What is Synecdoche? My photo exhibit at BBFA

Transmission

First, mark your calendar: my upcoming solo show, entitled Synecdoche: The Fragment that Represents the Whole, runs from March 15 - 30 at Blutstein Brondino Fine Art, which is in Suite 212 of the Marshall Building at 207 E. Buffalo St., Milwaukee, WI. (Gallery hours listed below.)

Second, mark your calendar again: the reception is on March 22, 5-8 pm.

So, with that out of the way, let's tackle this funny title: Synecdoche.

Synecdoche is a literary device in which the part represents the whole. ("All hands on deck!" refers to the whole sailor, not just the hands.) My images are meant to be visual examples of synecdoche, which I use metaphorically. My subjects are the complex and often paradoxical relationships that I perceive between nature and architecture, or natural and human features in the landscape. My approach, using the part to represent the whole, symbolizes the fragmentation we experience in our everyday environment.

Live Oaks

How do we reconstruct a definition of nature at a time when our traditional understanding has eroded and nature seems increasingly reduced, manufactured and abstracted? How does being human relate to our notions about nature? These are not landscapes in the usual sense, but symbols of how we construct meaning and interpret our place in a fast-changing world.

For additional examples from my Synecdoche Series check out my website.

Gallery hours: Friday 9 a.m. - 5 p.m., Saturday 11 a.m. - 4 p.m., and by appointment.
 

Milwaukee rocks on gallery night!

Lake in Catskill Mountains (Woman throws crutches), Joel Meyerowitz

January is a gamble in Milwaukee. We all know that below zero temperatures and blizzard conditions could have killed any desire to go out on a Friday evening. Gallery night also is a bit of a gamble. There are a great many venues from which to choose and wide variability in the types of art being proffered by them. The very success of the venture can lead to crushing crowds in a few of the more popular locations and more of a carnival atmosphere than one conducive to art appreciation.

Last night, however, the stars must have been in alignment. Everything seemed to click, at least for me. I hope it did for you as well, if you went out. Every gallery my wife and I visited had healthy but not bruising crowds along with a wealth of wonderful art from the well established to the unfamiliar. The remarkable 40° temps earlier in the day left a balmy feeling that helped keep my spirits lifted between venues.

If Milwaukee is indeed one of the top 12 “art places” in the U.S., as recently reported, then gallery night was supportive evidence. (I attended a listening session on Monday hosted by ArtPlace, the consortium of foundations, gov’t. agencies, and banks that awarded the designation. The designation specified East Town and the Third Ward rather than Milwaukee as a whole, which neglects the overall fabric of a city that supports those arts districts as well as overlooking other significant places to find art in the area. But, mea culpa, I spent most of gallery night in East Town and the Third Ward!)

I don’t have time to do more than provide a taste of what we saw last night. Almost everything we saw was just opening and is ongoing, so check them out at your leisure.

We started with the trio of new shows at the Haggerty Museumof Art. Dark Blue: The Water as Protagonist sprawls through several of the galleries. As the name indicates, everything in this show of both contemporary and vintage photography relates somehow to water. Like the subject, it is a tenuous, fluid connection that assembles and juxtaposes conceptual with documentary, monumentality with banality. We raised our eyebrows now and then, but agreed that overall it’s a strong show. (And, hey, it includes my favorite Misrach image. How cool is that?! The Meyerowitz image at the top is also from this show.)

Swamp and Pipeline, Richard Misrach

Compressed within the tight space of a side gallery, local photographer Kevin Miyazaki has created a kind of chapel devoted to Lake Michigan. In a two-week period, Miyazaki drove 1,800 miles and circled the lake. One wall features portraits of people he met along the way and the facing wall is a grid of lake views in which the horizons are precisely aligned. The result is a surprising mediation on the not-so-subtle variations in color and texture of the water and sky. The two sides of the room suggest the interconnectedness of the human and natural aspects of the environment. 

Perimeter, Kevin Miyazaki

Gallery M at the Intercontinental Hotel is hosting the finalists in the Pfister Hotel’s artist in residency for the coming year. Once again there are a few surprising choices among the contenders and it will be interesting to see who is selected.

After that we headed to the Third Ward and lucked into one of precious few free parking spaces on the street, not far from Translator, a design firm that is hosting a show called Art in Unexpected Places. The work in this show was all done by participants in the Alzheimer’s Association’s Memories in the Making program. The watercolors are unpretentious and fresh. Each is accompanied by a short story about its creator. It is a fitting reminder not only that life is short and memory unpredictable, but that genuine art doesn’t have to be about marketplace values. 

Although we had other places on our to-see list, we ended up spending the rest of the evening in the Marshall Building, which was humming from top to bottom. Quick hits, descending from the top:

Plaid Tuba, the arts incubator created and led by Reginald Baylor, has moved from its first floor digs to an expanded suite of studios on the sixth floor. If any place can “manufacture creativity” as its motto insists, this is a good candidate.

Every year in January the Portrait Society Gallery commissions a local artist to create a “Winter Chapel.” This year Kevin Giese has installed a grove of hollow birch bark tree trunks culled from the northwoods near Bayfield, stripped and then carefully stitched back together. It provided a magical, quiet interlude in the midst of the clamoring crowds.

Sculptor James Toth has returned to the art scene after a long stint as Director of Exhibits at Betty Brinn Children’s Museum. His evocative abstractions made of polished “cementitious” materials with the appearance of marble grace a pop-up gallery on the third floor.

Along with the regular fare in The Fine Art Gallery and Gallery 218, always worth a peek, Blutstein Brondino Fine Art is hosting artworks by the Grand Avenue Club. The club provides services for adults who have experienced mental illness and displays its members’ art regularly on its own walls at 210 E. Michigan Street. It’s nice to see it acknowledged by a commercial gallery. Kudos to BBFA!

Last but not least, Elaine Erickson has anointed two long time members of CoPA (Coalition of Photographic Arts) with her first ever show of photography, called Eye of the Beholder. George Sanquist and Yong-ran Zhu are an appropriate match, each following the tradition of classic black and white silver gelatin printing process, which has become far from common in this digital age.

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.