Arts + Literature Laboratory exhibits

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Hannah O'Hare Bennett (left)/Terri Messinides

Art by Hannah O'Hare Bennett (left) and Terri Messinides.

Art by Hannah O'Hare Bennett (left) and Terri Messinides.

A new round of artists are inhabiting the ALL gallery for the end of winter and it is an embarrassment of riches. Jennifer Bastian, artist in residence at Thurber Park for the city of Madison, is exhibiting “Grief Wave,” a mixed media examination of her grief following the death of her second mother. Hannah O’Hare Bennett, one of Madison’s foremost papermaking artists, presents “In the Vernacular: People, Places and Things,” a show of low-relief multimedia tapestries. Terri Messinides, a mixed media artist based in Madison, presents “In the Pejorative,” an eye-opening embroidery project about the English language and its war on women. “Pleasure is Power: The Pleasure Art of Sami Schalk and Sam Waldron” celebrates art and activism. A "First Look" at the exhibits takes place from 5-7 p.m. on Jan. 10, and an artist reception is from 6-8 p.m. on Jan. 24. Finally, Karen Laudon’s “Rupture” is being held over from fall.

media release: Arts + Literature Laboratory presents for new exhibitions, on display from Friday, January 10, 2025, through Saturday, March 1, 2025.

A "First Look" for the new exhibitions will be held Friday, January 10, 2025 from 5:00pm to 7:00pm. Note: this will be a mask-required event.

An opening reception for the new exhibitions will be held Friday, January 24, 2025 from 6:00pm to 8:00pm. This event will be mask-optional. 

More on the exhibitions:

In the Vernacular: People, Places and Things, an exhibition by Hannah O'Hare Bennett

On Saturday, February 22, 2025, Bennett will give an informal artist talk at 11:00am starting in her third floor studio at Arts + Literature Laboratory, followed by a market from 12:00pm to 5:00pm in the first floor Performance Gallery. The market will feature work by Bennett as well as a collection of fair trade Ecuadorian artisan craft products.

In the Vernacular is an exhibition of low relief, multimedia tapestries from Hannah O'Hare Bennett's People Places and Things/Gente Lugares y Cosas project exploring memory, cultural dislocation and adaptation, and love of a very specific place. Twenty years ago, the artist was a Peace Corps volunteer in a tiny village in southern Ecuador called Quillin. This exhibition is a celebration of incongruity, imperfect language, and incredible luck.

Exhibition Statement:

I make work that is in the broadest sense about human relationships to the landscape. In this current body of multimedia tapestries the “landscape” is both a specific community in a particular region of the world and the internal emotional journey of a person who has purposely chosen to be a foreigner. It is inspired by my experience two decades ago when I lived in an Ecuadorian village for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer. Everything was disorienting when I first arrived–the mountainous landscape, the language, some aspects of the culture; there was no choice but to adjust, learn the language, and humble myself in the face of many missteps and mistakes.

In the tapestries, recognizable images emerge in some places and are obscured in others, materially expressing the moments of understanding that emerged as I gradually integrated into the community, Quillin, Loja, population 60. By mending together disparate materials into something new and whole, I honor my memories of that time and the people who were a part of my life (and remain so now). One of the ways that my village neighbors and I built relationships was by doing manual work together, like shelling mountains of corn, making empanadas, spinning wool from the sheep. There is an echo of those repetitive, cumulative activities in many of the processes I use in my art. Ultimately, this work is about human connection to each other and to the landscape, both of which were an inescapable fact of village life. 

As I have worked on this project, which I call People Places and Things/Gente Lugares y Cosas, over the last few years, it has occured to me that I am most interested in the "vernacular." In June, I returned to Ecuador for the first time in 12 years. Walking around the working class Quito neighborhood where my hotel was in those first days, I realized that the unplanned juxtaposition of materials in the houses and businesses had unconsciously crept into my current work. A few days later I was in the far south of the country, back in tiny Quillin, learning about weaving from the last two people who use a loom there. The plain wool blankets they produce come entirely from that community, and served the purpose of keeping people warm at night. They exist entirely within the economy of Quillin. 

Grief Wave, an exhibition by Jennifer Bastian

Exhibition Statement:

The death of my second mother, Beverly, cracked open a wound in me that I have been unable and unwilling to sew shut. It’s always been there, but for most of my life I was able to hide it. A wound of childhood trauma, unknown neurodivergence, many things one masks to exist in a society not structured for them. All of the work in this exhibition began after Bev’s death and was in direct response to the pain and the very intense love I have for her. 

After Bev died, the absolute urgency and abandon I have felt to FEEL and SAY and DO has felt like a compulsion. I cannot stop building candle wax mountains, or sewing fluffy stuffed teardrops. I no longer have an inner voice questioning whether my work is “good” or whether anyone will like it. I need to make it, so I do. 

The directness I feel these days stops me from considering whether someone will understand what I mean by a photograph or a quilt. I must tell them quite clearly. And so I will tell you: it means love, it means liberation from oppressive family or societal systems, it means justice. This work began with the death of one of the people I have loved most in my life, and who helped to teach me how to love. Now my heart circles the globe. It will never again be closed to love and to pain, and to my own responsibility to those around me. 

Pleasure is Power: The Pleasure Art of Sami Schalk and Sam Waldron

Exhibition Statement:

Pleasure is Power: The Pleasure Art of Sami Schalk and Sam Waldron is celebration of Pleasure Art and Activism. Through photographs, film, and collage, Schalk and Waldron invite audiences into intimate and public spaces where pleasure is a liberatory and political act that centers joy and self-love as tools for a collective revolution.

In the Pejorative, an exhibition by Terri Messinides

Exhibition statement:

In the Pejorative was started during the pandemic with the realization that there are many more pejorative words in the English language for women than for men. One estimate state there are approximately 6,000 pejorative words for women, reflecting the misogyny hidden in plain sight in the English language.  These pejorative words compare women to food, animals, bags or receptacles, boats, and other categories. There are thousands of words that name the female breasts and genitals. Words that comment on a woman’s sexuality abound, including all the words that compare a woman to a whore or prostitute. The words that demean women and imply violence are frightening and leave women and girls worrying for their safety and leaves them in a permanent state of vigilance day and night. All these pejorative words reflect the misogyny that is deeply embedded in our culture and persists with the continued use of these pejoratives.

Each of these words is embroidered on muslin using a stitch called a French Knot in a camouflage pattern reflecting the hidden nature of misogyny in our everyday language. There is no endpoint to this project, I will continue to embroider these words into the future. 

Rupture, an exhibition by Karen Laudon (extended from fall)

Exhibition statement

Art making is a process of finding a meaningful, integrated balance between idea and its physical manifestation. This series of works, Rupture, is about the tension between dualities: facade/truth, construction/destruction, beauty/ugliness, death/renewal, flatness/dimensionality. These pieces began with frustration and despair at the state of our society, with the ugly underbelly that has become fully exposed in recent years. Looking for catharsis, I took an older series of paintings, Seven Sorrows, and smashed into the panels with hammers and weights. Working from the back side of the panels, I pressed encaustic through to the other side, where it oozed onto newly painted imagery referential of natural elements: water, earth, body, plant life. I think of these paintings as wounded, metaphors for our times, both personal and social. The ambiguous nature of the images begs the question, whether these are images of death and destruction, or growth and rebirth?

When Karen Laudon learned that her Rupture series would be on display at the Arts + Literature Laboratory, she invited poet Emilie Lindemann to create poems in response to her paintings, which she described as being “created by smashing holes into wood panels, so that encaustic paint and wax could be pressed through from the back side, and into/onto/through the painting on the front side.”

Limited copies of a chapbook titled Rupture Readings featuring poems by Lindemann and several images from Laudon’s Rupture series will be available for purchase and for viewing in the gallery. The chapbook includes prompts for ekphrastic responses to the exhibit for viewers who wish to create their own poetry or writing inspired by Laudon’s show.