Detail of Diane Levesque’s “Dancing Bear and Savoyard,” from "The Penny Dreadful Project," 2018.
The 2019 Madison Museum of Contemporary Art’s Wisconsin Triennial is, as always, a snapshot of artistic work being created throughout Wisconsin. And I am gratified to report that the state of our art is strong, varied, and both thoughtful and thought-provoking.
The exhibit occupies the entire museum, minus the Henry Street Gallery, and features work, often multiple works, by 32 artists and two artist groups. There are more new names than familiar ones, as Triennial junkies may note. And while it is impossible to condense this show to an encompassing statement about Wisconsin art, there are common threads. “Art Unearthed”
Jennifer Bucheit, "100%," from the series "Again & Again: A Reflection on Consumer Culture," 2017.
is the tagline for the show, a nod to its curatorial search throughout the state for representative artists, but also to … one of those same artists?
Materials used to make art are at the fore of this year’s Triennial, and you can start most obviously with Ed Erdmann’s dirt paintings. Erdmann, a young artist from Menomonie, collects mud from river banks, complete with sticks and other detritus, and arranges it on canvas. The result is both abstract and amazingly painterly, all the while appearing like a real terrain map seen from above. Erdmann’s work may recall Andy Goldsworthy’s, only less pretty. But as with Goldsworthy’s arrangements, these earth works prompt the viewer to recontextualize and re-appreciate the natural world.
There is also Dodgeville’s Peter Schwei, who utilizes “oil and water interactions” along with acrylic paint, pencil and colored pencil. In his huge canvas “In the Landscape,” chance operations with the oil and water join meticulous hand-drawing, prompting a reimagining of something as ordinary as underbrush in a woods.
Madison’s Helen Hawley animates still photos of her water drawings on slate as they evaporate, accompanied by a hypnotic score created in collaboration with Page Campbell.
Ben Grant’s large, jigsaw puzzle-like works may look like they were done with a drawing program, but closer inspection shows an avalanche of media — in addition to acrylic paint, the Milwaukee artist adopts automotive paint, ballpoint pen, colored pencil, enamel, graphite, oil and spray paint, all applied painstakingly by hand.
Another innovative consideration of materials comes from Madison artist Jennifer Bucheit. Her
Diane Levesque’s “Dancing Bear and Savoyard,” from "The Penny Dreadful Project," 2018.
“100%” features photos printed on the reverse of consumer packaging — a Chinese takeout container, Boar’s Head meats wrapping — that in turn generates the photo’s subject: a more artful montage of that same packaging.
Marianne Fairbanks of Madison calls attention to her works’ status as weavings through cutouts and meta-designs (and it is refreshing to see a representative of the fiber arts).
Celebrating riotous use of color are abstracts from Tom Berenz, two-dimensional still lifes from Timothy Brenner, exuberant expressionistic canvasses from Diane Levesque, and culturally resonating, almost cartoon-like patterned panels from Pranav Sood.
Della Wells’ sweet collage work casts the question “What does it mean to be a black woman in this political moment” in a decorative light. The Milwaukee artist has sewn cloth dolls and collaged cheerful nostalgia-tinged scenes of daily life. But both the dolls and the scenes also recall generations of black artists whose work has been demoted — or condescendingly celebrated — by the art establishment as naive or “folk” art.
There are more overtly political works too, like the Spooky Boobs Collective’s oversized mug shots of women and their crimes (“high-maintenance”). John Hitchcock’s wide-ranging multimedia installation “Bury the Hatchet” and Emily Arthur’s “Cherokee by Blood” are both reclaimings of Native American history. All three work in Madison.
The Triennial has been well laid out for the most part, with areas or sub-galleries set up to focus on a theme, or multiple works by a single artist. There are some drawbacks, though. I do wonder about the Triennial’s more recent practice of including multiple works from the same artist. While it can provide context and theoretically show a wider range of what an artist is producing, in many instances, the multiple works are more of the same. I loved the work of Shorewood’s Diane Levesque — masterpieces of color; seeing six of them from her series The Penny Dreadful Project was enjoyable, but not necessary.
Despite the mini-gallery approach, representational works like the macabre fairy tale-inspired
Pranav Sood's, "Who is She?," 2018.
oils of Cedarburg’s Gina Litherland, the well-drawn storyboard panels of Eau Claire’s Anders Shafer, and the oil portraits of Shorewood’s Ariana Vaeth seem a bit lost.
Madison’s Stephen Perkins’ collection of political printed matter (not created by him) elevates the act of curating to an art (and what could be more 2019 than that?). Unfortunately, it’s placed in the hallway leading to the Henry Street Gallery, physically marginalizing the work already the most likely to be categorized as not-art. And while Jeffrey Repko’s multivalent sculpture will get a lot of eyeballs from the street in its position in the first floor glass tip of the museum, the Madison sculptor’s piece feels orphaned from the rest of the show.
Anyway, don’t let a glimpse from the sidewalk be your only experience of this complex, playful and exuberant exhibit. The Triennial runs through Feb. 16, 2020, and there are gallery talks on Nov. 1 (Chele Isaac and Helen Hawley on video), Nov. 7 (Stephen Perkins on his curatorial installation) and Dec. 6 (photographers Tomiko Jones and Tom Jones on exploring identity and tradition though image).
