ALL Exhbits Reception

media release: Arts + Literature Laboratory is excited to present new exhibitions for this Spring season, including work by the 2024 ALL Prize artists, Kate Davidson and Claire Tomkiw. Additionally on view in the Mezzanine Gallery and First & Third Floor Project Spaces is work by artists Stephanie Barenz and Gregg Williard. The exhibitions opened on March 19 and run through April 20, 2024. The reception will take place on April 11 from 6:30-8:30PM.

MAIN GALLERIES Two Exhibitions with works by the 2024 ALL Prize Artists: Claire Tomkiw’s Stone Fruit and Kate Davidson’s A House in the Clouds.

The ALL Prize is awarded each year to outstanding graduating MFA students from the University of Wisconsin - Madison. The Visual Arts Curatorial Team selects two artist’s MFA theses for exhibition in ALL’s main galleries, and each prize winner receives a $1,000 stipend to support the creation of their work. This year’s ALL Prize exhibitions will feature work by Kate Davidson and Claire Tomkiw.

"A House in the Clouds" will feature work by Kate Davidson and considers our relationship with architecture and the space that surrounds us. Hovering between the real and imagined, the functional and fictional, Davidson’s work questions what it means to build ourselves into a place, to put down roots, or to see shifts over time? How does this affect our individual feelings of drift, change, or connection? The exhibition features four overlapping, interwoven installations and with a field of floating kite forms and their shadows, Davidson’s work provides a meditative recognition of the way our spaces come to life around us.

Kate Davidson is an artist, craftsperson, and educator currently completing her MFA in Woodworking and Furniture at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Her practice is materials and process based, using wood, textiles, imaging, and water to create site-specific sculpture that explores our connection to place. Besides the creation of her own work, Davidson’s practice centers around the importance of collaboration and community in craft and art education. After graduating from the University of Chicago in 2013 with a degree in Religious Studies, Davidson worked in historical restoration carpentry before enrolling at the Vermont Woodworking School to study furniture design and technical woodworking full-time. Her furniture and sculpture have been exhibited nationally, including at the Wharton Esherick Museum in Malvern, PA, Philadelphia’s Museum for Art and Wood, and City Gallery in San Diego, CA. Davidson has participated in residencies at Penland School of Craft and the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship.

"Stone Fruit" presents work by Claire Tomkiw and is an exploration of the performative femininity intrinsic to the artist’s experience with chronic illness and its impact on her life and relationships. The exhibition features large-scale alternative process photographic prints from the artist’s own MRIs and self-portraiture, displayed alongside contact prints of vintage garments, lingerie, and flower petals. Through this provocative juxtaposition, blood vessels, reproductive organs, and tissue become akin to the folds of fabric, pencil-lines of plant matter, and the boning of a corset.

Claire Tomkiw is an interdisciplinary designer with a focus in combining analog photography process, sculpture and writing. Her work explores the limitations of the body, particularly through the lens of chronic illness, and pressures of womanhood through playful exploration of myriad mediums. Tomkiw has exhibited throughout the Midwest and East Coast, and received a Shorty Award in 2021 for her design work. Prior to enrolling in the University of Wisconsin - Madison MFA program, Claire obtained a Bachelor of FIne Arts in Graphic Design from the Maryland Institute of College in Baltimore, Maryland.

FIRST FLOOR PROJECT SPACE & MEZZANINE GALLERY Stephanie Barenz’s exhibition, "A Walk with Water," is on display in the first floor lobby space and the second floor mezzanine. She explains that her show “is about how our external surroundings shape our internal landscapes. Slow acts of noticing transform our lives from feeling uninhabitable to a feeling of belonging.” Note: the first floor work will be on display through April 13.

Stephanie Barenz creates mixed media works with a creative practice that merges photography, printmaking, painting, and collage, and responds to the transformative potential that is realized through encounters with new spaces, often those centered around bodies of water. Barenz holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, and has taught at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and completed residencies at the Art Students League of New York, the Chicago Printmakers’ Collaborative, and the Pfister Hotel AiR program.

THIRD FLOOR PROJECT SPACE “'Paper Play' Art in Covid," an exhibition by Gregg Williard, is on display in the third floor exhibition space. The work addresses the struggles we all have faced in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic. “These drawings, like my experience of the time,” Willard explains, “seem too fast or too slow or too small or too slant for message, analysis, reportage or spectacle. They present instead a miniature theater that haunts a paper stage, resistant to closure or cliché.” Gregg Williard is a visual artist and writer living in Madison, Wisconsin. He studied painting and drawing with George McNeil and Lennart Anderson at The New York Studio School, fiction writing with Jerome Badanes at the State University of New ork and drama with The Performing Garage/Wooster Group. His work has been widely exhibited and published. Most recently, Willard’s work was featured in a one-person show at the Ohio State University Lima Campus Gallery and his narrative mural projects with Bhutanese refugees have been shown at the Overture Community Gallery and the UW-Madison’s Gallery 7.