Holly Cohn, "here," on view at the James Watrous Gallery.
Holly Cohn’s art exhibit, The Endless Unbegun, is filled with spaces, both literal and figurative, that afford viewers a chance for meaningful introspection and quiet wonder.
A series of sparse paintings and incorporated sculptural elements, Cohn’s work is deceptively unassuming. Much of the Madison College metalsmithing instructor’s installation work depicts the sky on small, square canvases — during the day under cloud cover, and in the darkness of night.
The Endless Unbegun is on display alongside Homing, a solo exhibit from Letha Kelsey, at the Wisconsin Academy’s James Watrous Gallery in the Overture Center through Jan. 28.
“It’s interesting, some people are afraid of the vastness, but I’m not,” says Cohn. “It makes me feel like I’m part of something.” There is an undeniable vastness present in all of Cohn’s work.
The lack of frill also encourages a new kind of seeing from the show’s audience. “here,” which features a miniature set of wooden stairs leading up to a cloud-filled painting of the sky, feels emblematic of The Endless Unbegun.
We’re invited not only to contemplate an art object, but to consider our own relationship to the massiveness of the world we inhabit. “In a lot of [my pieces], I want it to feel like there’s an ocean of space; you have to sort of let yourself be in it,” says Cohn.
Kelsey Letha’s “Mountain (laundry).”
While Cohn’s work deals with large-scale ideas, Homing has a narrower focus, but a similar level of delicate, artful precision.
Kelsey, who holds a master’s degree in fine arts from UW-Madison and is a currently an instructor at UW-Baraboo/Sauk County, says the scope of her work shifted after she became a mother. Instead of creating lush landscape paintings, she now focuses on ways to depict the joy, humor and quiet complexities of everyday life.
“I didn’t mean for this to happen,” says Kelsey about the domestic theme of Homing. “[These pieces] are very instinctual; it started with me just walking around, picking things up around me.” Her series of circular collage in alternating sizes focuses on domestic objects. The heavily textured surfaces include intricate patterns layered with found objects, including sections of a belt, her children’s pajamas, and split shards of oak.
“The fragmentary nature, of bits of things together, collisions of paint and objects, it’s all stuff basically around my home,” says Kelsey. “It’s about looking at things more, and thinking more.”
The artist also incorporates text into her work. Excerpts from Wallace Stevens, Laura Ingalls Wilder and others are threaded into the pieces, reflecting what Kelsey was reading when she created them. Taken as a whole, Homing feels like Kelsey is offering up a beautiful cross-section of her own life.
