Art and science at the Urban Ecology Center

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Visual Reflections: A Printmaker Collective

“The challenge is immense.” The phrase lingers in my mind as I slowly circumnavigate the room, reading stories of environmental restoration and seeing artists’ representations of those stories. The “challenge” refers to what artist Douglas Bosley offers as a “call to arms.” Bosley teamed up with Kingsley Dixon, an ecologist in Australia, via the twenty-first century technology of Skype. In an exhibit label the artist outlined the specific challenge:

“For two decades, a million acres of western Australian land were cleared per year. Kingsley Dixon’s mission is to restore a million of those acres…. The challenge is immense. The land is essentially wasteland. …Nevertheless, Dixon’s group and many others are building the science and the solutions to make this dream possible.”

Bosley’s lithograph of ghostly flowers and a monumental “1M” rising from a barren landscape attempts to express that million acre challenge.

For Yvette Pino, founder of Bench Press Events and organizer of this project, the challenge was to bring together fine artists and ecologists like Bosley and Dixon to stimulate dialogue and collaboration. The success of her effort is displayed along the gallery walls.

The challenge for Bosley, as for each of the 12 artists in the project, was to create an image inspired by conversations and, in some cases, interactions with the collaborating ecologist.

The prosaic title of the exhibit, “Visual Reflections: A Printmaker Collective,” doesn’t begin to describe the complexity of the project that led to these prints hanging on the gallery walls. The theme of ecology is expressed directly in the premise of the project. Pino invited twelve fine art printmakers from around the U.S. to collaborate with twelve ecologists from as far away as Australia and China.

An untitled woodcut by Colorado artist Kim Hindman superimposes terrestrial and aquatic life forms on a map of New York harbor. The spatially ambiguous composition emphasizes the ragged edges of the famous estuary. A text panel identifies restoration of seawalls and the water’s edge as the specialty of ecologist Dr. Marcha Johnson, Hindman’s collaborator.

The colorful, boldly abstract patterning in “Return, Take Over,” a serigraph by Wisconsin artist Katie Garth, might be mistaken as merely decorative. But the conceptual rigor in the work as well as the interdependence of printmaker and ecologist are hinted at in the accompanying narrative. In the artist’s words, “John [Reiger] explained several restoration strategies… each using varying levels of intervention. Mentally, I juxtaposed the initial disturbance…with its subsequent restoration. Both altered the landscape, but with opposite intentions…. ‘Return, Take Over’ depicts the cohabitation of growth and decay in order to represent this duality in human disruption.”

A densely detailed and somber mezzotint of a subtly surreal scene hangs in a far corner of the gallery. Leaves sprout from oddly geometric rocks. Fantastical creatures seemingly made from splinters of wood and stone march like crustaceans—or scorpions—through a hard, crystalline landscape. The mood is dark, foreboding. The title, “LD.4334.1409,” which may refer to scientific enumeration, adds obfuscation to mystery.

The ominous mood comes as a surprise after viewing the rest of the exhibit. While diverse in other ways, the overall tone of the show is bright, upbeat. This is perhaps the greater surprise. Sunny optimism is not necessarily to be expected in an art exhibit about ecology in a time when climate change seems to be trending inexorably towards climate chaos. But while the haunting mezzotint with the enigmatic title may be more consistent with such a vision, don’t come to this exhibit looking for stereotypes.

In fact, don’t go looking for this exhibit in a traditional art gallery. The challenge for the uninitiated is to locate the exhibition space. The flagship branch of the Urban Ecology Center at Riverside Park has had arts programming as one of its missions since its inception. The lower level Community Room of the Center was designed with art exhibitions in mind. The austere white cube of traditional gallery spaces, however, is another stereotype to dismiss here. Viewing the art may involve maneuvering around a room set up for the educational games that regularly bring hundreds of schoolchildren to the center to learn about the natural world.

That those children may enjoy seeing on the walls serious art geared for an adult audience is not a bonus. It’s a deliberate strategy to establish interconnecting experiences. Ecology and a culture of scientific inquiry pervade everything the center does. The positive tone of this exhibit may be a consequence of that kind of sensibility.

Optimism also may be a motivating attitude for the ecologists. All specialize in the forward-thinking field of environmental restoration. The impetus for the project was the 2013 World Conference of the Society for Ecological Restoration (SER), which was held in Madison, WI. All of the ecologists chosen for the project are SER members and the prints were first displayed last year at the Conference in Madison.

Several of the artists went beyond the use of imagery to express ecological principles in their work. For example, artist Heather Buechler teamed up with ecologist Debbie Mauer, who both reside in Illinois. After hiking together in prairie preserves and discussing the balance of nature, they harvested big bluestem and panic grass from one of the sites. Their collaboration continued into the studio where they processed the grasses into handmade paper pulp “to create a paper that is tied to the place that inspired it.” The image Buechler printed on the handmade paper, entitled “Diversity in Small Parcels,” is a complex layering of grass stems, the watershed of the Illinois River, and a silhouette of Lake Michigan.

Several of the prints were even framed in unfinished wood recovered from discarded industrial palettes. The recycling effort is intended to resonate with scientific methodologies; it also takes the concept of the cycle of nature beyond metaphor.

“Visual Reflections: A Printmaker Collective,” is on display through June. The Urban Ecology Center is located at 1500 East Park Place, next to Riverside Park. Hours are on its website.

One final challenge: if you arrive at this unique gallery when no one else is there you may have to grope along the wall to find the light switch. At the Urban Ecology Center no energy is wasted. Creative energy, however, is continually being generated.

An edited version of this review first appeared in Art City.

An Intensive Arts Week

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The past few days have been particularly arts intensive in Milwaukee, at least for me and a number of other folks who I have seen repeatedly at different venues.

It began Wednesday with a lecture by photographer Brian Ulrich at Marquette University. His talk was in conjunction with the current show at the Haggerty Museum of Art. Ulrich is represented by selections from three bodies of work: Copia, Thrift, and Dark Stores.

Brian Ulrich

What do images of big box retailers like Home Depot and Target, or images of Goodwill and other thrift stores, or depopulated and abandoned “dead malls” have to do with the War in Iraq? Simply by looking at the prints in the gallery you might not even think to ask the question. But they do, according to their creator, Brian Ulrich, who painted a compelling case for it in his lecture.

In a short video we were reminded of that brief but startling moment in the post-9/11 period when Dick Cheney and George W. Bush urged the people of the United States to “go shopping” as a strategy for beating back the terrorists’ efforts to destroy our way of living. Ulrich’s trilogy of portfolios proceeds from the straightforward pursuit of such consumerism through the more shadowy but also more intimate world of the secondary market and then on to bankruptcies that followed the 2008 economic collapse.

Ulrich’s work is part of a larger suite of exhibitions on display at the Haggerty through May 18, 2014.

Thursday evening saw pretty much the same audience in attendance as three Magnum photographers gave a panel discussion at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Alessandra Sanguinetti, Jacob Aue Sobol, and Donovan Wylie were in Milwaukee as the second of three waves of photographers participating in Postcards from America.

Wylie, who was just completing a ten-day stint here, was able to show us three new selections from Milwaukee. The other two, unfortunately caught onstage at the beginning of their visit, had to rely on presentations of past work. Sanguinetti spoke of her long dormant desire to experience for herself a Wisconsin that she’d been carrying around in her head since childhood. Her first exposure to our fair state, at an impressionable age, was through Michael Lesy’s famous “Wisconsin Death Trip.”

Donovan Wylie

Sobol spoke passionately about the importance of falling in love as a motivation for his photography. His black and white imagery, mostly shot in close range with a hand held primitive camera, was stark, gritty, grainy and intensely intimate. Wylie takes a more formal approach. His subjects are generally architectural. “I think I’ve been in every car park [he’s from Ireland] in Milwaukee,” he told us.

Each of the three has a very distinct style and it will be interesting to find out how they interpret their visit to Wisconsin when their final work is exhibited at MAM next summer.

Friday evening I was torn. With intriguing exhibitions opening in such far flung locations as Racine, Milwaukee’s east side and Brookfield, I knew I wouldn’t get to them all. I did make it to two, UWM’s Union Gallery and the Sharon Lynn Wilson Center for the Arts.

Reginald Baylor & Adam Carr

The Union has a show entitled “Collaborative Design: Great Minds Think Together.” As the title suggests, it showcases collaborative efforts with the collaborators often coming together from a variety of disciplines, including functional design as well as visual, performing and auditory arts. There was a diversity of goals on top of the diversity of disciplines. Many of the entrants had collaborated in order to solve specific problems experienced in social situations, including medical interventions.

This is a kind of socially engaged design and art making in which the medium is clearly not the message, where art is not for art’s sake but for the purpose of making people’s lives a bit easier, more dignified, or for developing a sense of community.

Unfortunately, I arrived early and had to leave before the main event, a panel discussion with Reginald Baylor, Adam Carr, and Sonja Thomsen, who were among the teams of collaborators. The show will be up through Feb. 21, 2014.

The Ploch Gallery at Brookfield’s Wilson Center was filled with boldly abstract paintings by Patricia Frederick. The non-objective paintings, made by pouring liquid paints directly onto the canvas, were described by some as Rorschach tests waiting to be interpreted by the viewer. The dramatic contrast between the Union and Ploch exhibits struck me as symbolic of the way life itself is a Rorschach test and art the way some of us interpret how we live.

Consistent with the famous therapeutic method, when properly administered and evaluated, there is no wrong answer, no wrong way to make art.

Though her work has roots in the Modernist tradition of Abstract Expressionism, Frederick considers the term misleading when applied to her paintings. She joked that the show’s title, “Beyond Belief,” doesn’t refer to the fact that she was able to complete the work. It refers, she said quite seriously, to a spiritual moment in the process of creation when you no longer have to believe in what you’re doing; you know you’ve succeeded.

Frederick’s eloquence at the lectern was no surprise to those of us familiar with her 30+-year tenure as a highly acclaimed art educator at Pius XI High School. The fact that she is able to create a compelling body of work with such a unified vision in spare moments between full time teaching duties speaks volumes about her professionalism and devotion to art.

"Beyond Belief" remains on view through March 1, 2014.

Three days in a row were not enough this week. Today I will be attending the annual Woodland Pattern Poetry Marathon. I recommend it to all bibliophiles and anyone else who has ever been curious about the vitality of the poetry and literary scene in Milwaukee: every bit as vibrant as the visual arts.

If you want to hear my five minutes come to Woodland Pattern between 5 and 6 p.m. I’ll be reading a few haiku from my newest book, Deep West. The full schedule is posted online at Poetry Marathon.