Curatorial Work
A selection of Curatorial Work from 2016-2020
2020
2020 ALL PRIZE: NOËL ASH AND EMMA PRYDE
2020 ALL Prize is an exhibition award for third-year graduate students in the UW-Madison Art Department. This collaboration between Arts and Literature Laboratory and the UW-Madison Art Department provides two outstanding graduating MFA students with an extended exhibition opportunity in the community.
Noël Ash will present her MFA Thesis: "Things Pile Up." It is an exhibition of oil paintings focusing on scenes of everyday life and parenthood—sinks piled with dirty dishes, kitchens crowded with the aftermath of quotidian chores. In setting her eye on the banality of the kitchen, Ash consciously elevates it to the level of consideration that oil painting has historically insisted on. Ash’s muted jewel-toned palette and loose brushstrokes reveal the beauty that resides mostly unseen within the mundane, even when it threatens to overwhelm.
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Emma Pryde will present her MFA Thesis: "Night Births in the Laboratory." It is a multimedia installation-based exhibition that utilizes a variety of materials such as slip-cast porcelain and laser-cut acrylics to create a world inhabited by the iconography of childhood, the digital age, and newer, fantastical forms of Pryde’s conception. Pryde mixes the visuals of religion, consumerism, fantasy, and aesthetics of cotton-candy hued nostalgia, belying an examination of the sinister side of the feminine.
2019
VERSE / US: LANGUAGE AND POWER
Verse / Us: Language and Power is an invitational group exhibition that explores how language shapes our identities and the world that we live in, featuring Julie Chen, Nina Ghanbarzadeh, Helen Lee, Tuesday Smillie, Chelsea Thompto, and Matthew Owen Wead.
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Language and discourse serve to construct and manipulate concepts of power in society. Institutions and individuals alike use language to strengthen their ideological interests, preserve authority over others, and lead the change in social practices, relationships, and values. In differing ways, these artists explore how art, text, and language affect our daily lives and the art that they create.
2019 CSArt Exhibition
The CSArt Madison program supports the local culture and creative economy of Dane County. The goals of CSArt Madison are to promote local artists and to create an engaged community of local arts supporters.
CSArt supports artists: in the creation of new work, to establish relationships with local collectors and patrons, and to participate in the launch of an exciting new model of art support and distribution. CSArt shareholder benefits include multiple works of art from local emerging and mid-career artists at a fantastic value. Additionally, CSArt shareholders have the opportunity to develop relationships with the local artists and art community, discover new artists, explore a variety of disciplines and support artists’ careers and a vibrant community.
The 2019 CSArt Madison artists are: Emily Arthur, Eric Baillies, Angelica Contreras, Richard Jones, Jennifer Leaver, Maeve Leslie, Emma Lister, Victoria Maidhof, Richie Morales, and Michael Velliquette.
2019 ALL PRIZE: ADRIANA BARRIOS & TAYLOR RUSHING
2019 ALL Prize is an exhibition award for third-year graduate students in the UW-Madison Art Department. This collaboration between Arts and Literature Laboratory and the UW-Madison Art Department provides two outstanding graduating MFA students with an extended exhibition opportunity in the community.
Adriana Barrios will present her MFA thesis exhibition, "Long Range Signal." The exhibition will include etchings, screen prints, works on handmade paper and large scale video projections. Barrios utilizes direct experience, scientific data, and live feed video technology as a way of recording the environmental changes happening along the California coastline.
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Taylor Rushing’s MFA thesis exhibition, "Slumgullion ,"(a word for an improvised hobo stew made from a comprehensive search of one’s pantry) focuses on the slippery and often distorted nature of storytelling through video, two-dimensional and sculptural work. Rushing’s wooden works, made of hundreds of pieces of layered wood with thousands of hand whittled cuts, discuss the confluence between modern DIY culture and American vernacular woodworking. His work in video and performance connect us to our past while aiming to level an audience through humor and accessibility.
POSTMODERN
Madison, home to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has a rich history of artistic practice, invention, and education. Drawn here by one of the country’s top ranked university art programs, scores of new students call Madison home every year. And then, they depart, pulled out into the world by opportunity and vision. But no one ever leaves Madison completely behind. In a progressive town with a restless energy, students are easily drawn in to numerous pursuits, they add to the richness of the community and they leave something of themselves behind.
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Postmadison was an invitational show that brings four graduates of the UW art program together in a place that was foundational to their development: Anna Campbell, MFA 2006 (Madison); Joey Fauerso, MFA 2001 (San Antonio, TX); Chris Walla, MFA 2003 (Moorhead, MN); and Kristof Wickman, BFA 2007 (NYC). We connect with these artists to see where their art practices have taken them, how their recent work informs each other and how we might glimpse a common thread of Madison's influence.
BRIDGE WORK 2019
Bridge Work is a collaborative endeavor initiated by Jason S. Yi and Leah Kolb of Plum Blossom Initiative (Wisconsin), with Mat Greiner of Chicken Tractor (Iowa), and Launa Bacon of Darger HQ (Nebraska), and joined in 2017 by the curators of Arts + Literature Laboratory (Madison). Bridge Work provides critical opportunities for emerging artists to broaden the scope of their professional connections and experiences. This multi-state project also endeavors to forge a more interconnected arts community throughout the region by facilitating meaningful artistic exchanges and dialogs among artists and art-centered organizations and professionals.
Bridge Work’s annual exhibition series aims to generate the public exposure necessary for artists to successfully network and establish beneficial relationships within the larger contemporary art community. The emerging artists invited to participate in this project express the energy, commitment, and willingness to benefit from the resources and guidance provided by each region’s facilitators. A culminating group exhibition brings together a diverse group of artists who are dedicated to their practices and poised to fully engage the contemporary art world.
Helen Hawley exhibits works from an artist residency in Saint Louis, Senegal, as well as other projects that explore similar themes, in "A Song to Cross a Big Stream."
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Yeonhee Cheong displays portraits of women in different media in her exhibition "She Presents."
2018
WOMEN AGAINST HATE, UNITED BY LOVE
"Women Against Hate, United by Love" is an exhibition of original prints from the series by Kelly Parks Snider, Rachel Griffin, and Leigh Garcia, showcasing powerful stories told by Wisconsin women leaders impacted by bigotry, intolerance, and racism.
"Hidden in Plain Sight," an exhibition by artist Kelly Parks Snider, explores the often-invisible truths that exist in society about power and privilege, inequality and injustice. She uses visual media narratives, collage, and steel and wood sculpture to comment on highly charged issues. “My idea is to agitate for the relevance of issues that make us uneasy and, in that way, to embrace change, to stay open to the possibilities,” says Parks Snider.
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2018 CSArt Exhibition
The CSArt Madison program supports the local culture and creative economy of Dane County. The goals of CSArt Madison are to promote local artists and to create an engaged community of local arts supporters.
CSArt supports artists: in the creation of new work, to establish relationships with local collectors and patrons, and to participate in the launch of an exciting new model of art support and distribution. CSArt shareholder benefits include multiple works of art from local emerging and mid-career artists at a fantastic value. Additionally, CSArt shareholders have the opportunity to develop relationships with the local artists and art community, discover new artists, explore a variety of disciplines and support artists’ careers and a vibrant community.
The 2018 CSArt Madison artists are: Hannah O’Hare Bennett, Derrick Buisch, Luisa Fernanda Garcia-Gomez, Erica Hess, Leslie Iwai, Lesley Numbers, Leslie Smith III, Kayla Story, Andy Villanueva, and SPOOKY BOOBS COLLECTIVE.
CONFLICT AND PEACE:
A YOUTH PERSPECTIVE
November 11, 2018 is the 100th anniversary of the armistice of WWI. As art events around the city honor the veteran experience through In Good Company: An Exposition of Emerging Veteran Artists, Communication has invited young people in Madison to express themselves about related issues.
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The month-long exhibition was with Madison art nonprofit Communication.
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Students from Madison's East High School have taken part in a series of workshops with Communication and artist/educator Mallory Shotwell to create artwork around ideas of conflict and peace. Reflecting on school gun violence, war, treatment of gender and sexual identity, and searching for ways to achieve peace, these students have poured themselves into collaborative drawings to share with their community.
THE PERVASIVE CURSE
SPOOKY BOOBS COLLECTIVE, a collaboration between artists Amy Cannestra, Myszka Lewis, and Maggie Snyder, uses art and design to visualize the trivialization of women’s experiences. Manifested through installations, interactive performances, social media campaigns, and printed material, SBC’s work halts the perpetuation of sexism in our culture.
The Pervasive Curse features three current works by the SPOOKY BOOBS COLLECTIVE that depicts the prevalence of sexist and misogynist language that continues to foster resentment and disrespect towards women.
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The Patterns’ Vicious Influence utilizes wallpaper as a conceptual vehicle to discuss the way language saturates our environment and imprints itself onto our psyches. The wallpaper patterns of this series are built using words that are used to diminish and minimize women; these words range from descriptors that disregard our ideas (bossy, crazy, over-emotional) to names that attack our bodies and sexuality (cunt, pussy, slut).
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Using many of the same words hidden within The Patterns’ Vicious Influence, our interactive performance piece You Have the Right to Remain a _____. visualizes the way hostile language is used to actively shame those not following patriarchal standards. For this interactive performance, we interrupt unsuspecting participants and place them under momentary arrest for various crimes against societal norms. The allegations we assign to our participants call out behaviors and attributes such as displays of confidence, independence, emotions, and other normal and even admirable qualities. For instance, the crime of voicing one’s opinion may lead to one being labeled a bitch. After informing our participants about the details of their charges, we take their mugshot-styled portrait and finish processing their paperwork. The arrest, and tongue-in-cheek performance, ends with the statement “you have the right to remain (introverted/confident/stoic/not smiling),” validating and encouraging our right to behave as we want in spite of these insidious labels.
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Now You Know Your ABCs is an audio piece that quietly plays throughout the gallery. A handful of voices slowly and matter-of-factly recite our misogynistic alphabet. “A is for aggressive… … b is for bossy… … c is for crazy…” This work critiques how early in life we learn and internalize sexism or a gendered understanding of social norms.
2017
THIS WOULD HAVE MEANT SOMETHING ONCE
Connectict artist Paige Mostowy's installation this would have meant something once explores the parallels of memory and associations made through projection, audio and a series of collages created over the past two years. Intermingling the passage of time with the petulance of perspective, audio and video will be used as partial descriptors of instances.
Found 8mm footage is manipulated to create a familiar, yet anonymous recollection for the viewer, while a telephone provides audio as a partial descriptor imbedded within a flawed perspective. Likewise, the collages offer a perspectival shift of the past sourced from vintage magazines and found photographs. Through the installation, disjointed aspects come together to explore the stagnated nature of memory and longing through three convergent mediums.
2017 CSArt Exhibition
The CSArt Madison program supports the local culture and creative economy of Dane County. The goals of CSArt Madison are to promote local artists and to create an engaged community of local arts supporters.
CSArt supports artists: in the creation of new work, to establish relationships with local collectors and patrons, and to participate in the launch of an exciting new model of art support and distribution. CSArt shareholder benefits include multiple works of art from local emerging and mid-career artists at a fantastic value. Additionally, CSArt shareholders have the opportunity to develop relationships with the local artists and art community, discover new artists, explore a variety of disciplines and support artists’ careers and a vibrant community.
The 2017 CSArt Madison artists are: Faisal Abdu'Allah, Katharine DeLamater, John Hitchcock, Helen Lee, J. Myszka Lewis, Dakota Mace, Jason Ruhl, Chelsea Thompto, Bernadette Witzack, and Ariel Wood.
CHRIS MADDOX // DERRICK BUISCH & DALE KAMINSKI
Since the summer of 2014, Derrick Buisch and Dale Kaminski have been working on a series of large-scale digital prints combined with painting. Kaminski initiated the project by delivering a set of oversize digitally manipulated photographs to Buisch in his Madison studio. Kaminski’s large-scale prints combine photographs with discrete digital manipulations to create a range of evocative atmospheric scenes; landscapes, abstract patterns, and architectural details are all elements of an ongoing body of work. Buisch overlays drawings from his own long-term project of a visual index – a collection of scribbles/doodles, drawn linear abstractions. The Buisch index is projected and painted on top of the Kaminski prints.
Chris Maddox's “≠” investigates shifts of meaning that occur when prose is translated. This study is built from two versions of The Garden of Forking Paths by Jorge Luis Borges: a version translated by Borges’ close creative partner Norman Thomas di Giovanni, and the recent Penguin Classics release, translated by Andrew Hurley. His works extract and recombine text fragments from these translations in ways that generate embodiments of the concepts embedded within the writing. A central theme, evident even in the title of the story, is the notion that one might imagine a multiplicity of personal existences, each of which expresses a choice made in life that triggered a sequence of events and a particular existence–parallel but unique realities. Such paradoxical antiparallels are mirrored in the text-based works of the project.
Since the summer of 2014, Derrick Buisch and Dale Kaminski have been working on a series of large-scale digital prints combined with painting. Kaminski initiated the project by delivering a set of oversize digitally manipulated photographs to Buisch in his Madison studio. Kaminski’s large-scale prints combine photographs with discrete digital manipulations to create a range of evocative atmospheric scenes; landscapes, abstract patterns, and architectural details are all elements of an ongoing body of work. Buisch overlays drawings from his own long-term project of a visual index – a collection of scribbles/doodles, drawn linear abstractions. The Buisch index is projected and painted on top of the Kaminski prints.
2016
IT CAN HAPPEN HERE
It Can Happen Here, a national exhibition, juried by Milwaukee-based artist Reginald Baylor, that envisions our post-election future. The show title is a nod to Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 prophetic novel, It Can’t Happen Here, which imagines the rise of fascism in the United States. In an election season characterized by bigotry and extremism—filtered through the sensationalism of a ratings driven media—artists explore the simultaneous promise and fragility of democracy through the lens of collective memory, present realities, and possible futures.
Participating artists:
Thomas Ferrella (Madison, WI), Matthew Scott Gualco (Brooklyn, NY), Jeff Lassahn (Chicago, IL), Fatima Laster (Milwaukee, WI), Stephanie Lifshutz (Brooklyn, NY), Guzzo Pinc (Fort Atkinson, WI), Camille Silverman (Chicago, IL), Mark Addison Smith (New York, NY), Bubblegum & Whiskey (Corpus Christi, TX), Nafis White (Providence, RI)