, singular train of thought. From the day we are born, our bodies exist in the present moment. Within our bodies, the brain contains a train of thought that moves along a neurological path, engined by the individual's breath, heartbeat, and synapse. This is all contained in time. All external experiences that an individual goes through are framed by the physical senses and leave a trail along this neurological path in the brain. When a train of thought 'engine' runs along a path that is familiar, it associates or triggers emotions and memories that are brought back to the present moment and used in the individual's reaction to an experience. We, as humans, place subjective and objective value on experiences that highly influence reactive traits in present moments. Therefore an individual's essence is comprised of all experiences had by that individual, considering the experiential intensities. My ideological material comes from a few different areas of research. One is neurological research mainly focusing on the frontal and central lobes, specifically the Hippocampus portion of the brain, which processes memory and emotion. Connected with this is Alzheimer's disease that my Great-Grandfather died from and Grandmother is currently deteriorating from. Alzheimer's is a degenerative disease that begins by plaque build-up, disjoining the neuron's 'tau' in the Hippocampus. This disables emotional and memory triggered associations. (Although some memories are still somehow triggered in my Grandmother, which are cherished.) I also hyper-analyze my day-to-day experiences with a mental and physical self-awareness, as well as find inspiration from philosophers to mapping to graffiti artists. I am currently exploring the present moment in my text based, design aesthetic work. This is highly influenced by my Grandmother, who only exists in the present, and by existential philosophy that is based on individual presence. I challenge myself to maintain a full awareness of my thoughts in the present moment and translate them to paper. I do this as a performance in the style of what I call "Design Aesthetic Freestyle Writing." There are elements of fear and vulnerability during these performances but I utilize those thoughts, and the influence of my surrounding atmosphere, as material for my writing.