New Photo Expression 2011

New Photo Expressionism 2011 will be opening on Thursday, Oct. 13 at the Blutstein Brondino Gallery. Blutstein Brondino Fine Arts is a full-service gallery in the Marshall Building in Milwaukee’s Third Ward.  The gallery invited Milwaukee photographer Lawrence D'Attilio to be a guest curator for their first venture into contemporary photography.

I am one of eight Milwaukee photographers featured in the show. The others are Valerie J. Christell, Robert Israel, Dara Larson, William Mueller, James Seder, William Zuback, and D'Attilio himself.

Christell should be familiar to regular gallery night visitors to the Marshall Building. Her profound and disturbing images on social, political and philosophical themes have been on display in her own Merge Gallery until she closed it in August.

D'Attilio's work involves complex surrealistic photomontages. Israel takes somewhat traditional views of land and water and pushes them into places of mysticism. 

Larson has a long established career in traditional print media. This time out she integrates that expertise with photography, a new direction for her. Mueller’s whimsical "insects" and macabre set pieces are astonishing in their conceptual and technical virtuosity. 

Seder’s dark flower compositions are far removed from the usual clichés that the genre calls to mind. Zuback brings us enigmatic and very personal fabrications. 

Blowing in the Wind

The five pieces of mine in the show represent three bodies of work: The Icon Series, The Reverie Series, and Accidental Art. You can see examples on my website by clicking the links. This one (above) from the Icon Series is the most recent.

Thursday’s opening reception is from 5:30 to 8:30 pm. 

Blutstein Brondino Fine Art is at 207 East Buffalo Street, Suite 212.

I am obviously biased, but even if I were not in it I would want to see this exhibit. I hope you’ll join me there on Thursday evening.

In his curator’s statement, D’Attilio says of this show, “The safe sterility felt in some contemporary photography is here supplanted by work that appeals as much to the heart as to the brain.”

Pulp Possibilities at Redline

“Pulp Possibilities” opened Friday night at Redline Milwaukee. It “celebrates … contemporary paper making endeavors” and features works that have been made in RedLine’s new Paper Making Studio. I missed the opening but visited on Saturday and enjoyed the show immensely. The mostly experimental works are appropriately diverse. Though the work varies in terms of its polish, the quality is remarkably high for a studio workshop effort and it shows off the possibilities of using paper pulp as a medium, as promised in the show title. Here are some shots of the installation, accompanied by excerpts from the artists’ statements.

John Kowalczyk: “ A transformation mask is used in Native American cultures and represents an animal transforming into a human. ...These masks represent equality between all living things. …I see pulp and paper as an equalizing factor between different works of art, a sort of skin that differs between every individual like the surfaces of varied artworks.”

Kari Couture: “Working in paper has started to bridge the divide between printmaking and sculpture for me. …H(ome)/H(eart) Bombs is a piece about the delicacy of relationships and the comfort we find in them. Home is often defined by the people we share our space with and when these relationships are threatened, changing or fading, our sense of home, belonging, safety, and wellbeing, comes under attack and becomes fragile.”

Laci Coppins: “In my current project, the self portrait, …the use of a template invites the observer into the repetitious hidden impressions. My intent is to rouse the viewer’s curiosity regarding the text and the message that exists. Finally, the spectator is encouraged to take ‘a piece’ of who I am with them as I strive to become more open.”

Jessica Laub: “the fragile nature of paper reminds me of the fragile nature of nests – so beautifully constructed with so much care, and yet so temporary, as is life. They exist for a season or two to nurture what is good, then the birds fly away and all returns to dust.”

Victoria Tasch: “Paper is temporary. …Sometimes the paper receives the marks of the artist; sometimes the paper is the mark. …My first paper casting project was a sand castle, incorporating sand into the pulp and on the surface. …The spontaneity and manipulation of the pulp/sand are therapeutic and intuitive experiments. This series will be finished when I take the sand/pulp castles to Florida to be documented and then they will return to the sea. Beautiful things are destined to end.”

Steve Vande Zande: An excerpt of Steve’s artist’s statement will not do it justice, as it has a diaristic literary style and narrative integrity. This delightfully twiggy character striding boldly across a disheveled book is one of four diverse pieces that Steve says “share the possibility of what narratives are presented in ephemeral litter with utilitarian purpose.”

Lawrence D’Attilio: “As a photographer I feel we create images that are limited by our five sensory perceptions and sense of passing time. …Wet pulp can dry into a texture that looks like a landscape in miniature…. We can consider that we are rapidly imprisoning the earth in the embrace of man’s ego. How do our limited sensory perceptions of earth, sea, and air govern what we permit ourselves to do that affects the earth?”

Dara Larson, who has been making paper since 1987, is the ringer in the bunch. Her statement asserts “paper is a wonderful source for collage, sculpture, artist’s books, drawing, and printmaking of all kinds.” That not only sums up the whole show but her own prodigious output. Her section of the installation includes pretty much all of that. The rest of the pix are all of her diverse installation.

Several of Dara's pieces were framed in glass, as above, and placed against the window. I not only liked the pieces in themselves but the way that their abstract industrial content and compositions harmonized with the view through the window.

“Pulp Possibilities” continues through April 2 at Redline Milwaukee.


(p.s. I apologize for the screwy formatting of this post. I wrestled with the blogger template and did my best!)

Frigid Night makes for easy Gallery hopping in Milwaukee!

After the optimistic report Wednesday evening from the Cultural Alliance on the state of the “Creative Industries” in Southeastern Wisconsin (see previous post) it was especially rewarding to see the creative spirit alive and well among individual artists last night. Fortunately for the few of us who braved below zero wind chills, it was easy to breeze through normally crowded hubs like the Marshall Building. Unfortunately for the artists and galleries – and the missing art lovers – a plethora of diverse and worthy art went unseen. I hope you all went out on Saturday to make up for it! There was too much to see in one evening, so I went back for seconds myself.

There was so much good work on display all over that I’m going to break with my own routine and give only brief snapshots and one-liners in an attempt to provide a sense of the extraordinary diversity I managed to see. I hope to encourage y’all to extend gallery night and day into a month or two of visits! I invite you to click on the links to the galleries and artists to flesh out my brief observations.

Oroza
Architecture of Necessity

I started my “gallery night” early on Friday afternoon at Inova. I was delighted to have the chance to speak one-on-one with Cuban artist Ernesto Oroza and to get a personal tour by gallery director Nicholas Frank. Oroza’s work shows how the people of Havana  adapt to social and economic realities there. I liked it all, but the surprisingly elegant goblets made out of cast off plastic beverage containers were especially stunning.

Tory Folliard has curated a show appropriately called “Color Vibrations.” Its very distinctive bodies of work include supersaturated landscapes by Harold Gregor, restrained color field abstractions by Mark Ottens, and extravagantly elaborate ceramic and mixed media sculptures by Albert Benedict some of which look like wild combinations of bird bath and baptismal font.

MIAD is showing an excellent dual exhibit. “Tiny: Art from Microscopes...” demonstrates the power of nano-photography to transcend scientific underpinnings and become aesthetic. Who knew how beautiful impossibly tiny things could be? Also “Visual Analogies…” a collaborative installation by Michiko Itatani and Bergitta Weimer.

You gotta love spunk or what’s the point of being creative? For the full gallery night experience I like to step off the beaten track. Sometimes I find unexpected gems and last night things were consistently hitting the right notes. At Atrio, jewelry store on Water St., I met photographer David Schrimpf. I found his nighttime explorations with a camera moody and captivating.

Next door, at Gallery H2O/Soup’s On I always find a nice mélange of visual arts and, of course, Mary’s great soups. (I chose Packer chili this time – yum!) Shout out to Steven Yeo and Tara Bogart, who have work there.



Reginald Baylor
End Freeway - A Love Story...

  The Marshall Building – of course! I can’t do this place justice, but don’t miss these:

The self portrait show at Elaine Erickson.

The “Winter Chapel,” an installation of ceramics by Linda Wervey Vitamvas at the Portrait Society Gallery.

Merge Gallery’s latest tour de force installation that plays off Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon: “there’s someone in my head, but it’s not me.”

Reginal Baylor is always coming up with intriguing new work in his inimitable style.

The Fine Art Gallery, Gallery 218, Light Ideas Gallery, studio pottery – there’s something for everyone at the Marshall Building!

A group show at Katie Gingrass is especially exquisite decked out in “White.” My favorite was Jeff Margolin’s ceramic sculptures.



Adolf Rosenblatt
The Oriental Pharmacy...

Portraits by Virgi Driscoll gave me a welcome reason to revisit an old favorite: the Rosenblatt Gallery. I fall in love with the old familiar (now long gone) Oriental Pharmacy counter every time I venture upstairs. At nearby Gallery 326 I finally found a lively crowd as well as a fine photography show by Jessica Kaminski called “Layered Journey.”

I finally made it out of the Third Ward to visit the Pfister where Katie Musolf has been ensconced as Artist in Residence for nearly a year. Her studio nook off their main hallway is filled with drawings and paintings in various stages of completion. It’s definitely worth a visit before she packs it all up in a couple months. The quality of Katie’s output alone creates a natural draw, but in person she is so delightful that it’s easy to see why people line up to sit for their portraits in her cozy studio.

After that I headed south. It was closing night for a nice little show of non-objective abstractions called “Bridging the Gap” at the Milwaukee Gay Arts Center Gallery on South Second St.

Kyle Talbott
at BYO Studio

I discovered an enticing venue on KK in Bayview called the BYO Studio and Lounge. This place was packed – with people and art! I will need to revisit this in daylight.

After that it was late and I beat it home, but I went back downtown today to check out the Pritzlaff Building and was glad I did. Talk about diverse! People there who I knew included Shelby Keefe, Frank Juarez, and my neighbor, Jack Lake. Plenty of unfamiliar work, mostly paintings in a wide variety of styles, made it a pleasant discovery. This temporary group exhibit called “The Best from Open Canvas” organized by Good Knight Promotions made it clear that Milwaukee is so bursting with talent that established galleries just can’t handle it all!



Sally Duback
from the Best of Open Canvas

And to think, I just picked places at random. You might have gone out and found an equally dazzling array of artists in other Milwaukee galleries.