MARK MENJIVAR
Joey Fauerso’s installation, “Guadalupe-After Images,” was created from the artist’s boat trip down a Texas river.
For many residents, the city of Madison is a waystation. A college town. A pleasurable stop to learn or live for several years on their way to other things and places. With this in mind, Postmadison was born, an exhibit at the Arts + Literature Laboratory (ALL) until April 6, featuring four artists who once called Madison home.
“What’s interesting is how Madison becomes this kind of nexus for relationships with other artists; it’s where a lot of people find out how they want to make art,” says Chris Walla, who received a master’s in fine art from UW-Madison in 2003 and is currently a tenured professor of sculpture at Minnesota State University Moorehead.
Walla’s contribution to Postmadison includes several ceiling-mounted sculptures that present a narrative of a failing relationship through both form and language. The body of each piece is a larger-than life text bubble from which a single word hangs by ball chain: “Try,” “Eclipsed,” “Gone.” Strange sinewy beauty and sadness blend together seamlessly, producing a moving elegy for a modern relationship.
Anna Campbell’s “Chosen Family, Chosen Name, Separatist, Safe Space, Ex-Pat, Invert, Homophile, Homestead.”
In preparing Postmadison, show director Chele Isaac, herself an acclaimed Madison-based artist, chose to organize pieces within the ALL space that worked well together, often juxtaposing unexpected elements. And while the premise of the show unites each artist, the works speak for themselves. “There’s something tying all of this together, but it’s not strangling it,” Isaac says.
Anna Campbell, who earned a master’s in fine art at UW and now is an assistant professor in gender and women’s studies here, contributes a delicate yet assertive series titled ”Ever Your Friend.” Using photographs from the Lesbian Herstory Archives, a massive archive housed in Brooklyn, New York, she focuses the art on the hands of the subjects in photographs, creating laser-cut prints from white paper (that are also mounted on white paper) of these fragmented body parts, centered in a wash of negative space. The omission and erasure of entire bodies or any real depiction imbues each piece with a hushed reverence, as if they’re withholding a great and terrible secret. It serves as a complex and haunting honorific.
One of the show’s most eye-catching pieces is a mixed-media project created by Joey Fauerso, another former master’s in fine arts student who is now an associate art professor at Texas State University. Her work, “Guadalupe-After Images,” spans most of a large gallery wall with a series of color-manipulated video stills taken from a boat ride down the Guadalupe River in Texas.
Resembling some of the early serial productions by Andy Warhol, the images are hung in a neat grid pattern, 8 feet by 9 feet wide, so that the psychedelic washes and other painterly manipulations applied to each image appear as waves of color rippling through strange and beautiful landscapes. The piece pairs these images with Fauerso’s video of the river.
While all artists in the exhibition have ties to Madison, Kristof Wickman, who is now based in New York, was born here and received a bachelor’s degree from UW-Madison.
Wickman presents a series of seven beige coolers in a highly formal flying V arrangement. They appear nearly identical, open at the top, revealing packages of Oscar Mayer bologna, hot dogs and other meats on ice. The work depicts the same formation in multiple photographs, from a variety of angles. The wonder of Wickman’s creation comes in his ability to mutate the most banal (and even humorous) of subjects into something that takes on a quiet but undeniable beauty.
Isaac says ALL might consider making a tradition of Postmadison, with future installations. She sees it as a way to feature outstanding art and homegrown talent, keeping artists tied to the city for years to come.
“It’s a great way to bring people back to a city that they love,” says Isaac.
