October will be punctuated by the third installment of the 2024 Gallery Night & Day event, with galleries and museums opening their doors to the public on October 18th and 19th. In some cases, the artists showing at the listed galleries will attend their own exhibition for the event as a way to better engage with their audience, as is the case for Conhg Lopez at Grove Gallery and Shana McCaw and Brent Budsberg at The Alice Wilds. This presents an opportunity to learn about the works on display, buy work directly from the artist, and obtain deeper insight into what it means to create for Milwaukee.
The Green Gallery keeps their exhibitions rather sparse in their airy white cube on Farwell, even with two solo exhibitions this month. In the first, Tyson Reeder turns an expressive and critical eye toward current fashion. Although the paintings on display are not much like the traditional croquis one finds on pattern packaging and in the sketchbooks of famous designers, with features elongated by dynamic poses, there is something just as exploratory in Reeder's vertically aligned fashion figures. Puffy jumpsuits and abstracted bellbottoms replace clean lines and clear boundaries between the bodies and their attire. It's difficult to tell if all are even human, coddled as they are in expressive marks and patterns. This work asks us to consider where to delineate between fashion concepts and figurative experimentation, and if it's possible for clothing to ever represent a current social mode or identity. In a similar vein, Thomas Dozol's composite photographs capture individuals in a contradictory moment of animation and stasis. He has stacked transparent images atop one another, creating liminal portraits that paint a span of time rather than a single moment. These images are busy with conversation, usually presented against a home or artist studio backdrop, where Dozol met with his subjects. Every time some critic somewhere considers photography to be a dying art, pushed aside by videos or AI or painting, another photographer presents something brimmingly clever, as Dozol does here.
Open during Gallery Night and Day: October 18th (5-9 p.m.) & October 19th (12-4 p.m.)
832 S. 5th St.
Conhg Lopez's solo exhibition features the artist's woodblock prints that reflect his unique perspective on cultural legends and myths. Lopez considers himself to have adopted a new culture in Milwaukee, and although he has lived here for 20 years, his roots in Oaxaca and his Mixe ancestry form the bases of his visual art. His carvings often depict figures in dynamic positions as they engage directly with nature, wildlife, and man. Here is a figure with reins looped through a crocodile's hinged jaw. Here is a woman lying down nude on a horse. Here are two figures in tabletop position supporting a bighorn sheep, who is supporting a dog, creating a strange totem that feels more like an allegory than a literal depiction. In his most striking image, two men exchange blows amid defensive crustaceans and a large, phallic rattlesnake woven between their legs. The men are rendered in muscular layers, every tendon exposed in a critical moment of battle, as the dominating figure bites down on his helpless adversary's susceptible jugular. Lopez's prints will fill the compact Grove Gallery space with a tactile energy that makes these myths pulsate into life.
Lauren Woods' rose paintings are displayed like ship portholes along the south wall. Viewers can peer closely into their swirling orbit and feel as if they are on their back under a rose bush at night, gazing through the thorns at the stars and sliver of a moon. Painting in dusky gingers and Verona greens, Woods creates an interplay between space overhead and the natural world at our feet. Indeed, this series of paintings is titled "Space is the Vessel," where the circles represent a container for the infinite -- an experience with no distinct beginning or end. These works are accompanied by Nikita Vishnevskiy's eerie hybrid sculpture in the gallery's center, entitled "E.S.P." -- as in "extrasensory perception." It does feel like these objects are operating beyond an expected sensation -- made from soft fibers like nylon and cotton, they stand stiffly upright and arrested in resin -- and appear to defy their material physics. It is a puzzling little sculpture, a fragmented statement on memory and detachment, but reminds the visitor that not everything we perceive is neatly translated into clear representation. Sometimes it is more appropriate to emphasize the suspension between two states rather than solidify a concept that is so elusive.
Gallery Hours: Friday & Saturday 11 a.m.-5 p.m. or by appointment
900 S. 5th St., Ste 102
Shana McCaw and Brent Budsberg are the co-founders of Current Projects, a design and fabrication studio that applies techniques used in historical, archival, and scholarly architecture and interior design in contemporary installations. It sounds vague on purpose. The artists are responsible for work that has been shown in association with Sculpture Milwaukee, the Milwaukee Art Museum and the charming miniature-populated policy reel that rolls before each Oriental Theater screening (silence your phones, get some popcorn, etc.), as well as other initiatives that require rather niche craftmanship. For The Amaranthine Room, the pair installed a screened meditation and drawing hut for observing the natural world while remaining enclosed in a state of creative incubation. McCaw and Budsberg are specifically exploring how conditions can create or transform inspiration in a natural environment. Broadly, they see creative output as the result of meticulous introspection and a total occupation with building the conditions necessary to foster an artistic vision. See this show before it moves to a more permanent home in Iola, Wisconsin, where it will become part of an open-air studio for creative contemplation. The artists will attend on Friday, October 18th for Gallery Night.
Portrait Society Gallery presents a second group exhibition that focuses on artists working in textile and fiber manipulation. A number of names in this show may be familiar to individuals who regularly attend Milwaukee exhibitions -- Heidi Parkes, Ella Clemons,Rosemary Ollison -- but there is much to discover throughout the entire exhibition. Notable highlights include Kate Flake's Holding, a cyanotype pillow of a figure clutching her own chest. The volume of her body pushes up through the pinched stitches that hold her in place. Indigo shadows freckle her creases and dimensions, suggesting a body in low light, in the midst of a self-soothing moment. Other works achieve visual effects through other methods often employed in fiber art. See Natasha Das and Elnaz Javani for examples of how hand-dyed silk and fabric produces print-like or painterly results. See numerous takes on quilting, its formal boundaries pushed into realms political, low-brow, and abstract. This exhibition showcases an exciting range of approaches to a familiar craft and is not to be missed.
Rather than highlight a single exhibition from this season's edition of Gallery Night & Day, see what fits into your existing plans and try to make a stop along the route. You will notice artists from this list dipping back and forth between two or more identities -- cultural, professional, and technical. This adds a tension and complexity worth noting during your visits on October 18th and 19th, and maybe expanding upon further with the artists in attendance. Artists love these conversations, so don't be shy with your inquiries.
As an additional note: If you are a visual artist, gallery owner, curator, or arts organizer of any kind and would like to submit your exhibition information for consideration in the monthly visual arts roundup, please reach out to me with the details of the exhibition at least three weeks before the show opens.