Recent works

March 6th 2009 "Tyanna Buie"

Childhood memories and family dynamics are the catalyst for my work. Growing up in negative environments has shaped the way that I view the world. I have always been able to look outside of my situations and create imaginative landscapes that I could call my own. I combine my memories with the use of familiar landscapes as ways to restore my past. The aspect of layering and the use of texture create a dialogue, which allows the viewer to understand as well as create their own visual narration.

By Using multiple layers in my work, this allows me to cover certain aspects of the figures identity, which creates a ghostly impression within the pieces. I specifically use this process as visual depiction of personal history.

Like the content of my work, people are complex and ambiguous. I find it intriguing what they choose to conceal and reveal. Memory certainly plays a part in this act. There are certain experiences that one might always want to recollect if nice, or forget if traumatic. The recalling or recognizing of previous experiences is what I am most interested in; thus using memories that I consider enjoyable as well as harmful and unpleasant, are what I find most effective in my work.

Ladies of a Certain Mileage

Mar "Joan Zieger"

Maximum impact, with minimal materials is how I create my art quilt series, Ladies of a Certain Mileage. These portraits in fabric personify the universality of women in sharing the same body. Yet each celebrates her own distinct personality, expression and culture. The result is bold and memorable as I explore color, shape and commercial fabrics using needlework skills begun as a child. Exploring the representation of women is an expression of my life-long feminism and inexhaustible fascination with how women are seen, feel, view themselves, are approached by others, and how they are represented in art.

Yi Ya Yuan - Computer renderings

Sep-Oct "Li Han"

Ms. Li Han, born in Beijing China, had progressed a long way in her career before coming back to graduate school at University of Wisconsin - Madison. After finishing her undergraduate study at Tongji University (one of the best architecture and interior design program in China) in 1993, she then worked for Beijing Institute of Architecture and later moved to Singapore and worked there for various design firms as an interior designer. She has strong abilities in various design fields including interior design, graphic design, computer rendering and web design.

The art work displayed here is a set of computer renderings printed on the glossy photo paper. It is an interior design project for a large restaurant (7500 sq ft) in downtown Madison. The restaurant is called "Yi Ya Yuan", which means "peaceful and elegant garden" in Chinese.

Demolition Series - Black and white photography

Sep-Oct "Ttle of the seminar"

When a building is demolished it is never a quick process because of its size. The process takes days, weeks, sometimes months. Due to being drawn out, we tend to forget the structure is disappearing. We become immune to the fact that this beast is slowly dying, until one day, it's gone, changing the once seemingly indestructible force into an endearing creature we peek at each day we pass it.

I chose to photograph my subjects at night only available light, the light that is considered "dark", to show these structures are just as visible when one stops to look. All of the structures in the photographs are on warehouse scale or larger, yet under the blanket of night they seem to magically disappear, and we pass by them, forgetting they are there. They demand out attention during the day as they are being noisily destroyed by our machines, while they bleed into the background at night and decay. The huge cement structures become personified; they are giants, dying slowly, alone, in the dark, virtually unnoticed.

Déjà Views - Photography, mixed media and Fiber

Sep-Oct "Stephanie Funck and Edna M. Kunkel"

This innovative and imaginative exhibit features the "re-presentation" of subject matter found in nature using two strikingly different media: basket weaving and digital photography.

Titled "Deja View", each grouping in the series reflects the individual artist's interpretation of the selected sunject matter. In addition, each piece is interrelated to its companion component through title, thene and/or collaboration. The show is an exploration of texture, color and form.

Fractions in Time

May-Jun "Tara Nuutinen"

A collection of Acrylic Paintings by Tara Nuutinen. Awareness is the key, which is determined through critical analysis. I try to connect one moment, recollection, or synopsis with another aspect of life and contrive a meaning, relationship, or theory. I develop a conceptual interpretation based on knowledge from research and perception. Although perspectives vary among individuals, perhaps we gain a mutual understanding through similar experiences. I feel the simple elements in life are overlooked, but critical to the comprehension of complex organisms, situations, and theories. I create my own abstract and complicated world through the repetition of simple forms and techniques, which result in a story or an emotion from a specific moment in time.

When was the last time you looked at one blade of grass, a single snowflake, a raindrop, or a grain of sand? How about a rainbow? Did you think about how the rainbow was formed or did your brain stereotype the rainbow in front from your perception of other rainbows? When was the last time you watched a sunset without being concerned about the clock? Can you ever relax and enjoy a moment of observation without diverting your attention elsewhere?

I am a complex person composed of simplistic qualities, just as everything else in this world. However, I feel the simple forms are overlooked in every day life. In my creation of art, I combine layers of simple forms, such as composition, line, color, texture and rhythm, with each other, resulting into a complex entity. I approach each project in the same manner. I develop a central theme, story line, or concept. I brainstorm until an idea pertains exactly to my intention. From there, I create an abstract imagine and paint in onto a canvas.

Attentional Landscapes

Mar-Apr "Mark Marrarra"

I am interested in how the environment shapes and directs what we, as humans, pay attention to. While I draw visual inspiration from nature, the conceptual direction of my work results from psychology and vision research that investigates how people meaningfully interpret the visual world. Applying the findings of this research to art enables me to further study and illustrate the mental processes that viewers use when looking at a painting.

Several pieces in this exhibit illustrate the psychological concept of attentional capture, which describes the phenomenal experience in which the viewer's attention and gaze are automatically directed to an object or region of space within the picture. This capture process is thought to operate without us consciously recognizing when or how it occurs, although infrequent events, like seeing out of the corner of your eye a spider crawling on the floor next to you, certainly alerts us that this capture process operates successfully. Artists and magicians frequently use techniques that control this process, thereby controlling where and what pay attention to.

Other works in this exhibit, such as the large grass drawings, require a more complex mental process in which your mind interprets depth information to understand the structure of the scene. For instance, using clues such as color, contrast, and texture, your mind structures the visual world into surfaces that, when necessary, you assemble and recognize as familiar objects. While structuring the world into these surfaces, your mind sorts this information into different depths or layers. This process enables us to see, for example, that some objects appear in front of other objects. When viewing a painting, this process also enables us to see the mulitple depths that, from background to foreground, make up the composition. From an aesthetic perspective, these pieces encourage viewers to linger and study the strucutre of space within the drawing.

Finally, a recurring theme in this exhibt is the use of extreme close-up views as a subject matter. I'm intrigued by the abstract, ambiguous, and near chaotic structures found when viewing nature at such a close distance. Looking at nature from this perspective provides several overlapping layers for your mind to sort through, divide, and connect -- much like a visual puzzle or riddle.

GENTLEMEN

Jan-Feb "Nicholas Grider"

Artist's Statement
One of my main interests as an artist is in how texts and photographs have been used in the service of typology and ethnography. Photography in particular has a long history of being used in the service of typology, and my interest lies both in exposing the structures that make up what we think of as types and kinds (of people, places or things) as well as finding or creating gaps between what an image actually shows and what is expected of it.

In the Gentlemen series, there are two systems at play. The first of these is the historical concept of the photographic portrait, which has witnessed something of a sea-change over the last 100 years from categorical explorations (in the work of August Sander, for example) to a "snapshot" aesthetic seen in the work of Nan Goldin and Wolfgang Tillmans. (It's more complicated than that, of course, but for the purpose of the project I've chosen these two systems specifically.) Each mode of photography has a particular set of assumptions attached to it, and what I've tried to do with the series is blend the two approaches by combining quick-shooting pictures of friends in their homes with "formal" set-ups of what seems like commissioned portraiture.

The secondary system at work is how the manner of the photographs and the "rules" I followed (using only men, having them dress in suits, photographing them in their own homes using long exposures) contributes to a certain idea of masculinity. I'm interested in how showing the men against domestic backdrops affects the reading of who these people are and for what imagined purpose they're being photographed.

UNCULTIVATED

Nov-Dec "Jennifer Anne"

COMEDY OF ART

Sep-Oct "Douglas Hyslop"

I think most would agree we have all changed since 9/11. We are in a crisis mode. It seems evident to me we sense we lack something, a sense of inner peace. But to have an inner peace you must first have an inner world.

One of the great untold ironies of the modern movement in art, where there has been so much emphasis placed on the unintelligible (something that if it belongs anywhere, it certainly must be in some inner realm), is that the great victory of abstraction, say as won by the Abstract Expressionists and others, did not include an inner realm, or if it did, it has become a pretty empty one. When I think of the inner realm of contemporary culture, I sometimes am reminded of the famous knight who had a taste for mustard and pancakes. Of this knight's honor, a Shakespearean clown observed, "He never had any, or if he had, he had sworn it away before ever he saw those pancakes or that mustard." Today we find our happiness in the material possessions we possess and in the pleasures of the flesh we experience.

My art is about an attempt to win an inner realm. An apparent irony here would seem to be that in order to win it I have ended up focusing on the human figure as it appears naturally, or more to the point, externally. Every now and then I come across a contemporary artist who, like me, is a figural artist. But in every case I can remember the focus of the artist in question has been on something tacky or seedy about the human condition. I have taken my cue from what happened in Greece during the fifth century B.C. The result was what we now refer to as classical art. I try to handle figures the way Classical Greeks handled them; the figures are ideal ones rather than actual ones. Stated another way, certain proportions may be stressed more than individuating attributes. On the other hand, I try very hard to make the figures look as though they actually exist in their own pictorial space, i.e., in the context of the picture itself. To this end, my working technique is to draw or paint on the canvas for a few seconds, stand back and look. If it looks right, I move on. If not, I paint out what I have done and start again. It's a kind of communication between my hands and my eyes. However, what looks right seems not always to be the same, and some of my figures are not really very ideal.

The figures and objects are largely delineated by lines, and these are drawn out sometimes in a painstaking manner. Color is another matter. The idea is to let the color roam more freely. Line and color have different functions, and for better or worse, I often treat them independently of each other. Hopefully, the figures lose rigidity this way, and in addition appear to be a part of, and in fact to belong to, their surroundings in a non-physical way.

In any event, although the figures are not portraits, hopefully they are characters. I am fond of the tradition of the Commedia dell'arte with its harlequins, pierrots, and columbines, and it is these which tend to populate my pictures.

Somewhat ideal figures costumed for slap-stick comedy - where does this lead? At the beginning edge of the modern movement Daumier took up the theme of these characters. And of his work Henry James observed, "The crowd doesn't come, and the battered tumblers, with their furrowed cheeks, go through their pranks in a void. The whole thing is symbolic and full of grimness, imagination, and pity." For comparison's sake, it may be said my characters are not "battered," their cheeks certainly are not "furrowed," and the scenes are generally not full of "grimness." If there is anything that is shared, other than the theme itself, it may be in the "pity." The price of admittance to this artist's inner world.