Paige Rice at Gallery 2622

It was damn cold last night! My wife and I were going to check out a few gallery openings but we didn't get past our first one. Fortunately, it was a welcome discovery.

Gallery 2622 in Wauwatosa is showing the work of Paige Rice, who is a MIAD student working on a double major in Photography and Communication Design.

The primary exhibit is spare and evocative. The images are mostly of blurred trees. The prints are black & white and large in scale. They float, appropriately, I thought, unmatted and unframed against the while gallery walls. 

This lovely installation is supplemented with a shelf full of beautifully crafted hand-made books. Don't be put off by the request to use the white cotton gloves provided. They are well worth the effort to page through them.

Many of the images in the books, like this one titled "Reflective Perceptive 1," are delicate meditations on intimate details of nature and water.

The exhibit, which is called simply, "In My Life," runs through the end of February. Gallery 2622 is open by appointment.

Photographs courtesy paigerice.com.

Gallery 2622 opening August 5

Blooms, from the Icon Series

I will be showing selections of my work from two projects, the Icon Series of triptychs and the Reverie Series of photomontages.

The exhibit will be held at Gallery 2622, which, not coincidentally, is located at 2622 North 76th Street in Wauwatosa. The exhibit runs August 5 - 28, 2011.

The opening reception is August 5, 5 - 9 pm.

Artist Statement 

I believe that we live in a world that is fundamentally different than that of previous generations. The land is stressed, the natural processes that sustain life are stressed, and as a result the human species is stressed. Our unavoidable and often unconscious task is to adapt to these unresolved circumstances. My work tries to make sense of the paradoxes inherent in this human condition.

The pieces in this exhibit are drawn from two series.  Each series deals with particular formal considerations as well as subject and meaningful content.  While my work often involves very specific formal structures, form is driven by content, expression and an overall conceptual framework.   

Tower, from the Icon Series

The Icon Series uses the triptych, a recognizable formal structure with historical/cultural resonance, to emphasize iconic themes. The form places a central figure within a context that either magnifies its iconic stature and symbolic meaning or creates an unexpected juxtaposition. The central figure in these constructions is often elevated to iconic status despite its being an otherwise ordinary subject. It is rarely a subject that would be perceived as iconic and therefore it subverts or inverts the accepted definition of an icon. My intention is to invite the viewer to think about the subject and its relationship to its context in a newly symbolic way. Using multiple images emphasizes that our experience of the world is relational and conditional rather than singular and fixed. 

Burn

The images in the Reverie Series are subjective landscapes. They are less about a particular place and more of a meditation or emotional experience. Each is a montage created from multiple photographs. Like the realities I perceive, the facts are blurred: the image is removed from actuality to some dimly seen place between memory and desire, where the landscape is subjective and the intersecting spirits of nature and humanity are suggested.

The meanings are often ambiguous, but they refer to the tensions and narratives of living in an environment that is increasingly compromised or redeemed by our own actions. I am not a dispassionate observer and although the landscape I experience may be beautiful, it is never pristine. This work has been informed by author Bill McKibben’s “The End of Nature,” in which he asserts that nothing on earth is left untouched by human influences, and other ideas of contemporary environmentalists.

But, while they may relate to urgent topical issues, the images are not didactic; they are experiential, symbolic and emotional. My central intent in this work is to express feelings I experience when confronting a particular landscape at a certain time and—paradoxically—to find the universal in the specific place and the eternal in the moment.  

This is work that has not been shown in one place before. Examples from both series can be viewed on my website.

Glass Facade, the Reverie Series

Waste Land and two local exhibits of art with a social conscience

Another busy weekend on the art scene. Botanical blockbuster at the Milwaukee Art Museum, of course. (See previous post.) While that was fun – and a great way to attract a crowd to see great art – I also enjoyed a couple more modest exhibits of work with a social conscience.

Friday evening I started out at Walker’s Point Center for the Arts for the opening of “Carlos Cortez and Allied Artists.” Cortez, who died in 2005, was a prolific printmaker and indefatigable advocate for immigrants, the working class, and social justice. In addition to his personal activism, he influenced the work of many who followed, some of whom pay tribute in this exhibit. The exhibit organizers must be very pleased with the unexpected topicality of this show, given recent events in Madison. It runs through May 14.

Next I stopped at Gallery 2622 in Wauwatosa where Marianne Huebner, an art therapist at Children’s Hospital, is exhibiting her own work in a series of large mixed media paintings. Unlike most artists, whose efforts to express themselves in ever more novel ways often lead to self-indulgent excess, art therapists choose to use art as a tool for healing others. Art is created for the benefit of people in some kind of distress. The show runs through April 30 and the gallery will be open for the Westside Art Walk, a good time to check it out.

When I got home it was still early, so I popped in my Netflix DVD of the Oscar-nominated documentary Waste Land. It documents a project by Vik Muniz that takes art that can help others to a new scale, literally.

Zumbi is a picker. He lives in a favela (slum) near Jardim Gramacho, the world’s largest landfill, in Rio de Janeiro. Every day he joins an army of 2,500 who pick recyclable materials from the garbage. It is hard, smelly, dangerous work. Zumbi is also a philosopher. He rescues – and reads – books that have been discarded. He’s read Nietzsche and Machiavelli. He sees similarities between the medieval fiefdoms of Machiavelli’s princes and the turf wars, gangs, and drug lords of Rio’s favelas.  Zumbi dreams of creating a library for the community of pickers.

Waste Land tells the story of Zumbi and other pickers whose lives are transformed by an artist who grew up in a favela in Brazil and who wants to give back. Vik Muniz is now a very successful artist in New York with an international reputation. He has long made art from unconventional materials. Inspired by the landfill, he befriends the pickers and makes enormous portraits using them as subjects and their work – the recyclables gleaned from Gramacho – as his art materials. The results astonish everyone and transform Muniz as much as the people who become his collaborators as well as his subjects.

The inhuman scale of Gramacho is replaced by the individual lives of Isis, Tiao, Zumbi, and others who become monumental works of art. Along the way Muniz has to struggle with the impact he is having on them, whether it is ethical and sustainable.

To learn more, go to Waste Land. And put it on your Netflix queue.