Niki Johnson announced live on CNN Sunday, April 14, that the sale of the piece would be open to international offers with a percentage of the proceeds going to AIDS research and advocacy groups. For information about the sale of the work, see eggsbenedictproject.com. 

OPENING FRIDAY, MAY 17, 2013, 6 TO 9 P.M.

Elias Vallejo: The airbrush and the portrait

 Opening saturday, june 8, 2013, 6 to 9 p.m. 

The Personal is Political: Martha Wilson and MKE

Opening reception: Saturday, June 8, 2013, 6 to 9 p.m.   Running through:  July 14, 2013

Portrait Society Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition that brings together the contemporary work of feminist artist Martha Wilson with regional artists responding to her influential practice.

The Personal is Political: Martha Wilson and MKE will feature one room of Wilson’s recent work (2009 onward) and two rooms of regional artists’ work.

Martha Wilson (b. 1947), a New York based artist, has spent the past 40 years exploring feminist practices. Beginning in the 1970s, working with photography, video and performance, her work has dealt with how human identity is shaped by cultural forces, power relationships, gender, and now, aging. She is best known as the founder of Franklin Furnace (1976), a non-profit space that gave alternative art practices a home.

Also exhibiting are: Laci Coppins, Paul Druecke, Skully Gustafson, Ashley Janke, Niki Johnson, Erik Moore, Joseph Mougel, Amy O’Neill, and Rafael Salas.

The local artists were asked to use the catalog, Martha Wilson Sourcebook, as inspiration for their own work. The catalog was prepared by the artist in conjunction with her touring retrospective (concurrently at Inova). (The book was reviewed in the May 2013 Art News).

Sourcebook is a non-traditional publication that compiles essays, documents from her work, performance ephemera and assorted influential writings from the 1970s and 1980s. In either peripheral or direct ways, each artist was asked to attach some bit of text or thought from the Sourcebook to their work to create threads of interaction with the legacy of feminism.

Martha Wilson’s work in the Portrait Society exhibition is photo-based and uses role-playing and self-portraiture to explore themes of visibility and identity, and, in general, how the ‘personal is political.’ Wilson has stated that much of the early feminist theory has been dislodged from current ideologies.  The phrase, “The Personal is Political,” was a feminist slogan in the late 1960s and 1970s. It suggests that individual, small measures count; that the grass roots choices we make have larger ramifications. While this phrase is no longer associated with the feminist movement, its momentum has lead to recycling, commitments to organic food and local food sourcing, and resistance to fossil fuel consumption.

A larger historic survey of Martha Wilson’s work, organized by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York, curated by Peter Dykhuis, and staged locally by Sara Krajewski (Inova director), will open on Friday, June 7, from 6 to 8 p.m. at Inova, The Institute of Visual Arts, 2155 N. Prospect Ave., Milwaukee, WI. It runs through August 11, 2013.

Martha Wilson will be present at both receptions. Portrait Society will also be presenting several performances during the opening as well as another manifestation of The Store, where un-conventional and extraordinary merchandise is created and made available for sale in conjunction with the exhibition. Storekeeper is MIAD printmaking major, Philip Gattuso.

Additional links to information about Martha Wilson:

Art 21 Blog: An interview,  http://blog.art21.org/2012/06/29/the-tipping-point-between-laughter-and-crying-an-interview-with-martha-wilson/

New York Times review: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/04/arts/design/04gall.html?_r=0

Art in America: http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/reviews/martha-wilson/

The Brooklyn Rail: http://www.brooklynrail.org/2008/05/artseen/out-of-the-furnace-martha-wilsons-feminist-critique

Artcritical: http://www.artcritical.com/2011/11/25/martha-wilson/

Book Forum Review of Sourcebook: http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/018_04/8603

Shana McCaw and Brent Budsberg: The Vanishing Point

March 15 to May 10, 2013

Gallery hours: Thursday through Saturday, noon to 5 p.m. and by appointment.

Portrait Society Gallery is pleased to present a major exhibition of new work by Shana McCaw and Brent Budsberg. This collaborative team works with sculpture, installation and performance. In the past two years, residencies in Wendover, Utah and Death Valley, near the ghost town of Ryolite, Nevada, inspired a series of photographs that present fictive, dramatic accounts of the pair dressed as pioneers pitted against unforgiving landscapes.

“The Vanishing Point” presents the artists as two 19th century, Midwestern farmers, characters who emerged from their earlier work using architectural miniatures.  The alien landscapes of the American West represent a kind of unconscious dystopia where the characters long for the fertile soil of the Midwest and struggle in vain to coerce a land of harsh conditions to bear fruit.  (There could be an art world metaphor at work here as well).

The exhibition presents several bodies of work from their residencies as well as a video project. While the artists do not consider themselves “photographers” in a conventional sense, the photographs are an extension of their sculpture/performance investigations. Fictive and dramatized, these images also feel timeless and real. Because the vast landscapes of the west are so deeply familiar from decades of films and storytelling, this larger-than-life, romantic quality adds cinematic verity to the humble contrivances of these fabricated personal journeys. History, fantasy and mythical human pursuit expand into themes of place, ancestral memory and the passage of time.

McCaw and Budsberg have collaborated since 2001. They received a Mary L. Nohl Fellowship in the established artist category in 2008. In the past several years, they have had solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, Cleveland, Minneapolis and Canada. Locally, they have done projects at the Lynden Sculpture Garden (2011) and the James Watrous Gallery in Madison. In May, 2011, McCaw and Budsberg were in residence with MKELAX in Los Angeles, CA. McCaw teaches at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and Cardinal Stritch University. Budsberg is a supervisor at the Steve Lacey 3-D Lab at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.

Kevin Giese’s Winter Chapel expanded into a print collaboration: “White Noise”

Each year, Portrait society invites a different artist to build a chapel/meditation space dedicated to our harsh winter clime. Kevin Giese’s chapel features a stand of hollow birch trees with their seams hand stitched together in an act of tender repair.

White Noise is collaboration between four printmakers creating a body of work in response to Giese’s chapel. This is the first time Makeal Flammini, Alyssa Schulte, Jessica Seamans, and Ella Dwyer have worked together on a project. They will employ a variety of print techniques and will also collaborate on hand-painted plates. Their work will be installed on the outer, curved wall of the Chapel and the West gallery wall.

Bios follow:

Alyssa Schulte is an artist from Milwaukee. She graduated in 2005 from the University of Milwaukee-Wisconsin with a BFA in drawing and painting.  She briefly studied painting at Santa Reparata International School of Art in Florence, Italy.  She was co-owner, curator and participating designer of Fasten Collective in Bayview, WI. She is a co-founder, curator, and participating artist of Hovercraft, an annual Milwaukee music and art event whose purpose is to support local artists.

Jessica Seamans is an illustrator, screen-printer and performer based out of Milwaukee and Minneapolis, and one half of the tiny design studio Landland. Most of her visual work is characterized by an attempt to merge lively figurative imagery with pristine, stagnant, flattened abstraction. Many of her recent posters can be seen at landland.net.

Makeal Flammini is a contemporary folktale teller, chronicler, and obsessive observer. With a dark sense of humor, she builds an illustrative narrative born from her desire to remember, collect, record and share.  Her most recent series of drawings, The Bricks Are Dipped in Marble Dust, explores life within a small community of people on the west coast of Ireland where she lived for nine months in 2012. Makeal is the co-founder and curator of the mobile arts organization, The Parachute Project which hosts one-night exhibitions in unused spaces. She conducts a regular interview series The Peanut Gallery on her blog, and her most recent interview with artist Kati Heck will be published in Believer Magazine.

Ella Dwyer received her BFA in printmaking from the University of Milwaukee-Wisconsin. Her paintings and prints attempt to find balance at the intersection between the harsh but honest lessons of the wild and the controlled but delicate environments of man. She is the co-founder and co-curator of the Parachute Project, a mobile arts organization that hosts one-night exhibitions in abandoned spaces. In addition to her work as an arts organizer, Dwyer runs an online vintage shop, Fox and Fawns. She recently participated in a group exhibition, Nicotine Bliss, at Jackpot Gallery in Milwaukee.

January 18, 2013 to March 3, 2013

 Shane Walsh: The Available Language presents this Milwaukee-based artist’s recent, portrait-oriented paintings in two rooms of the gallery. Walsh builds small models out of craft materials and rectilinear shapes and translates the three-dimensional structures into paintings that piece together, yet never fully adhere, into a human bust or presence.

The work is sculptural and painterly, abstract and representational, serious and whimsical – a whir of theory, influence and exploration of processes.  This is Walsh’s first show at Portrait Society. He completed his MFA in 2006 at the University of Washington – Seattle, and currently teaches at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and the Peck School of the Arts, UWM.

Over the past year, as Walsh explored this theme of the portrait bust, the actual content of his work became increasingly about the presentation, staging and display of the “work of art.”  Early paintings in the series depict just the human bust on a support or small pedestal. Later, Walsh paints the bust displayed in a vitrine, and then eventually, he paints the busts fully installed in a gallery setting. Each step further distances the painting from existing simply as a self-contained, autonomous object. One thinks of Velazquez’ Las Meninas (1656) as an early version of this idea, where the truth of the painting itself is exposed as a contrived staging.

Within Walsh’s paintings, we see what happens when an idea is translated into a material object produced in the studio and then restaged in a gallery or museum. Walsh takes us through these visual channels of delivery and display and shows us how each stage affects the viewing of the object. Walsh’s paintings of the colorful human busts almost explode with energy: shapes and patterns float in their own centrifugal odyssey, never staying still. But once he paints one of these heads inside a glass case, the object becomes tamed and harnessed, stilled and captured. Once the objects get painted into full gallery rooms, there is even more coolness and distance.

To Walsh, the act of painting is about language and metaphor. He is interested in how readily a brush stroke of orange paint can suddenly signify “mouth” or become an eye. He holds these paintings in states of suspended mimesis, where a mark, color or shape still exist both as abstraction and as referent. It’s both a mouth and a line, clearly and equally. By never letting the marks of the paintings fully settle, he keeps these compositions alive in a purgatory of indecisive identity. Walsh flings shapes, colors, brush strokes and textures at the paintings in a happy tumult. Like a drunken carpenter, he hammers together disparate forms and colors. These objects don’t quite coalesce but still harmonize in a tippy playfulness.

Walsh’s exhibition will include an installation called “The Store,” where Shane Walsh souvenirs (cups, t-shirts, toothbrushes) as well as 4 x 4 inch details from the paintings and 8 x 10 reproductions of the paintings can be purchased inexpensively. In this project, the gallery has stepped into Walsh’s painting world and added one more stage within the making/displaying/selling network.  The Store (named after Claes Oldenburg’s Store of 1961) comments somewhat ironically on the merchandising and packaging of art experiences yet at the same time very sincerely desires every person who visits the exhibition to be able to take a piece of it home with them. Everyone can own Shane Walsh’s work in some way and extend its reach into the world, breaking down a little of the elitism that tends to separate viewers from collectors. More exhibition images here.

KEVIN GIESE: WINTER CHAPEL (4)

Every year in January, Portrait Society invites an artist or collaborative team to build a “Winter Chapel.” These self-styled rooms of meditation are a means of exploring how a space can be fashioned to enhance quietude and spiritual reflection via the secular language of the artist rather than the established vocabularies of formal religions.

This year’s chapel architect is Kevin Giese, an associate lecturer in the art department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Giese’s work focuses on nature and its repair. His interests are shaped by Buddhist philosophy, a knowledge of and affection for the natural world, and an understanding of traditional wood joining techniques. Giese views his artistic project as one of repair and re-presentation of natural objects; he employs processes that echo nature’s slow and repetitive rhythms as he reconstructs pieces of the physical world in his sculptures and installations. Here is a video about how Kevin made the Winter Chapel.

Portrait Society Gallery has been closed since the end of July for major reconstruction. The Grand Opening of the new space was Friday, November 9, FIFTH FLOOR, Marshall Building. Watch this video! Here are photos from the opening celebration by Art Elkon.

Gallery hours are Thursday through Saturday from noon to 5 p.m. or by appointment.

The new 1,300 square foot space has three interconnected gallery areas. A new storeroom and office occupies a space across the hall. Here is a review. Here is another review. And here is a review of the grand re-opening.

THREE New Shows: THROUGH JANUARY 5, 2013

Decay Utopia Decay: J. Shimon & J. Lindemann

This show presents self-portraits shot on this collaborative team’s Wisconsin farm. Large-scale cyanotype  prints and ambrotypes were created with a hand built “big” camera.

In the words of the artists:

“An exhibition about our personal desperation to create a paradise and record its existence at our isolated rural Wisconsin farm. Such perfection can only exist in the haze of the past or future, making it absurd to approach it with the present-ness of photography, even with camera formats as reflectively cumbersome as 30×36 inches or as spontaneous as small-gauge 8mm movies. Our decaying, aging existence provides us with a stage as we face off with the elements, the uncontrollable plant world, broken-down farm implements, groundhogs, wasps, and mosquitoes.”

Here is a link to more work: Large scale images.

Here is a link to more information and a video about their process: Artists’ website

 Natural History: Barbara Ciurej & Lindsay Lochman

This exhibition, in the front gallery space, features another long-term collaborative photographic team. Lochman teaches photo courses at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Ciurej lives and works in Chicago. They have collaborated on projects for more than 20 years. This new body of work features portrait busts of women, over-laid with plant forms. The process pairs a digital print with a cyanotype layer on top.

The artists describe the project as:

The transformation of “portraits into tangled shadows of time. Grafting techniques from the history of photography, the cyanotype impressions of botanicals pay homage to Anna Atkins’ use of the medium in the nineteenth century…They speak of evanescence and hidden nature.”

Portrait commissions by Ciurej and Lochman are also available through the gallery.

Absence Makes: Nicholas Grider and Portrait Society

This collaborative project between the photographer Nicholas Grider (MFA Cal-Arts) and Portrait Society pairs vintage portraits in all media with photo-derived word images. The exhibition is  in the gallery’s new “Lounge,” the smallest and most informal room of the new space.  Gallery owner and curator Debra Brehmer says the exhibition is about loss (of all kinds) and the difficulties of communicating who we are and how we feel; the difficulties of being “known.” All of the vintage portraits, whether paintings, photographs or drawings, carry a sense of displacement as they have fallen out of context and out

of a linear kind of history. But that may be a truer state than the assumed conventional ‘life,’ where we think we have a place, a permanency and belongingness.

Nicholas Grider, whose “Men in Suits” project was shown at the gallery in 2009, works in diverse formats. These word photographs present fragments of phrases, thoughts or song lyrics.  Disjointed, the broken phrases feel far more open and interpretive than they would nestled into completed sentences. Grider says this about his body of word images:

“I’m interested in how thought translates to writing and how writing translates to image so I have connected bodies of work that approach those ideas in different ways.  A kind of sub-lingual emotion or precursor to thought is represented by the abstract, swirling fields of pen lines; private, unspoken thought is represented by handwriting; and words spoken in conversation are represented by stenciled text in pencil and pen.  I’ve matched words and phrases to projects according to what I think a piece of text most suits, and I draw upon pop songs and popular sayings for the text pieces to make them possibly recognizable but unfamiliar in their new form.”

Nicholas Grider’s word photographs can be ordered in any size.

 Opening March 15, 2013

 The Vanishing Point: Shana McCaw and Brent Budsberg

This collaborative team works with sculpture, installation and performance. In the past two years, however, residencies in Wendover, Utah and Death Valley, near the ghost town of Ryolite, Nevada, inspired a series of photographs that present fictive, dramatic accounts of the pair dressed as pioneers pitted against unforgiving, vast landscapes. “The Vanishing Point” presents the artists as two 19th century, Midwestern farmers, characters who emerged from their earlier work using architectural miniatures.  For this couple, the alien landscapes of the American West represent a kind of unconscious dystopia.  The series depicts the Sisyphean struggles of the characters as they long for the fertile soil of the Midwest and struggle in vain to coerce a land of harsh conditions to bear fruit.

Closing reception, 6 to 9 p.m.  Gallery Night July 27 and 1 to 5 p.m. Gallery Day July 28. Gallery Hours: Thursday through Saturday 1 to 5 p.m. 414 870-9930. Photos from the opening reception on June 14 by Art Elkon.

A Fop’s Banquet: An exhibition in three acts

1. Destruction: Michael Davidson, “Rocket Goes on a Mission”

2. Re-configuration: Ashley Morgan

3. Growth: Lynn Tomaszewski, Will Pergl 

Portrait Society Gallery is pleased to announce the final exhibition in its current space. On Gallery Night, we will be celebrating the end of an era as the gallery will close on July 29 for a brief interlude during its deconstruction and rebuilding. A brand new spankin’  Portrait Society compound will re-open in mid September to late September.

Three installations in three rooms currently address the themes of Destruction, Re-configuration and Growth. A fourth exhibition/installation/event, A Fop’s Banquet, takes place in a new secret gallery room, hosted and created by Jack Eigel and Skully Gustafson. The Fop’s Banquet will come alive gallery night and inspire revelry and happiness (in a time when those conditions seem in short supply).

In addition to the exhibitions, a Silent Auction (click for preview) will be conducted in the hallways of Portrait Society. All proceeds will go toward some of the building expenses. A portion of those proceeds will also be donated to the Riverwest artists who lost their homes and art work in the recent fire.

Some additional notes on the installations:

Re-configuration: Ashley Morgan

In the gallery’s “white room” Ashley Morgan has put her gentle touch toward turning the space into an slightly haunting room that feels part memoriam and part elegantly configured living room, but one made of dream fragments. Working from the historic file of Minimalism, Ashley anchors some of those concepts (truth to materials, simplicity of form) to found objects or things that carry the charge of past lives and other lived-in places. In this installation, she reconfigures pieces of ceiling molding by cutting them apart and gluing them back together. These gentle interventions feel tender and a little sad in that they address how the notions of solidity, wholeness, lastingness are tenuous at best.

In one piece called “A Pair,” 2012, she balances two rungs of a rocking chair in an empty white frame. The legs can be moved further apart or closer together, they might tilt or lean, depending on the mood of the viewer. These two pieces of an old rocking chair take on the metaphor of co-existence and its precarious arrangements. In another piece (Steady, 2012), eight vintage legs of end tables form a composition by balancing on one another.  At once poised and beautiful in its simplicity, even a strong breeze might topple the sculpture.  Again, beauty and impermanence join hands. Ashley’s room of “Reconfiguration,” as a whole, might remind us of the delicate balance of any arrangement. No matter how profoundly meaningful or sweetly benign, things fall apart. We glue them back together the best we can or we use the pieces to assemble new works.

Destruction: Michael Davidson

Michael Davidson is mainly known as an abstract painter who, with a leap of daring, has moved back into crafting this sculptural installation at Portrait Society. In setting the stage, he has removed the carpet, taken out the lights, lined the walls with velvet theatre curtains.

Titled “Rocket Goes on a Mission,” we enter a theatrical setting where a wooden pier extends across the room and at the end stands a steel sculpture that seems vaguely figurative. Broken, uneven, displaced, this ‘figure’ takes a step toward a mirror and attempts to assess the reflection. There is a down pouring of water, however, that obscures the view, as well as stains and dirt on the mirror. But, there is also a place where the shadow cast from the sculpture opens up a rather clean, piercing view. Two benches provide places to sit in the installation where the viewer can relax and commune in the room as the darkness and the sound of the water engulfs the senses. One can interpret this installation in a number of ways. The way I see it is that Rocket has come to a place in his/her life and pauses to try to see his own reflection, asking the same question that we ask in different ways, all our lives: who am I and what have I become?  Rocket is a little withered and broken and holds some dried flowers (memories) in one ‘arm.’ The act of trying to see feels courageous and futile and funny at the same time. Destruction, in this sense, is a normal state we all endure as we walk down the pier of time and personal history.

As a work of art, “Rocket Goes on a Mission” does a nice job of breaking down categories. Davidson sees it as much as a play as that of a fixed object. It is staged more than installed and if it recalls any associations, it might be Jean Tinguely and his wonderful kinetic assemblages.

Lynn Tomaszewski and Will Pergl: Growth

Both Tomaszewski and Pergl teach at the Miwlaukee Institute of Art and Design and who would have thought that their work would unite in such a seamless conversation. Tomaszewski presents two large-scale works on paper on opposing walls in the gallery’s front room. One work is a drawing of small circles that float, open and gain densities. She has abstracted the overall pattern from an image of a flock of starlings. Lynn is interested in natural formations in nature, the structures that expand and dissipate and the shapes that they take. Her other work features a pile of colorful dots that form a mound on the bottom of a large white sheet. This piece, called “Pile, 2” 2012 (5 x 4 ft.), recalls a garbage dump, but in candy colors. The attraction and addiction we have to plastic and alluring non biodegradable objects is both compelling and repelling.

In the same room, sculptor Will Pergl contributes a wall piece called “Drop.” Made out of wood, painted blue with a pattern of round bumps, this object is simple and elegantly formal, and yet goofy because it is, indeed, an abstraction of a rain drop. In some ways, in its enlarged and displayed form, it speaks of that great transformative moment when art allows us to make leaps from an object into zones of possibilities and interpretations.

Pergl has two other pieces in the show: One is a floor piece called “Mass” that resembles a giant black tongue with lots of bumps or welts. Texture, mass, density, darkness and an organic shape draw us in to wonder about this “thing” that has no function yet seems to demand a presence in the space in a stubborn, insistent manner.

Fop’s Banquet

The Fop’s Banquet Room is an installation by Jack Eigel and Skully Gustafson. They have created a dining room of  spirit and aplomb, a joyous, over-the-top, explosion. The Banquet Room will frame the gallery’s final celebration and provide the proper place for saying goodbye and beginning anew.

See exciting hole bashing video here. Read review 

All of the entries are being shown in a reading room at the gallery. Any print from any book is available to order for purchase. In addition, three artists were selected for solo shows, which are running  simultaneously.

The jurying of the book show took place on Monday, March 12 at the gallery. The judges were photographers Sonja Thomsen, Kevin Miyazaki and Paul Baker Prindle.

Three projects were selected for solo shows and four books were selected (one from each category) for Honorary Mentions. In addition, one book was chosen for a Juror’s Selection (best-of-show) award.

See the blog site: bsatps.wordpress.com for notes on some of the judges’ responses and thinking.

Here are the winning projects:

Honorary Mentions (includes cash award, special display of book and one print from project on wall):

Contemporary Portrait:  “Back in the World: Portraits of Wisconsin Vietnam Veterans,” by James Gill.

Travel: “Flores de Guatemala,” by Pam Miller.

Documentary: “A Working Ranch,” by James Brozek..

Fine Art: “Digging,” by John Lusis.

Exhibitions:

1. “Peruvians” (travel) by Christopher Colby.
2. “The Bedroom” (contemporary portrait) by Lois Bielefeld.
3. “A Selection of Selections” (fine art) by PJ Moody.

Juror’s Award, best in show:

(Cash award donated by jurors)

“Brief Encounters” by Marta Shumylo.

The finalists in each category were as follows:

Fine Art:  “Lambent” by Sarah J. Stankey; “Veil” by Henk Joubert; “States of Matter” by Shana McCaw and Brent Budsberg; “Winter Zen” by Arthur Elkon.

Documentary: “Under MKE” by Robert Burns; “Skyros Carnival” by Dick Blau; “The Face of Food” by Adam J. Horwitz; “Anatomy of an Avenue” by Barbara J. Miner; and “Bomber: A Chance Unwinding” by Lewis Koch.

Contemporary Portrait: “Facets” by Sheila Teruty.

Travel: “A Week in Panama” by Mark A. Stall; “The Promised Land” by Kyle Seis.

March 15 to March 29, 2012

Opening Thursday: March 15, 6 to 8 p.m.

Catering by Milwaukee’s Localiscious

Portrait Society, 207 E. Buffalo, FIFTH Floor.

Portrait Society is pleased to announce an exhibition of work by painter Fred Bell, inspired by the 1950s and 1960s still life photographs of Livija Patikne.

The exhibition, in three rooms of the gallery, carries a dialog between Fred Bell’s paintings and Livija’s photographs that heightens our awareness of how each medium’s vocabulary renders emotional states.

Livija Patikne (1911-2001) was originally from Latvia but had lived in Milwaukee for much of her adult life. When she had to leave her apartment to enter a nursing home, the apartment manager closing out her residence gave photographer James Brozek boxes of slides. Brozek said he “felt something” for this body of work and kept the slides tucked away in his closet for 15 years.

During the 1950s and ‘60s, Livija would create simple flower arrangements and then dedicatedly photograph them in still-life compositions. She also photographed each new floral arrangement that she would leave on the grave of her husband who had died in 1959.  A small group of this work was introduced last year at Portrait Society in the More than Real: The Death of Kodachrome exhibition. A larger exhibition of Livija’s work will open at the James Watrous Gallery in Madison July 6 through August 19, 2012.

Fred Bell has done a number of projects with the gallery over the past three years. He studied with Henry Hensche in Provincetown, Mass in the 1970s and then lived in New York City for 15 years before returning to Milwaukee. Fred is much admired for his warm and robust approach to the portrait.  He became interested in Livija’s photographs for their strong emotional pull, delicate beauty and rather lonely sentiments and entered an active dialog with her in creating this new body of work.

Rafael Salas: Lucid Dreams

Winter Chapel: Paula Schulze and Keith Nelson

Wisconsin Self-Taught: Bernard Gilardi, Rudy Rotter, Ringo White

Through March 10, 2012

Exhibition review, Third Coast Digest, Kat Murrell

Jean Roberts Guequierre, a Milwaukee based painter,  taps historical references in her work, most often turning to the Early Netherlandish paintings  of the 15th and 16th centuries.  For this show, however, she has been looking at the work of an early Renaissance Italian artist, Giotto, and extracting faces from his frescoes to translate into her own portraits.

A second project at Portrait Society is a video installation by a group of students from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. With guidance from professor Jamal Currie, the students have designed a project that deals loosely with the ideas that Giotto considered in his work during the cultural shifts of the early Renaissance. At this time, the idea that sky and nature begin to re-appear within religious painting represented a new way of thinking about man’s position in the world.

The third gallery will host a show called Every Day. Thirteen artists/photographers were invited to shoot images during a single day of their lives. The intention was to escape intent, packaging and ambitions and seek out the mundane. Each artist has been given a two-foot wide by 10-foot high space to present the project. This exhibition also loosely addresses the issues that Giotto brought to image making in the 1400s as he re-staged religious stories down on earth, within real-life settings (rather than against gold-leaf backgrounds in the netherlands of a spiritual world). All of the images in this project will be for sale at 50 cents to $1 per inch.

September 16 to November 6, 2011

Opening reception: Friday, Sept. 16, 6 to 9 p.m.

Gallery Night: October 21

This collaboration between the photographer Francis Ford and Milwaukee’s well-known man-about-town Jack Eigel began in 2000 with an exhibition at Kent Mueller’s now defunct KM Art Gallery. The second iteration of the project, “Jack’s Dolls” was in 2003 and the third, “Dairyland Divas and Dandies,” was in 2006 (accompanied by a book).

Portrait Society Gallery is honored to host the fourth chapter of the project, Men of Leisure. This new body of work emerges from the span of five years that have passed since Dairyland Divas and Dandies, a time in which both Jack and Francis suffered life-threatening health crises.

Jack Eigel, 55, experienced cardiac arrest in 2007. In subsequent years, his heart deteriorated to the point that he needed a full transplant. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel covered the 2009 surgery in Madison in a series of front-page articles. Jack had a rare condition where his heart was on the opposite side of his body, making the surgery extremely difficult. Not only did he survive the surgery but he has since become involved in the US Transplant games, winning a Bronze in swimming.

Although many people know Eigel as the iconic salesperson at George Watts and Sons, a position he held for many years, he has chosen to take time off post transplant because he says he is having too much fun with his renewed lease on life.

Francis Ford, 66, Wisconsin’s best known and perhaps most revered portrait photographer, experienced a fully unexpected bleeding aorta while watching a film of the Metropolitan opera’s Der Rosenkavalier,  at the South Shore Cinema in January 2010. Unexpected to survive emergency surgery, Ford has since fully recovered.

The new project, Men of Leisure, obliquely addresses both of their near-death experiences and the subsequent changes in their lives but lands squarely in the same playful, whimsical inventive narratives of the previous bodies of work. Indeed, Ford’s passionate interest in opera and Eigel’s affinities with vintage fashion and style infuse these staged images with a potent blend of theatricality, absurdist folly and humor.

Jack Eigel is the ultimate chameleon. He invents these scenes by first dipping into his vast repository of vintage clothing, which is stored at his Wauwatosa home in an orderly and accessible manner. The outfit then triggers the setting and staging of the concept. Eigel concocts all of the ideas and titles and enlists friends in supporting roles and then tells Francis where to arrive with his camera. This could be his cousin’s lake house, city hall, the Hob Nob supper club in Racine, who knows. From there, Ford uses his considerable mastery to frame the idea and cast the drama as a compelling picture.

The first project, “Jack Show,” completed in 2000, featured only Jack, as a solitary performer. Still anchored to film and darkroom chemicals, Frank followed Jack through all kinds of imagined scenarios: Jack wearing furry chaps and a cowboy hat while drinking a cocktail in a horse pasture or Jack wearing a headdress of daisies and floral patterned pants and sipping wine, still manly with a five-o’clock shadow, in the backyard by the Weber. The descriptions get cumbersome as the images become laden with layer upon layer of artifice, that is also, ironically, an amplified reality.

From the relative simplicity of this first project evolved increasingly complex and multi-character scenes.

The exhibition features the Men of Leisure work in the front gallery and “greatest hits” from the past projects in the other two rooms, pulled from the total 108 pictures. In any of these images the viewer can easily detect sparks igniting between photographer and subject. There’s a shared joy in the making of the pictures and it energizes the compositions.

Both Jack and Francis have always lived a little on the edge of the mainstream and when they throw themselves fully off the cliff into their own invented wacky world, it’s as if they are suddenly more at home.  For Jack and Francis, the celebration of the exaggerated is a place of comfort, a place where we are all finally, fully safe from becoming numbed and absorbed by the monotonous consumption of daily life. Francis has always gravitated toward drag queens, rock bands and eccentrics. In contrast, Jack has lived an almost absurdly normal life by day in his parent’s home in Wauwatosa, selling china and wine glasses to dreamy future brides at Watts, yet fully commanding a Milwaukee nightlife existence as a flaneur (a lounger, saunterer or loafer as the dictionary defines it). It is here, after dark that Jack would flow across all boundaries from gay to straight, from grunge to business elite.  It is legendary how he could land on any bar stool and inextricably bring enchantment and charm to the encounter.

For Eigel, whatever persona he concocts, be it sailor, crossing guard, tough guy, bar fly or civil servant, it seems to engender him. People often ask what Jack “is” – is he an actor, a performance artist, a comedian, a cross dresser? Oddly, he defies categories. There is really no title for Jack’s role in life or his avocations. Perhaps he is simply more alive and engaged in the exploration and expansion of his composite selves than most of us. And that becomes an art form because it allows us to imagine what our own composite selves might look like if we dared unleash them. Recently, when pressed to come up with a label, Jack said he is a “novelty model.”

Writing about the artist, actor and writer Antonin Artaud (Theatre of the Absurd), Marthe Robert said that theatre to Artaud was “absolute freedom in revolt.” She writes, “To outfit life in the most garish fashion in order to force it to show itself as it really is, to recapture a language that existed before value judgments froze the word – such was the task Artaud entrusted to theatre…” (Marthe Robert in “Antonin Artaud: Works on Paper,” Museum of Modern Art, 1997).

Ford and Eigel’s long collaboration first speaks from this realm of theater. Photography then steps in to burnish these bizarre little vignettes with a veneer of truth, allowing them to co-exist in our space as wacky alternatives to our often deadened world of perception.

Within these constructed photographic narratives, Eigel/Ford’s greatest antecedent would be Lady Clementina Hawarden in the 1860s who costumed her adolescent daughters in staged compositions. The role-playing seemed to allow these women to step out of proscribed Victorian social codes. Then there’s Sally Mann and Cindy Sherman and, more recently, Yasumasa Morimura, and Nikki S. Lee. But Ford and Eigel’s project stands fully on its own as something “other,” perhaps in part because of the decade-long engagement and the odd blending of art and life that they manage to keep tethered together.

The new body of work, Men of Leisure, is shot in color. Francis Ford has seldom worked in color.  To wander from the older work into the room of new work is a Wizard of Oz experience. Ford has manipulated the color to unnaturally blanch skin tones toward a colder, paler contrast as well as heightened some colors and isolated contrasts between areas. Eigel’s wardrobe choices are given full lavish, shout-out attention. But even beyond the color, there is something different about this new body of work. While the black and white images feel grounded in the editorial and documentarian, somehow limited to the page and pushed just a little away from us, the color work embraces us fully into these contrived worlds.

Even with Jack dressed in a vintage airline stewardess dress in the role of a school crossing guard juxtaposed with a young girl who looms brightly in the foreground, or Jack dressed in a gingham apron in the kitchen peeling a very phallic plastic carrot there’s an innocent goofiness to the scenarios that is trusting and inclusive.

Perhaps when one enters a real-life zone that feels fully impossible and unreal – such as the near-death experiences and medical/hospital worlds from which they’ve both recently emerged – the invented world of art and fiction become less severed. The gap closes when life gets as implausible as anything one could imagine. This new body of work has a bolder assertion to it. Sure Jack and Francis are aging but they are not letting go of that wide-eyed kind of looking at life that notes just how truly bizarre it all is, on every possible level.

-Debra Brehmer, Gallery Director

Portrait Society Gallery, 207 E. Buffalo Street, Fifth Floor, is a contemporary gallery devoted to the exploration of the portrait and its role in society. The gallery is open Thursday through Saturday from 1 to 5 p.m. For additional information contact Gallery Director Debra Brehmer, 414-870-9930; portraitsocietygallery@gmail.com.

 Tracy Cirves: Lavender Longings

July 15 to September 10, 2011

Galleries A and B

Opening reception: gallery night: July 29, 6 to 9 p.m.

Portrait Society is pleased to present paintings by Tracy Cirves during the summer months of 2011.

Ms. Cirves earned her undergraduate degree in painting from UW-Madison in 2008 and completed her MFA at Yale in 2010. She has recently moved back to the Madison area.

Primarily large scale, Ms. Cirves’ work deals with issues of womanhood, isolation, contemporary fashion and the more self-reflective ideas of how the act of painting navigates between the shores of truth and fiction, between true emotion and performative affect. The artist’s most recent body of work places women in interior settings and is influenced by “The Yellow Wallpaper, ” a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman published in 1892 about a woman confined to her upstairs bedroom by her physician husband because of her “nervous depression.”

Tracy says, “I have found the interior spaces that I am depicting in my paintings as metaphorical to my own interior space, and a way to contemplate the fiction within the reality of my experience of being. “

Here is an excerpt from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s preview of the exhibition:

Women in solitude, or isolation, depending on your perspective, is a time-honored theme in art history. Solitudinous gals were particularly in vogue for the Romantics, usually men. Think Frederic Leighton’s “Flaming June,” Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “Beata Beatrix” or John Everett Millais’ “Ophelia.”

Tracy Cirves is neither a romantic nor a 19th-century male, but she does explore a similar melancholic territory in her portraits. Though she brings her intellect to bear in these paintings, her work is more than feminist critique. They appear to be that rare thing: unabashedly sincere explorations of self.

Of late, her large, color-saturated works have been inspired by “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s late-19th-century story of psychological and physical isolation, womanhood, interior spaces and the act of painting. “I see these women as fictional portraits of myself,” the Madison-based artist says.

In addition to work by Tracy Cirves, a third room of the gallery (The Lounge) will present an installation in tribute to the imprisoned contemporary Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who was released in June. Running in conjunction with the Milwaukee Art Museum’s Summer of China exhibitions, the project was inspired by the international discussion (launched by Mary Louise Schumacher of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel) regarding how Milwaukee should address this human rights crisis at the same time that it is celebrating China’s cultural heritage. Portrait Society’s project is a collaborative undertaking that will focus on portraits of Ai Weiwei by Stephen Somers. It represents an effort to keep the issues of his art and detainment visually present through the summer months.

For additional information, please contact Gallery Director Debra Brehmer at 414-870-9930.