Otherlands 5-D - Nina Bednarski

Opening Reception
Friday, April 21, 2017; 5-9 pm
Saturday, April 22, 2017; 12-5 pm

Otherlands 5-D remarks on landscape traditions through the personal narrative of the artist, Nina Bednarski. Her work pays homage to nature and the limitless realities envisioned within it. Her use of color and methodical painting techniques join to create the bright and enchanted environments in Otherlands 5-D. Striving to reach a meditative state while painting, Bednarski created this new body of work to inspire the mind and heart.

The paintings in Otherlands 5-D are made primarily with enamel on glass and acrylic on canvas. A methodical, slow-painting approach achieves a smooth, blemish-free surface reminiscent of mechanical print processes.  Experiments in mixed media sculpture accent and combine with the paintings to achieve poetic foregrounds that the landscape paintings enrich.

Nina Bednarski is a multi-media artist working and living in Milwaukee, WI.  After graduating with a BA from the University of Wisconsin in Madsion, she began a fifteen year career of group, solo, university and museum shows across Wisconsin, Chicago, and New York City (where she maintained a Brooklyn studio for many years.)  More recently, Nina has taken on several large curatorial projects in raw spaces, storefronts and experimental galleries in Milwaukee.  To learn more, visit www.ninabednarski.com  

Gallery Hours: 
Saturdays 12-5 pm and weekdays by appointment.
Show runs through Saturday June 18, 2017.

Warmer: Modern Quilts and Weaving from the Upper Midwest

Opening Reception
Friday, January 20, 2017; 5-9 pm
Saturday, October 21, 2017; 12-4 pm

WARMER features a selection of modern weavings and quilts by four regional artists working in fibers.  Their individual practices oppose the disconnect between work and meaning. Using traditional techniques requires long investments of time and careful consideration of materials.  This collection of work is a comforting yet critical response to consumerism and industries that thrive on exploitation.

Work like theirs whispers to the person seeing or touching it. It vibrates with the energy used to create it; deep concentration, patience, tenderness, hopefulness, and time are vital to construction.  The artists have developed unique approaches to fiber arts less through formal training than through their personal desire to create and explore.

MANDI SMETHELLS graduated with a BFA in printmaking from UW-Eau Claire , and currently reside in St Paul, MN. For the weavings in this series, she repurposed leather from five jackets found at thrift stores. Contrasting the texture of leather with colorful yarns transforms this unconventional pairing into delicate and beautiful wall-hangings.

AMANDA TOLLEFSON received her BFA in painting from Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design in 2003. She was inspired by ski fashion and the solar system as she designed the quilts featured in Warmer.  They are made of recycled sweatshirts that would otherwise be destined for a landfill. The utilitarian aspect of these quilts is elevated by their intended potential to transfer love.

JENNA VALOE is a self-taught textile artist with a BA in Cultural Anthropology from UW-Milwaukee. She is a daydreamer who attributes her innate fiber skills to the abundance of makers in her ancestry.  Considering place-making, symbolism, and magic in daily life, she employs large color planes in gentle  combinations to capture the calm of rural skylines.

KELLY WANDERER is a weaver and musician with a BS in Film Studies from UW-Milwaukee. Her formal introduction to weaving began in a a class at ABK Weaving Center.  She’s taught herself complex weaving skills through analysis of 1960s and 70s weaving books.  Her techniques produce technically sound fabrics using modern yarns and historic patterns. She’s drawn to the immersive nature of the act of weaving.

Leslie Vaglica, the curator of Warmer, lives in Milwaukee. She holds degrees in drawing,  political science, and apparel design. She currently works in costuming for dance, opera, and theater.  

Gallery Hours:
Fridays 5-9 pm, Saturdays 12-5 pm and weekdays by appointment.
Show Runs through Saturday March 18, 2017.

The Last of the Bohemians - Bob Watt (1925-2012)

Opening Reception:
Friday, October 21, 2016; 5-9 pm
Saturday, October 22, 2016 12-4 pm

“The Last of the Bohemians” features a suite of ten Native American landscape paintings from the private collection of Jimmy von Milwaukee. This is the first public thematic exhibition of Watt’s works since his death in 2012.

“The Last of the Bohemians” showcases Watt’s signature style of Native American Chiefs in repose on appropriated sofa-size commercial art landscapes.  

In Watt’s playful style, chiefs are “photo-bombs” that lurk in the background, dominate the composition, or meld into the picture like a double exposure in the wasteland of commercial kitsch.

Sampling the facial masks of modern art masters, 19th century portrait photography and the whimsical three-dimensional play of mobiles, Watt creates images that are haunting and haughty totems signifying the clash of the natural and manmade world that requires the viewer to  question what is and what isn’t art.

Bob Watt was a Milwaukee poet, artist and provocateur.  He was considered the most published Wisconsin poet.  His artwork is in numerous private and public collections including Jimmy Carter Library, Hugh Hefner, Jack Nicholson, John Shimon & the late Julie Lindemannn and the Vatican.

Gallery Hours: Saturdays 12-5 pm and weekdays by appointment.
Show Runs through Saturday, December 17th, 2016

View fullsize

Bob Watt painting in his studio, 1997.  Photo courtesy of J. Shimon & J. Lindemann.

Viewshed - Jessica Meuninck-Ganger

Opening Receptions:
Summer Gallery Night & Day
Friday, July 22nd, 2016 from 5-9 pm and Saturday, July 23rd, 2016 from 12-5 pm

Closing Reception:  
Doors Open Milwaukee
Saturday, September 17th, 2016 and Sunday, September 18th, 10 am-5 pm

Gallery Hours: Thurs & Fri, 5-9 pm; Saturday, 12-4 pm

Jessica Meuninck-Ganger's visual art practice can be framed as communal engagement in “making” by means of papercrafts and printmaking. She has a dedicated interest in learning and sharing the traditions of these practices, practices that are rooted in ideas of locale and community. Printed assemblages of built environments utilize paper's strength, translucency, touch, surface, and materiality to offer a unique "Viewshed".

Jessica Meuninck-Ganger’s prints, artist’s books and large-scale hybrid media works have been exhibited in museums and both experimental and commercial galleries regionally, nationally and internationally. Her works are included in several private and public collections, including the Weisman Museum of Art, Northwestern Mutual, the Target Corporation, and in contemporary publications, such as Andrea Ferber’s, Sustenance: Contemporary Printmaking Now, Richard Noyce’s, Printmaking Beyond the Edge, and Nathaniel Stern’s, Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance. Jessica received a BS degree in Art Education from Ball State University and a MFA in Studio Arts from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. She is currently the Print and Narrative Forms Area Head, Associate Professor, and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

CASTINGS Made at MATC, 1980-2013, by Celine Farrell

Opening Receptions: 
Friday, April 15th, 2016 from 5-9 pm and Saturday, April 16th, 2016 from 12-4 pm

Closing Reception:  
Saturday, June 18, 12-4 pm

Gallery Hours: Thurs & Fri, 5-9 pm; Saturday, 12-4 pm

During the 1970s, artist Celine Farrell took welding, metallurgy and foundry classes at Milwaukee Area Technical College.  By 1980, she had created a set of techniques to create aluminum castings from polystyrene patterns.  Over the next 33 years, she remained enrolled in the foundry, casting over 200 sculptures.  Working within the themes of puzzles and natural cycles, Farrell creates castings that are reverent and playful.  

Celine Farrell earned a BFA in Advertising Art from the Layton School of Art in Milwaukee, WI an MFA in Painting from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI, and an MA in Sculpture from Pius XII Institute in Florence, Italy.  A born-and-raised Wisconsin artist, Farrell purchased a Cream City Victorian commercial building in the Walker's Point Neighborhood in 1972 and has lovingly restored it for over 40 years.  She takes great pride in her building's garden which features many native Wisconsin flowers and grasses.  She's been a part of countless solo and group shows and has public sculpture on permanent display in Milwaukee's south side.