Left: Melody Carranza, “CLINIC DAY AM”; Right: Tara Bogart, “”un oiseau … Paris” birds in cages.”
Images courtesy WPCA.
The CoPA 5th Annual Midwest Juried Exhibition is like a anthology of au courant photographic practices in the Midwest. Juror and gallerist Catherine Edelman (Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago), sifted through over 450 entries, slimming down the exhibition to a sharp collection of just over 40 pieces by 30 artists from Wisconsin, Illinois, and Minnesota. The subjects run the gamut from bucolic-tinged-with-the-bizarre rural scenery, industrial architecture that stands on a par with the sublime, pictures shot with the eyes of a voyeur, and photographs that slip into an identity akin to a painting.
Edelman’s choice for best in show was Sarah Stonefoot’s Ladies in Red (1800 Ladybugs), a lighthearted play of scale and surprise. A minuscule ceramic dog stands on alert, looking attentively at a brocade pattern on the wall. The wall decor is made up of ladybugs, a detail only apparent after close viewing. There is something funny in these frozen figures, the hundreds of unmoving and intensely organized bugs, and the sculptural dog. I can nearly hear his tiny bark. A lively sense of fun is also found in other works such as Tara Bogart’s “birds in cages,” as the little twittering things hang out in their French pied-à-terres like a row of colorful sprites in an apartment block.
Sharp contrasts between man and nature, industry and organics, charge Eddee Daniels’ Grain Elevator with quiet drama. Smooth concrete structures undulate as framework of rusting tracks creates a visual base for wide columns. A worker sits below, reading. Sinewy red vines signal the refusal of nature to be obliterated in the face of concrete and industry. The form is beautiful and strangely alien among the rigid materials and lines of the manmade world, the products of human knowledge. Neither man nor nature can be denied.
Pictures investigating the corners of daily life, here and abroad, are well-represented. Moodier works abound as well — images of dusky attics, lonely windswept landscapes, and views of distant grainy windows. What lies beneath? What is the longer, larger story? Supplementing the images in the gallery space are quotes from the artists. One of these statements speaks strongly to the phenomenon of photography and how it is distinct from normal, quotidian vision:
“The images are remnants. To be made, they reject the standard way in which we travel through the public sphere and the social standards that restrict us from gazing into the bedroom windows of strangers.” ~Ryan Lowry.
This exhibition ends this weekend, and this evening’s Gallery Night will mark the closing reception, and the final voting for the viewer’s choice award.
Walker’s Point Center for the Arts is located at 839 S. 5th Street, Milwaukee.
The Gallery Night reception will be held on Friday, Jan. 20 from 5-9pm.
The exhibition closes at 5pm on Saturday, Jan. 21.
For more, see the video of the opening reception remarks by juror Catherine Edelman, who speaks from her perspective as a gallery owner and curator.
Recent Comments