John Craig, Valerie Mangion

press release: Solo exhibitions by Wisconsin artists John Craig (Rolling Ground) and Valerie Mangion (Muscoda) will be on view beginning Friday, July 15, at the Wisconsin Academy's James Watrous Gallery, located on the 3rd floor of Overture Center for the Arts in Madison. Details are as follows:

Exhibition dates: July 15 – August 28, 2016

Evening Reception: Friday, July 15, 5:30–7:30 pm, with informal gallery talks by the artists at 6:30 pm

Afternoon Reception: Saturday, July 23, 1–3:00 pm, with artists’ talks at 2 pm

Snapshot Wisconsin Gallery Talk: Thursday, August 18, 12 noon (note date change)

Art @ Noon Tour: Friday, August 26, beginning at 12:00 pm

EXHIBITION DESCRIPTIONS

John Craig: New Work

After a successful career as an illustrator and graphic designer, John Craig has turned to making more personal artwork. This exhibition will focus on two series of prints Craig has been developing over the past few years. Equivalences is a study in perception, pairing found postcard images using pairs of found postcard images allied to underline their graphic similarities and related sense impressions. Lost Treasures from Heart of the Driftless, a group of images collaged from historic photos of southwestern Wisconsin, presents an alternative narrative of the region’s development. Each print—from “The Lost Ark of the Kickapoo” to “When the Sheep Got Out in Viroqua”—is accompanied by a short, dryly witty prose poem that sets the scene.

John Craig earned a BFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology and a MFA in printmaking from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He worked for over forty years as an award-winning illustrator, during which time his work was featured in Time, Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal and on Sesame Street, amongst others. He has had solo exhibitions at University of Northern Iowa, Clark College in Iowa, and in Tokyo, Japan. He currently lives in rural southwestern Wisconsin where he focuses on his personal artwork.

Valerie Mangion: Night Vision

Valerie Mangion’s Night Vision paintings are based on photos taken by a trail camera placed on her farm in the Driftless Region. Trail cameras have motion-activated sensors and use infra-red light to take photos without human intervention, day or night. In capturing images of animals rarely seen during the day, Mangion says, “It feels like I am fishing with light, and it is thrilling to check the images I've caught in my ‘net.’” Translating the photographs into paintings, Mangion alters the accidental compositions, changes the format and size, and strives to work with colors so subtle that it appears the images are black, white, and gray. She approaches this challenge with a combination of warm and cool grays and optical blacks all mixed from dark blues, browns, violets, greens, purples, and reds. As the series has progressed, Mangion has begun exaggerating the strange, surreal effects of infrared digital technology. These sensitive, subtle paintings offer fascinating glimpses of the nocturnal lives of animals, and express the artist’s rich sense of humor and compassion for her subjects. 

Valerie Mangion earned a BFA in Painting from the University of Illinois-Champaign/Urbana and a MFA in Painting from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has had solo exhibitions in Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Washington. She regularly shows in group exhibitions regionally and nationally. She lives on a 58-acre farm in the beautiful Driftless region of southwest Wisconsin with her two horses, two dogs, three cats, and one husband. Read an article about Valerie Mangion's Night Vision series in our latest issue of Wisconsin People & Ideas, which is published in conjunction with the exhibition.