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.

Here, the term is appropriated for a little morsel of artistic delight to start the week. Enjoy.

A visitor at the Met looks at John Singer Sargent’s Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau), 1883-84.

The American art galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York are freshly reinstalled. Enjoy a fantastic desktop tour through the article and interactive features in today’s New York Times. 

 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/16/arts/design/metropolitan-museum-of-arts-new-american-wing-galleries-review.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1326716040-+eIeSHdHQc5gAkSFpbXAvA

For more on this painting and why it was oh so very scandalous, see English art critic Jonathan Jones’ “Madame XXX” in The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2006/feb/01/3

Weekend Art Date links:

Dominion Gallery, 804 E. Wright St. 414-581-0978.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Dominion-Gallery/276048335771524

Painted//Curated by Tyson Reeder at Green Gallery East: http://www.thegreengallery.biz/

Giotto’s Eye’s at Portrait Society: http://portraitsocietygallery.wordpress.com/2011/11/08/giottos-eyes-opening-december-2/

I Am A Painter at EFFJAY PROJEKTS: http://www.effjayprojekts.com/    https://www.facebook.com/effjayprojekts

Light up the Garden at the Lynden Sculpture Garden: http://www.lyndensculpturegarden.org/calendar/light-garden-0

National props for Milwaukee Urban Renewal exhibition

Milwaukee is home to some extraordinary programs and individuals when it comes to innovative urban and environmental initiatives. Urban historian Michael Carriere and sociology Ph.D. student David Schalliol organized the exhibition, “Working Legacies: The Death and (After) Life of Post-Industrial Milwaukee,” currently on view at the MSOE’s Grohmann Museum, and received national press through a recent interview.

Emma Mustich. “Visions of post-industrial Milwaukee.” January 7, 2012. http://www.salon.com/2012/01/07/visions_of_post_industrial_milwaukee/

The Politics of Art  

Above: a fantastic photo from today’s New York Times. New Hampshire voter Gail Gagnon emerges from a booth.

Photo by Brendan Hoffman for the New York Times.

Also in today’s Times, James Estrin interviews veteran campaign photographer Jim Wilson, who talks about the changes in cameras, technology, and pressing deadlines during his decades covering politics via pictures.

James Estrin. “Photographing politics in changing times.” January 10, 2012. http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/10/photographing-politics-in-changing-times/?hp

Fair use, copyright, and the creative arts

Legislation known as SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) is working its way through Congress, and could have ramifications concerning copyright infringement laws.

Martha Lufkin, “Online piracy bill has free speech supporters up in arms.” The Art Newspaper. December 30, 2011. http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/Online+piracy+bill+has+free+speech+supporters+up+in+arms/25332

According to ArtInfo.com, there are other alternatives under consideration from the United States Copyright Office.

Julia Halperin. “Is it about to get much easier for artists to bring copyright-infringement lawsuits?” ArtInfo International Edition. January 9, 2012. http://artinfo.com/news/story/755345/is-it-about-to-get-much-easier-for-artists-to-bring-copyright-infringement-lawsuits

Salon.com’s Emma Mustich investigates the questions of appropriation bordering on plagiarism, or outright invading that verboten territory. A variety of experts weigh in from legal, artistic, and psychological perspectives.

Emma Mustich. “Salon debate: What is plagiarism?” Salon.com. January 10, 2012. http://www.salon.com/2012/01/10/salon_debate_what_is_plagiarism/?source=newsletter

As if they didn’t have enough trouble already…

Reuters reports three pictures were stolen during the early hours of Monday from Greece’s National Gallery of Art in Athens. In less than seven minutes, two paintings by Picasso and Mondrian, and a drawing by Italian artist Guglielmo Caccia, were taken from the museum.

Reuters. “Picasso, Mondrian paintings stolen from Greek gallery.” January 9, 2012. http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/09/us-greece-paintings-idUSTRE8080QI20120109

Art History — History! It’s reputable

In light of statistics that seem to cast arts and humanities majors as doomed to dead-end careers and a life spent on the parental dole, Virginia Postrel writes incisively in support of humanities studies. She counters the notion that college is merely a training ground to grind out minions for the corporate workplace. Thank you, Ms. Postrel!

Virginia Postrel. “How art history majors power the economy.” January 6, 2012. http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-01-08/how-art-history-majors-power-the-u-s-economy-virginia-postrel.html

On a much lighter note, here’s some “super fun” 

Need to unwind a bit from news and stress? Or in search of another nifty distraction? ArtInfo.com declares that the Tate Modern’s new iPhone game called “Race Against Time” is “actually super fun.” What makes it especially appealing to art aficionados are the “striped-shirt-wearing Picassos, flaming absinthe bottles, deadly Dan Flavin light sculptures, and a giant Joseph Beuys figure strung up in a parachute and cradling a hare.”

Yes! I haven’t played it yet, but I know what I’m doing this afternoon…

Kyle Chayka. “The Tate’s new iPhone art history game is actually super fun.” January 9, 2012. http://artinfo.com/news/story/755403/tate’s-new-iphone-game-lets-players-jump-through-modern-art-history

Here, the term is appropriated for a little morsel of artistic delight to start the week. Enjoy.

Michelangelo Buonarotti — sculptor, painter, poet. Was there nothing he couldn’t transform?

Here’s to a new week and new year of burgeoning possibilities.

Image: EPA/TONINO DI MARCO

Gender, race, identity, politics and more are starting points for commentary, but it is the form they take which is most interesting. A book sounds simple enough on the surface — a cover and some pages in between in the most basic form. The artists in this exhibition stretch the concept of a book in many directions, from the simplicity of a single broadside print, to a crafted bag as metaphor, and a host of works stuctured like abstract literary sculptures.

Sarah Peters, Necessary Disclosures, 2003.

Sarah Peters of the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, New York, crafts a series of diminutive nested bowls in Necessary Disclosures (2003). Their fragile appearance belies the weighty issues of the text within. Conceived as symbiotic statements, Peter’s words dwell on a personal relationship, juxtaposed with larger global issues such as economics and Mideast politics. The micro and macro view of the world ever so gently mirror each other, held in delicate tension.

James Allen, Are Apelike Men Our Ancestors?, 2007.

James Allen, an artist from Seattle, Washington, who received his BFA from UWM, recuts and recasts a 1967 creationist treatise into a veritable explosion of delicate figures in Are Apelike Men Our Ancestors?. A butterfly, sheep, a car, horses, not to mention people, are liberated by his “excavation” of the text, transforming flat pages into a lively relief sculpture.

Caren Heft, book (foreground) and broadsheet (background) from If I Should Die: Children Murdered in Wisconsin in 1993.

Artist, gallerist, and publisher Caren Heft of UW-Stevens Point takes a direct, sober approach in If I Should Die: Children Murdered in Wisconsin in 1993  (1993). In book form as well as broadsheets, Heft’s work, part of the Children Don’t Count Project, memorializes in straightforward text the deaths of children under 14 years of age in 1993. The rawness of the paper and dignified clarity of the prints, which record the names, birth and death dates, and causes of death of young victims, are starkly poignant.

As with reading, it is best to take your time with the works in Illuminating the Issue, letting the details of craft and composition sink in. The main drawback to this exhibition is the necessity securing it in display cases. The objects are literally kept at arm’s length, but understandably so. Despite this space between, their messages come through. There is a sense of gravitas in these pieces, as part of the intellectual status of a book is that it is something of longevity; it is tangible and enduring. These works use the significance of this medium for lasting, resonant statements.

Illuminating the Issue: Artists books as Social/Political Critique continues through December 30, 2011.

Click to view slideshow.

FOR MORE ART WITH A BOOKISH BENT…

There are been a number of recent articles about an ongoing art intervention of sorts in Edinburgh, Scotland. An anonymous artist had left a series of exquisite paper sculptures in various venus with messages and a Twitter component.

Here are pictures and articles of these gorgeous things:

Photograph by Chris Scott.

A beautiful photo essay and commentary by Chris Scott about the project: http://thisiscentralstation.com/featured/mysterious-paper-sculptures/

More in the Guardian newspaper:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/dec/01/edinburgh-book-sculptures

And from NPR:  http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/11/29/142910393/the-library-phantom-returns?ft=3&f=111787346&sc=nl&cc=es-20111204

MARN Holiday Bazaar

Secrets of the Dead: Michelangelo Revealed episode online from PBS.org

The Jewish Museum Milwaukee opens One World, One People: Jewish Photographic Portraits by Arnold Newman

Here, the term is appropriated for a little morsel of artistic delight to start the week. Enjoy.

Under her watchful violet eyes…

A larger-than-life image of Elizabeth Taylor gazed on La Peregrina, the enormous, 55.95 carat pearl pendant on a Cartier necklace. It was a highlight of last week’s auction of her collection at Christie’s. The pearl has a storied history, having been in the possession of King Phillip II of Spain in 1582, and subsequently passed down through the Spanish royal family. In the 19^th century it changed hands, going to Joseph Bonaparte (brother of Napoleon). Richard Burton bought the bauble for $37,000 in 1969, presenting it to Taylor as a Valentine’s gift. It went to a new owner for $11.8 million dollars.  ( AP Photo/Mary Altaffer.)

Walker’s Point Center for the Arts

RedLine Milwaukee

PAINTED // Curated by Tyson Reeder video on YouTube

Here, the term is appropriated for a little morsel of artistic delight to start the week. Enjoy.

The Royal and the Radical, the Establishment and the Avant-garde; however you describe it, Queen Elizabeth II and Yoko Ono’s handshake at the opening of the Museum of Liverpool (Liverpool, England) on December 1 is a meeting of two historic women.

As a picture, it’s quite striking for the play of red and black — and that single purple glove.

AP Photo/Tim Hales.