Rafael Francisco Salas, Craig Clifford

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Wisconsin Academy

Rafael Francisco Salas: The Garden

Exhibition through July 5, Overture Center’s James Watrous Gallery

Find yourself transported to another realm at this opening reception, which features talks from the artists. Hear from Clifford as he describes his unique ceramics, assembled from hundreds of kitschy slip-cast molds that he’s transformed into high art, and from Salas, whose multimedia creations are a tribute to rural Wisconsin.

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Wisconsin Academy

Craig Clifford: Balance

Press release:

Rafael Francisco Salas: Wasted Days and Wasted Nights

Wasted Days and Wasted Nights reflects upon identity and tension played out on the vast landscapes of rural Wisconsin.  It is a personal journey in response to conflict and confusion, but also beauty and devotion.  The central figures are Tejano superstar and musician Freddy Fender and the image of the sacred lamb from Jan and Hubert Van Eyck’s 15th-century Ghent Altarpiece. The exhibit includes several large-scale drawings and two larger-than-life mixed media sculptures that evoke objects of devotion from the Ghent Altarpiece but also allegorically portray Mexican-American culture in Wisconsin.  

Using landscape imagery along with narrative and symbolic elements, Rafael Francisco Salas creates artwork that investigates Midwestern culture, architecture, abstraction and country music.  Salas grew up in small towns in Wisconsin, of mixed Mexican and Caucasian descent.  His family owns a grass-fed sheep farm in Burnett, Wisconsin.  He is an associate professor of art at Ripon College in Ripon. 

Craig Clifford: Fragments

Working in brilliantly glazed ceramic, Craig Clifford casts found objects and combines them into tableaux in which natural imagery collides with pure kitsch.  Clifford describes his process as an investigation of how context, expectation, and gaze affect our experience with everyday objects and images.  Using teapots, cups, and other traditional ceramic forms, Clifford’s colorful three-dimensional collages elevate the familiar to the sublime.  

Clifford is interested in the intersection of high and low culture, and how images and objects carry meaning.  His work has been exhibited internationally and he was recently an artist in residence at the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, Montana.  Clifford is currently an assistant professor and head of the ceramic department at the University of Wisconsin - Oshkosh.

More biographical information can be found at wisconsinacademy.org/contributor.