Wildspace performs with Staab at Villa Terrace

A lush sunset over Lake Michigan created a ravishing backdrop as the performers began to dance in the garden of the Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum. The audience, seated on the long stone staircase that forms the central axis of the garden, was treated to a divine view of the dancers moving within and around Roy Staab's sculptural installation.

Members of the company performed in a variety of spaces throughout the gardens, such as this trellis. The audience, initially divided into groups and then later freed to wander, traveled about to witness each of the segments.

As the evening progressed the lighting became more dramatic. Using my iPhone I took only these three shots to represent the performance. Not only did I not want to disturb the performance or annoy those around me, but I also wanted to enjoy the dance without the mediation of the camera. It was enchanting.

For the finale, the audience was seated immediately before the Staab sculpture, which now loomed large and glowed with colored lighting. The dancers again interacted with the willows and reeds of the installation in marvelous symbiosis.

I attended opening night, last night. There are three more scheduled performances, Sep. 11, 13 and 14. If you act quickly you might still be able to get tickets from the Wildspace website. I heartily recommend it!

A “peculiar curiosity” lurks in the Lynden Sculpture Garden’s back woods

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What if the remains of slave quarters were suddenly discovered hidden in the woods behind the smoothly contoured landscape and monumental artworks of the sculpture park? That’s just one of many questions that might be raised by “Eliza’s Peculiar Cabinet of Curiosities,” which can in fact be found in the backwoods of the property.

Because of its semi-hidden location and—from a distance—humble character, the temporary installation by Chicago artist Fo Wilson could easily be missed or even dismissed. That is, until you walk right up to it. That’s when it become totally engaging.

Because I was out of town at the time I missed the opening, which was back in June. I was glad to finally catch up with this new feature of the Garden. The fact that the piece was located “out back” on property is significant. After all, maintaining its “natural” environment for the education of its visitors and patrons is part of the Lynden Sculpture Garden mission.

A circular swath of meadow had to be cleared for the installation. While not unprecedented—David Robbins’ “Open-air Writing Desk” (detail above) also is located in the “wilderness” of the back section—it is sufficiently rare that it adds depth to a sculpture that has no lack of meaning or symbolism.

The cabin is intriguing enough in itself. Sections of wall are opened up to reveal the interior and a ladder to the sky emerges from the roof. The exterior stud walls double as shelving for some of the “curiosities” indicated in the title.

The inside is decorated with many more objects, artifacts and images. They are arranged carefully, with almost obsessive neatness. The references to slave quarters and slavery is overt. But there is so much more than that as well. Here are a few thing that caught my attention.

Make sure you mosey on over to the far corner of the cabin and look down into the pail that sits there, surrounded by turtle shells.

The ceiling is worth a glance upwards.

Don’t miss the tiny figure of Thomas Jefferson being ladled up for our amusement—or derision.

My favorite moment in the cabin was when I noticed this intensely hued caterpillar casually worming its way along a bookshelf. A reminder, if I needed one, that nature is more than a setting for an outdoor sculpture like this one.

A distinct but related body of work by Wilson is on display in the Lynden gallery. Wilson alters postcards that depict stereotypes of the “happy servant” with the stated intention of  “restoring their dignity.”

While I was there I couldn’t help but notice a few changes around the grounds since I was last there. (Disclosure: I was artist-in-residence in 2015.)

The Brementown Musicians have been outfitted with colorful new duds.

It was a pleasure to see Marta Pan’s “Floating Sculpture No. 3” back in the water. It was missing in action the whole year I spent in residence, being restored. It looks beautiful.

The lawns are drier than I’ve seen them. We do need a little rain.

But the flowers are as spectacular as ever.

“Eliza’s Peculiar Cabinet of Curiosities” will remain on display at least through October 30, so you still have plenty of time to check it out. There have been several performances at the Garden in association with the installation. One final dance performance is scheduled for September 17. I’m putting it on my calendar. Hope you’ll join me there.

For more information go to the Lynden Sculpture Garden website.

Buns, Bugs, Nubbins and “What they thought” in Normal, IL

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“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” William Shakespeare

That famous quote from Hamlet is apropos to this review of art for at least two reasons. First, it was in fact to see a performance of Hamlet that I found myself in Bloomington/Normal, Illinois this past weekend. There is an annual summer Shakespeare festival (going on 40 years, they said) and several members of the Milwaukee Rep were acting in their performance of Hamlet, including the unconventional choice of a female title character played by Deborah Staples.

The performance was wonderful and wickedly funny. Staples brought to Hamlet’s character a kind of youthful, even adolescent energy and fragility, which shifted some interpretations of his temperament, words and actions. (Read a review in today’s Mke Journal/Sentinel.) All well and good, at least my thinking makes it so. But what about the art?

My wife and I went with friends to Bloomington/Normal where we were fortunate enough not only to stay with family but also to have a guided tour of art offerings in the twin cities. It was a great surprise and delight to find an exhibit of Claire Ashley’s work at the ISU University Galleries in Normal. Ashley came to my attention (in a big way) when I was artist in residence at the Lynden Sculpture Garden last year. As a visiting artist, Ashley was a huge hit with her enormous and interactive inflatable sculpture that visitors were able to enter and move around the grounds. (See my blog post about it.)

The constraints of the gallery setting made her work less interactive but no less marvelous or enormous. In fact, her wildly colored, bloated forms were squeezed into what otherwise would have seemed like large spaces making them seem cramped, like Alice after taking a bite of cake and growing large.

The playfulness of the work is accentuated in their titles, which run from goofy (“Hunnybunny”) through descriptive (“Hangin’ Drape”) to suggestive (“Worms,” “Suckers,” or “Rump.”) The show title itself is equal parts bawdy and enigmatic: “Cawt, Taut, Hot … Not.”

This untitled, site specific installation made out of colored and distressed foamcore, along with a selection of her more characteristic pillow-shaped and spray-painted forms in plaster became part of the gallery wall.

A separate, smaller gallery contained (barely) two related forms with glowing paint eerily illuminated with black lighting. Ashley describes her work as “cartoony organisms referencing motherhood and eroticism.” Drawing on her training in psychology, my wife had another interpretation. She saw the blobby, organic forms as both invasive and banal like petty everyday anxieties that have grown out of control and can no longer be ignored.

Ashley shared the gallery spaces with another artist, Rob Swainston. The title of his show, “We thought they thought what we thought, but they didn’t,” was what reminded me of the Hamlet quote.

Although two-dimensional prints, Swainston’s work was no less monumental than Ashley’s. And if they were therefore less claustrophobic they made up for it with a barely decipherable density of dark, moody imagery with veiled references to something apocalyptic.

Measuring a full 16 feet tall, the largest reached from floor to ceiling, evoking Chinese scrolls. Most involved complex, multilayered and off-register woodblock printing. Some layered the woodblock-printed images over digital, inkjet-printed ones, an intriguing and surprisingly harmonious combination of ancient and contemporary technologies.

Less successful, I thought was an installation called “Shingles” that wrapped around the corner of one of the galleries. But clearly, it must have been my thinking that made it so. Hamlet also said, “Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”

Nothing Kills A River Like Concrete: Exhibit invitation

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Concrete River: 

Memorial and Promise on the Kinnickinnic River

Photography by Eddee Daniel

Collaborative shrine and installation with Melanie Ariens

Alfons Gallery

1501 S. Layton Blvd., Milwaukee, WI

Opening reception: May 22, 1 - 3 pm. 

Artist's remarks: 2 pm.

I hope you'll join me and Melanie for this event. This will not be an ordinary photo exhibit. We plan an installation that will make the gallery feel like the concrete channel.

Exhibit runs through July 31

Gallery hours:

Wed, Thu, Fri, Sun 12 - 3 pm

and by appointment.

For more information: Alfons Gallery website.

Artist's Statement:

Nothing kills a river like concrete. How we treat rivers is suggestive of how we relate to the natural world in general.

Historically, rivers have been central to the growth of human civilization. This was as true at the founding of Milwaukee as it was in the Fertile Crescent between the Tigris and Euphrates. Somehow, though, in the late twentieth century, our modern society lost sight of this vital truth. Milwaukee’s three rivers suffered many abuses, including habitat loss, pollution and dams.

But there’s nothing like pouring concrete into it, essentially transforming it into a drainage ditch, to signal the destruction of a river. Sections of other rivers and creeks in the Milwaukee River watershed were subject to this debasement, but the Kinnickinnic River suffered the most.

In the 1960s the KK, as it is still affectionately known, was straightened and lined with concrete in order to mitigate flooding problems in the surrounding neighborhood. Although at the time this dramatic action did provide some relief from the risk of flooding, it also compromised the river in significant ways. The concrete channel destroyed aquatic and riparian habitats, degraded water quality, and increased the risk of drowning during high water flows. Ironically, today even the original intent of the channelization has become outdated and ineffective for flood control.

Fortunately, for the river and for the community, attitudes have once again shifted. Caring for and revitalizing rivers has captured the public imagination. On the KK the current solution is a project to remove the concrete channel and restore the river to a more natural condition. When I was invited by the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District to document the project area I jumped at the opportunity. It’s exactly the kind of subject to which I am drawn.

 

The KK River Project, officially known as the Kinnickinnic River Corridor Neighborhood Plan, is a joint endeavor by the MMSD and the Sixteenth Street Community Health Center. The project area is located between 6^th Street and 27^th Street. (An earlier phase of the project, completed in 2012, removed the concrete channel downstream from 6^th St.) The 50-ft. wide concrete channel is to be removed and a 200 ft.-wide rock-lined river channel created. This has necessitated the acquisition and deconstruction of 83 homes in order to accommodate the wider river. Although most of those houses had already been removed, I witnessed and documented the deconstruction of several of the few remaining.

Because the project is in its early phases, most of the images in this exhibit depict the river’s current state as a concrete channel. Furthermore, the installation itself is intended to reinforce the claustrophobic and treacherous conditions that exist. In order to represent the more hopeful future of the KK, I have invited environmental artist Melanie Ariens to collaborate with me on a water shrine to signify the restored vitality that is envisioned in the KK River Project.

See more of my KK River photos in my Flickr album. 

Chicago: City Creatures and the Day of the Dead

A day trip to Chicago took me to three distinct art exhibitions in two very different venues.

At the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum in Lincoln Park, the main attractions are live butterflies and family friendly interactions with natural history and contemporary ecological issues. But they host rotating exhibits of art related to nature as well.

The current show, called City Creatures: Animal Encounters in Chicago's Urban Wilderness, is based on a blog and a recently released book by the same name. It was curated and organized by the Center for Humans & Nature. The theme of the artworks, as the name suggests, deals with animals that the artists have encountered in Chicago. Among the many artists represented, who worked in a variety of mediums, were distinguished photographers, Terry Evans and Colleen Plumb.

A trip to Chicago in November is rarely complete without a stop at the National Museum of Mexican Art in the Pilsen neighborhood. Their annual Day of the Dead exhibit is always spectacular and--unlike most--seldom predictable. True to form, this year's exhibit, entitled La Muerte Niña: Day of the Dead, was more like a traditional art exhibit.

There were a dozen or so ofrendas (altars honoring the dead), a few of which were even more traditional in form than this one devoted to the singer Selena. 

Most were far less traditional, such as this one, complete with a marquee in blazing lights and titled Santo in the World of the Dead: Altar to the Silver Masked Wrestler / Santo en el mundo de los muertos: ofrenda al enmascarado de plata.

However, the ofrendas were widely spaced and the intervening wall spaces were hung with more traditional works of art, mostly paintings. My favorite was this very atypical, enormous installation of mixed media variations on the typical Day of the Dead skull motif (above and below, details). Each of the 40 or so "faces" is about 3 feet tall and the grid of them wraps around two sides of a huge gallery.

Here is a closer look at a few of the individual skull designs, many of which dealt with topical issues like immigration and climate change, among many other themes. Unfortunately, I didn't make a note of the name of the artist or artists who created them.

There are four concurrent exhibits on display at the museum. This one (above and below, details), by Rodrigo Lara Zendejas, was especially compelling. Entitled Deportable Aliens, it appears at first glance to be a set of shelves bearing busts. Each porcelain bust, however is sculpted in the form of a thumb and many of the highly expressive faces are composed of only partial facial features.

The thumb forms suggest the fingerprinting process required of anyone who is apprehended (such as immigrants), with all the identity issues that connotes. Their placement on the shelves symbolizes the commodification of individuals, subject to being bought and sold or deported at the whim of our government and society. The larger-than-life scale of each "bust" or thumb makes the installation especially powerful.

Art at MASS MoCA: Size matters.

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I knew little about the place before we drove into the parking lot on a dreary, wet December day. I had read that it specialized in contemporary art and it was big. I had no idea how big.

The entrance was nowhere to be seen. After asking directions we made our way under a bridge connecting two massive brick buildings, then along a spacious paved yard bounded by more of the same. It all looked very much like what it once had been: a mill dating from the Revolutionary War period.

Turning a corner towards a courtyard surrounded by similar structures it suddenly became obvious that this was no longer a mill and in fact not any kind of ordinary place. A series of six contorted trees were growing from the bottoms of inverted stainless steel planters trussed up on telephone poles. Alice, the White Rabbit and the Red Queen might have felt at home amid what I later learned was an enormous work of art called “Tree Logic,” created by Natalie Jeremijenko. Even though defoliated by winter the trees clearly had been straining to correct the illogical orientation of their planting.

I soon learned that “enormous” could describe without hyperbole much of MASS MoCA. The former mill is a complex of many large, interconnected buildings that cover 13 acres in downtown North Adams, Massachusetts. As an electronics factory that served the military and space industries from 1942-1985 it employed over 4,000 people in a town of 18,000. The mill turned factory has again been repurposed as an interdisciplinary arts center.

Inside, the galleries sprawled from one enormous building to the next. I’ve never been convinced that size alone confers value on art, but moving throughout the MASS MoCA complex and seeing the variety of intriguing installations, the significance of the scale of the place was striking. Considering the history of the place, the scale and interactivity of the art it now contains was made more poignant. The mill, so long so central to the life of this community has once again come alive, this time through the arts. The power of the artworks is imbued with the power resonating within the place.

I can provide little more than a teaser, not only because of the scope of works on exhibit but because so many of them require immersion in the physicality of their presence.

The work of Brooklyn artist Teresita Fernández filled several galleries on an entire floor of the first building we entered.

This site specific installation called Sfumato (Epic) is made up of over 40,000 small chunks of graphite that flowed throughout the long, narrow space like an asteroid belt or a swarm of flying insects.

Black Sun fills a three-story tall space with “thousands of translucent tubes” that create cloud-like formations in colors ranging from amber to black.

An exhibit entitled The Dying of the Light: Film as Medium and Metaphor features the work of 6 artists — Rosa Barba, Matthew Buckingham, Tacita Dean, Rodney Graham, Lisa Oppenheim, and Simon Starling — all of whom favor traditional light-sensitive film over newer digital technologies. None of these can be rendered satisfactorily in a still image, as you can imagine. My favorite was a film projector similar to this one that was dangling from the ceiling by the looping film itself. The machine gently bounced and swayed as it projected a wavering rectangle of white light onto the adjacent wall.

An exhibit by Lee Boroson called Plastic Fantastic filled an entire building with a variety of forms all made of the ubiquitous material. One low-ceilinged room resembling a multi-chambered cavern was far too dark to photograph adequately.

This complex and whimsical installation, called Deep Current, rains ping pong balls from a hole in the ceiling, which then get noisily sucked back up before they fall again.

This piece, entitled Moisture Content, is colossal in scale as well as suggestive of planetary spheres, galaxies and other celestial phenomena.

It’s Only Human, by two British artists named Nick Veasey and Marilene Oliver, is in a gallery called “Kidspace,” although you certainly don’t have to be a kid to be impressed by the work.

I could have spent far more time than we had available in Mark Dion’s Octagon Room. Austere and bunker-like outside, on the inside it resembles a cross between a Victorian cabinet of curiosities and a peculiarly tidy basement. There are jars of pickled animals, carefully tagged sets of keys, shelves full of books and strange juxtapositions of objects. A wall of portraits depicts many famous scientists in odd frames.

Here we see framed compositions of randomly collected pottery fragments from riverside beaches as far apart as the Thames in London and the Seekonk in Providence, RI.

My favorite detail strikes me as a bit of personal catharsis. Jars full of ashes atop a cabinet are labeled “Burnt Archives” containing the likes of “correspondence,” “gallery announcements,” and “press releases.”

The most moving piece for me was quite impossible to photograph. A projected video depicted a leafless tree in graphic white on a stark black background two stories high. White shapes that at first appeared to be leaves accumulated until the tree was full to bursting and did in fact burst upwards as the leaves turned out to be birds that rose and flew en masse down a long, narrow ceiling. The space, called an atrium, must once have been a narrow alley between two buildings. The birds are passenger pigeons. The piece by the artist duo Susannah Sayler and Edward Morris and writer Elizabeth Kolbert is called Eclipse. It mourns the infamous extinction exactly 100 years ago of what is widely believed to have been the most abundant bird species on the planet. You can get a sense of it as well as a thorough description on the MASS MoCA website.

Last, but hardly least, all three floors of an entire building are devoted to a Wall Drawing Retrospective of Sol Lewitt.

The three floors proceed chronologically, beginning with the early linear, monochromatic works on the first floor.

North Adams, in the far northwest corner of Massachusetts, is a little off the beaten track. But if you’re a Lewitt fan you have plenty of time to plan a trip there to see this show. MASS MoCA literature proudly announces that it will remain on view for “an unprecedented” 25-year period.

Stay tuned. After visiting North Adams we travelled the entire length of Massachusetts to Boston (states are smaller in New England than they are out here in the Midwest) where we managed to catch more excellent art. 

Okay, I'm back and here's the link to Boston: Order and Disorder.