April 15 through June 3, 2016
207 E. Buffalo St. Suite 222, Milwaukee,
Artist Reception Gallery Night April 15, 5-9pm
featuring photographs Barbara Ciurej & Lindsay Lochman
Artist Reception Gallery Night April 15, 5-9pm
featuring photographs Barbara Ciurej & Lindsay Lochman
with response by Nicole Naudi
curated by Paul Drueke and Sarah Sutterfield
Art City Review
The modest but resoundingly insightful show called "Variant" manages to address some of the most existential quandaries facing the art world today, all inside the 140-square-foot Greymatter gallery.
The Western world has long reckoned with a social question, which is: What is society's responsibility to those who fall through the cracks?
Similarly, since being emancipated from traditional practices and media over the past half century, the art world faces its own social question, which is: If art is not simply a formal or aesthetic enterprise (meaning: art isn't simply pretty paintings and sculpture in the round) what is its obligation to use its seemingly limitless agency to address social problems?
At first glance, "Variant" appears routine enough: a grid of nine photographs of storefront architecture by Barbara Ciurej and Lindsey Lochman, and three shelves displaying sketches and text by Nicole Naudi.The modest but resoundingly insightful show called "Variant" manages to address some of the most existential quandaries facing the art world today, all inside the 140-square-foot Greymatter gallery.
The Western world has long reckoned with a social question, which is: What is society's responsibility to those who fall through the cracks?
Similarly, since being emancipated from traditional practices and media over the past half century, the art world faces its own social question, which is: If art is not simply a formal or aesthetic enterprise (meaning: art isn't simply pretty paintings and sculpture in the round) what is its obligation to use its seemingly limitless agency to address social problems?
At first glance, "Variant" appears routine enough: a grid of nine photographs of storefront architecture by Barbara Ciurej and Lindsey Lochman, and three shelves displaying sketches and text by Nicole Naudi.
Ciurej's and Lochman's photographs turn out to be of daycare centers in economically distressed areas of Milwaukee, so they're packed with social significance. But the social material is girded with exceeding formal rigor. Beyond the precise, gridded arrangement on the wall, the photographs themselves have the internal composure of a Piet Mondrian, with door jambs, window casings, and vertical blinds reacting to an implied grid that seems imposed by art history as much as carpentry. In many cases vertical blinds in the windows of the establishments frustratingly obstruct our view inside. And yet the visceral humanity of the content throbs from beneath and behind the formal elements.
Quirky handmade lettering on one storefront reads "Watch Me Grow" between two crudely painted but welcoming trees that disrupt the otherwise perfect bilateral symmetry of the spare storefront. Another photo is cropped to reveal only part of the center's handmade signage. The lettering "…BABY" and "…G ACADEMY" hangs conspicuously against a frieze of vertical strips as regular and perfect as caring for children is irregular and imperfect.
The photographs send beautifully conflicting signals. One naturally wants into these spaces, physically, emotionally and psychically, but our urges are continually impeded by visual elements. The form becomes metaphor.
Naudi's interpretations of Ciurej's and Lochman's photographs are scattered atop three shelved stations in the gallery. Each features loose pages of graph paper containing verse and prose passages, some hand written, some printed, with the strikethroughs and erasures indicative of a fitful editing session. They give off the manic energy of someone writing to catch up to a truth that will forever outrun their thoughts.
Naudi writes, "See them cradled in rectangular mangers/ these static tools of bisection/ units snapped from units/ autonomies sanctioned from and by you/ see your hand build the apparatus/ dividing into oblivion…"
Another passage reads,"…all is shared and all is deceit if not sensed lying down at the feet of our fixed fractals," followed by the word "gestalt" repeated four times.
Randomly placed doodles of hands, lists and diagrams mingle with her cryptic copy. And the more you look, the more a picture begins to emerge. A picture of structure as both urban module and compositional device — a picture where the grid and communities of flesh aren't mutually exclusive.
Gestalt indeed.
Naudi continues, "The shy temporal lobe collecting data like diamonds/ is compressed by neighborhoods/ gated as we peer/ between God's venetian shackles"
"Variant" provides a bird's eye view of the social question, offering not simply a perspective but a metaphorical bridge between multiple perspectives. Naudi's scribblings and text go a step further. They paint a picture not only of social structures, but of complexity and emergence, where structure erupts from simplicity and repetition.
And still no consensus has been reached on how to resolve individual interests and social well being in a free society. So what is the future to hold for an art world more and more equipped and more and more inclined to take on the social question?
So, what will happen to our own motley feudal ties to the aesthetic past? Will traditional art making merge smoothly into a new age of connectivity, interactivity activism and what's called social practice? Will aesthetics and social practice annihilate each other? Perhaps beauty and activism will simply live side-by side as unlikely admixtures.
"Variant" is curated by Milwaukee artists Paul Druecke and Sarah Sutterfield and is on view at Greymatter, 207 E. Buffalo St., Suite 222. It closes after Friday.
Shane McAdams is an artist and Art City contributor.
ART CITY An online journal about visual art, the urban landscape and design. Mary Louise Schumacher, the Journal Sentinel's art and architecture critic, leads the discussion and a community of writers contribute to the dialogue.
curated by Paul Drueke and Sarah Sutterfield
 |
| Installation - Watch Me Grow, 2009 - ongoing |
The modest but resoundingly insightful show called "Variant" manages to address some of the most existential quandaries facing the art world today, all inside the 140-square-foot Greymatter gallery.
The Western world has long reckoned with a social question, which is: What is society's responsibility to those who fall through the cracks?
Similarly, since being emancipated from traditional practices and media over the past half century, the art world faces its own social question, which is: If art is not simply a formal or aesthetic enterprise (meaning: art isn't simply pretty paintings and sculpture in the round) what is its obligation to use its seemingly limitless agency to address social problems?
At first glance, "Variant" appears routine enough: a grid of nine photographs of storefront architecture by Barbara Ciurej and Lindsey Lochman, and three shelves displaying sketches and text by Nicole Naudi.The modest but resoundingly insightful show called "Variant" manages to address some of the most existential quandaries facing the art world today, all inside the 140-square-foot Greymatter gallery.
The Western world has long reckoned with a social question, which is: What is society's responsibility to those who fall through the cracks?
Similarly, since being emancipated from traditional practices and media over the past half century, the art world faces its own social question, which is: If art is not simply a formal or aesthetic enterprise (meaning: art isn't simply pretty paintings and sculpture in the round) what is its obligation to use its seemingly limitless agency to address social problems?
At first glance, "Variant" appears routine enough: a grid of nine photographs of storefront architecture by Barbara Ciurej and Lindsey Lochman, and three shelves displaying sketches and text by Nicole Naudi.
Ciurej's and Lochman's photographs turn out to be of daycare centers in economically distressed areas of Milwaukee, so they're packed with social significance. But the social material is girded with exceeding formal rigor. Beyond the precise, gridded arrangement on the wall, the photographs themselves have the internal composure of a Piet Mondrian, with door jambs, window casings, and vertical blinds reacting to an implied grid that seems imposed by art history as much as carpentry. In many cases vertical blinds in the windows of the establishments frustratingly obstruct our view inside. And yet the visceral humanity of the content throbs from beneath and behind the formal elements.
Quirky handmade lettering on one storefront reads "Watch Me Grow" between two crudely painted but welcoming trees that disrupt the otherwise perfect bilateral symmetry of the spare storefront. Another photo is cropped to reveal only part of the center's handmade signage. The lettering "…BABY" and "…G ACADEMY" hangs conspicuously against a frieze of vertical strips as regular and perfect as caring for children is irregular and imperfect.
The photographs send beautifully conflicting signals. One naturally wants into these spaces, physically, emotionally and psychically, but our urges are continually impeded by visual elements. The form becomes metaphor.
Naudi's interpretations of Ciurej's and Lochman's photographs are scattered atop three shelved stations in the gallery. Each features loose pages of graph paper containing verse and prose passages, some hand written, some printed, with the strikethroughs and erasures indicative of a fitful editing session. They give off the manic energy of someone writing to catch up to a truth that will forever outrun their thoughts.
Naudi writes, "See them cradled in rectangular mangers/ these static tools of bisection/ units snapped from units/ autonomies sanctioned from and by you/ see your hand build the apparatus/ dividing into oblivion…"
Another passage reads,"…all is shared and all is deceit if not sensed lying down at the feet of our fixed fractals," followed by the word "gestalt" repeated four times.
Randomly placed doodles of hands, lists and diagrams mingle with her cryptic copy. And the more you look, the more a picture begins to emerge. A picture of structure as both urban module and compositional device — a picture where the grid and communities of flesh aren't mutually exclusive.
Gestalt indeed.
Naudi continues, "The shy temporal lobe collecting data like diamonds/ is compressed by neighborhoods/ gated as we peer/ between God's venetian shackles"
"Variant" provides a bird's eye view of the social question, offering not simply a perspective but a metaphorical bridge between multiple perspectives. Naudi's scribblings and text go a step further. They paint a picture not only of social structures, but of complexity and emergence, where structure erupts from simplicity and repetition.
And still no consensus has been reached on how to resolve individual interests and social well being in a free society. So what is the future to hold for an art world more and more equipped and more and more inclined to take on the social question?
So, what will happen to our own motley feudal ties to the aesthetic past? Will traditional art making merge smoothly into a new age of connectivity, interactivity activism and what's called social practice? Will aesthetics and social practice annihilate each other? Perhaps beauty and activism will simply live side-by side as unlikely admixtures.
"Variant" is curated by Milwaukee artists Paul Druecke and Sarah Sutterfield and is on view at Greymatter, 207 E. Buffalo St., Suite 222. It closes after Friday.
Shane McAdams is an artist and Art City contributor.
ART CITY An online journal about visual art, the urban landscape and design. Mary Louise Schumacher, the Journal Sentinel's art and architecture critic, leads the discussion and a community of writers contribute to the dialogue.
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