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20 December 2017 by nathaniel

Tops of 2017: a different kind of year in review

This was a short-lived tradition I started almost a decade ago, and I’m stoked to reboot it. Here, I put forward four Top 5 lists of my own: The Top 5 people I newly met in 2017, The Top 5 people I’d like to meet because of what they did (or the work I saw from them) in 2017, The Top 5 exhibitions for me (what I found most enjoyable), and The Top 5 shows I wish I had seen, but didn’t. Hope you like it! Feel free to comment, leaving any things/people I missed but might (or should have) enjoy(ed)!

The Top 5 people I newly met in 2017

  1. Julian James Lafayette Stern. My newborn son. Obvs. Also his mom is AMAZING.
  2. De Angela Duff

    De Angela Duff

    De Angela Duff co-runs the Integrated Digital Media program, a creative technology degree (er, set of degrees – undergraduate, masters, and PhD) in the engineering college at New York University. She restructured it to be more creative – to cover design and arts thinking along with utilitarian engineering skills – and grew it to more than double its size in a few short years. All this and she is a proud woman of color to boot. She hosted me in New York, along with Luke (below) for a talk I gave at their program last Spring.


  3. Luke DuBois

    Luke DuBois

    Luke DuBois co-hosted me on my aforementioned New York visit. He and his work are fun, smart, political, and engaging on so many levels. He is most known for his “human portraits made from data” (this is Dubois’s TED talk) and for his work on Cycling74’s artful Software Development App, Max. He’s also a great teacher and composer, and a generous seeker of funds for his students; and one can get a real pulse on liberal news simply by watching his Twitter or Facebook feed fly by…

  4. All my new studio assistants: Mary Widener, Jenna Marti, Alex Gugg, Josh Passon, Reid Finley, and Olivia Overturf (actually, I met Olivia in 2016, but it’s a fit). These folks have been working feverishly on new sculptures, new experiments, my new card game, and more. They do so with passion, creativity, and professionalism, all while having to put up with a very strange boss.
  5. Maggie Sasso

    Maggie Sasso

    Maggie Sasso was a Nohl Fellow (a big deal in Milwaukee) a few years back, and we were thrown together for side-by-side solo shows coming up in Madison’s Watrous Gallery in Fall 2018. We decided to meet up to discuss the space… and eventually agreed to collaborate! I’ve had a blast getting to know her, her work, and her family. She is very generous, very smart, very fun, and both creatively thoughtful and thoughtfully creative. If you don’t know her or her art… do yourself a favor! It’s humorous and tragic, with both implied and explicit narratives from the sites and lives she touches.

The Top 5 people I’d like to meet because of what they did (or the work I saw from them) in 2017

  1. Amanda Boetzkes is someone whose work I only briefly encountered while doing research for my new manuscript, and who then wound up giving amazing and insightful feedback on an earlier draft of that text, pushing me towards the book it eventually became. The book is, without any doubt, much stronger because of her constructive criticism. Boetzkes has some wonderful texts out there already, and I am eagerly awaiting her new book project, Ecologicity: Vision and Art for A World to Come, which “analyzes the aesthetic and perceptual dimensions of imagining the ecological condition.” More on Amanda Boetzkes via her website, or check out some of her writing via Amazon.
  2. N. Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics was hugely influential on my dissertation and thinking, and I still cite her regularly in my classes and texts. Almost 20 years later, her 2017 Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious differentiates between a thinking that describes “thoughts and capabilities associated with higher consciousness such as rationality, the ability to formulate and manipulate abstract concepts, linguistic competencies, and so on,” and “cognition” (2), which is the nonconscious capacity for processing information, the latter gained through biological sensation or perception, or technological sensors, mechanical feedback, or data received from external sources, among other things. Cognition, in other words, is a “much broader faculty” extant on some level “in all biological life-forms and many technical systems” (14). Hayles wants to have the humanities engage with and better understand “the specificities of human-technical cognitive assemblages and their power to transform life on the planet” through a more coherent “ethical inquiry” (3-4). She wants us to look more closely at what and how those systems act, cognize, and think, what we do with and as them, and why. Hers is an important premise and fascinating study of the “supporting environments” humans are “embedded and immersed in,” which “function as distributed cognitive systems” (2). As I said in an earlier briefiew of the book, I found myself alternatively nodding with approval ,and shaking my head in disagreement, while reading, but that is precisely because this is such an interesting field with too much to debate. And Hayles’s bringing these ideas into the humanities is unmistakably important, and may prove to be another game-changer.
  3. Kathy High

    Kathy High

    Kathy High is the super cool bio artist behind Blood Wars, where participants contribute their white blood cells toward battle against each other in a petri dish, until only one winner in this (literally) bloody tournament remains. We’ve shot a few emails back and forth around the section I wrote about her work in my upcoming book, but I’d love to meet her in person.

  4. Ben Davis is the author of 9.5 Theses on Art and Class and an all-around great writer on the arts, aesthetics, pop culture, and how they all relate to both everyday and overarching politics. He is smart, and funny, and manages to wrap up a lot of difficult-to-understand aesthetic and cultural philosophy and theory into easier to understand texts, when it is called for. Part activist, part writer, part arts and culture critic, whenever I stumble onto his writings I always read and enjoy them, and imagine a coffee or beer with Ben would be fun and enlightening.
  5. Lin-Manuel Miranda. This is a no-brainer. If you don’t know who he is, I can’t help you. Hell, I feel like I’m pretty late to his fan club myself…

The Top 5 exhibitions for me (what I found most enjoyable)

  1. Bill Viola

    Bill Viola

    Electronic Renaissance, Bill Viola at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence. I find Viola’s slow motion and high definition video installations of the last decade to be mesmerizing; where he began as an experimental video artist, playing with time and image, he has now mastered that material and discipline. He has long been re-staging historical (mostly religious) paintings, with a few moments before and after in his detailed slo-mo imagery, and this exhibition curated his updates alongside the originals. It was a wonder to take my time with the show, an affective and curious ride…

  2. The Venice Biennale. I finally made it out! What an amazing few days of jumping around contemporary art and ideas, and a beautiful city. I’d never been (though some of my work has been part of the periphery), and I feel like this was a very strong year. Candice Breitz has always been a favorite (since my time in South Africa, 2001-2006), and I was very pleased to be introduced to the work of Michel Blazy.
  3. Rashid Johnson

    Rashid Johnson

    Hail Now we Sing Joy, Rashid Johnson at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Locals: if you missed this, you missed out. Johnson is a master of mixed media and installation, using materials that allude to race and gender, identity and escape, while pushing us to explore how we think-with ourselves and our surroundings, histories and presents, materials and how and why they matter. Not only are there explicit ties to politics and its knowns and unknowns, but implications of ecology and more long-term accountability, and where these coincide with issues of race and class, interpersonal relationships and how they function.

  4. Stacey Williams-Ng, tour of Black Cat Alley. Wlliams-Ng has amplified how Milwaukee murals are acts of politics, dialog, community, and commercialism, all in one. Black Cat Alley has launched a lot of debate and new business, a shining light on a number of locally featured artists. Yes, there was some controversy around Adam Stoner’s mural (and again when it was painted over) – but in my opinion the outcomes of the conversations it spurred have had a net positive effect, mostly because of the generosity of everyone involved. It was great to get a group tour with other generous folks in the Fall of 2017.
  5. Shane Walsh at The Alice Wilds. I did not review this show because it was before my blog was rebooted, but I did follow up with this post about Shane’s work a few months later.

The Top 5 shows I wish I had seen, but didn’t.

  1. Nicole Eisenman in Munster

    Skulptur Projekte Münster. Only every ten years, this citywide exhibition sees new permanent commissions, several exhibitions and ephemeral projects, and a whole history of work of years gone by. I went a decade ago and … wow, it was like a treasure hunt! I hope I make it again some day.

  2. Sara Cwynar’s Rose Gold at Foxy Production. I’m just gonna pull from the text on this one, because it totally nails it: “Apple’s Rose Gold iPhone [tracks] how the phone acts as a talisman of desire for objects, people, power, and money. The film considers how individuals — the artist is one of its protagonists – negotiate complicated feelings of love and hate for commercial objects and how features such as touch and 3D resonate directly with the user’s emotions and imagination.”
  3. Sean Slemon’s Confluence Tree. I LOVE Sean’s work, and wrote the catalog essay for this one – but sadly had to miss it. More on his work and this show via this post.
  4. “Merce Cunningham: Common Time” at the Walker Art Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Mostly known for his cutting-edge and revolutionary choreography from mid-last century until his death in 2009, Cunningham also collaborated across genres and disciplines from installations to theatre, costumes to printmaking, painting, music, and more. I’ve loved and appreciated much of the work by his contemporary William Forsythe, and I imagine this show was stunning…
  5. WanÃ¥s Konst. Honestly, I’m not entirely sure I understand what is going on here, but it looks RAD. I love it.

Comment with your lists!!!

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07 December 2017 by nathaniel

Artist feature: Gregory Klassen AND Review: Back to School at Villa Terrace

The only disappointing thing about my visit to Gregory Klassen’s studio a few weeks ago was that I hadn’t, rather, visited with him years ago, so as to include him in my upcoming book, Ecological Aesthetics: artful tactics for humans, nature, and politics. Just… wow.

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I define an ecological approach as one where we take account of, and speculate on, agents, processes, thoughts, and relations – together. We concern ourselves with how humans and nonhumans, matter and concepts, things and not-yet-things, politics, economics, and industry, past, present, and future, for example, are all actively shaped in, and as, their interrelations. We wander and wonder around “How?” and “Why?” and “Where to?” for each. I argue that it is both an ethical and aesthetic practice to think- and act-with in such a way. After all, we must look and see, sympathize and desire, as part of thinking and acting and making decisions with and for our world, with and for and each other.

And Greg’s work approaches ecology and relation in precisely this way. It embodies and amplifies the generally imperceptible “actions” of “things” around us, so we might sense and perceive what they do, and want, and are - what they could be, how we might be, and what we might all make, looking towards the future.

The image above, for example, pictures a snapshot result of Klassen’s studio sweepings. I kid you not; for Nature Floor, he continuously swept piles of dirt and dust and garbage from the floor, into one large mound, and let that build. Over months, as he fancied, he also began to sprinkle it with water, some seeds, some interesting bits he found walking outside around the studio, and gift it with light. And… there it is, teeming with life and signs, compositions and decomposition. At stake here are our understandings of, and interactions with, the fields of influence, the potentials and capacities for birth and transformation, which are a part of each and every thing.

Greg sets up systems that help us to see and feel these forces, and just a fraction of their outcomes. Or, sometimes, he just puts extant systems (and/or their results) on display.

Retrospective Aggregate was more of an “accident,” and what, in part, set him on this path of ecological framing. Klassen spent almost a decade attempting to coerce paint – through splashes, drips, and swings of both the paint and canvas – into organic movements about… well, mostly, organic movement. And the results were indeed beautiful, written about brilliantly in this review by Mary Louise Schumacher in the Journal Sentinel. But it was when Greg rolled up his studio carpet, which he had been working “on” (in the more literal sense, as in, “on top of”), and found paint that had actually escaped to its underside – seeping and drawing, pooling and crawling, saturating and evaporating – that the artist felt he was really onto something. This became his solo exhibition at the Museum of Wisconsin Art: an eight-year work of art, where the paint itself did all that he had been trying to urge it to do, and more, but without his explicit direction. Here, and elsewhere, Greg presents works that are less an expression of human gesture or symbolism, and more a result of what paint, or plants, or dirt, themselves, do and want. Klassen encourages life and non-life as they are: growing, decaying, and growing again – and exhibits how they move and are moved.

For Greg’s Nature Table, he had the help of artist Brent Budsberg in constructing a wood structure to house and display dirt, and he gives it cycles of light and water, occasionally dropping whatever seeds are on sale at the hardware checkout over the top. Over years, it sees death and prosperity continuously emerging in and out of earth and rubber, grain and compost.

It’s nothing, really. It’s every-thing. It’s his interest or the lack thereof, the temperature in his studio, the light it gets or doesn’t, what’s on sale, what’s in the water, what people see and say, point out and ask him to enhance, and, and, and…

Currently, at the Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum, Greg is showing Plants: a room full of upended and upside-down, dead, potted plants, on tripods and dramatically lit, that mirror the strange, vintage, designer floral wallpaper in one of the upstairs rooms. Here is a forest of “dead media” in the most literal sense; it’s dusty and rigid, but also tangled between its own organic feel, and the sprawling desire to “be alive” from the papered shrubbery around the room.

At moments, it feels like Greg’s not-yet-decaying plants are bursting from the walls themselves. Infesting, propagating, taking over; aestheticizing, slipping through cracks, making strange; presenting, performing, redirecting; intervening, interacting, interesting.

This all “matters.” The etymology fits: all matter matters. Yes, I too am a life-long humanist, who spends more time worrying over the homeless than rainforests, thinking about American politics than recycling lithium ion batteries (for better or worse)… But Klassen reminds us that we humans are not the center of everything. Far from it. What lives in the dirt, comes from the sun, floats around the water… these “facts of the matter” are far more consequential. As a matter of fact (so to speak), there is nothing human at the center of a human. We are made of the same quarks and electrons as that table, the same liquids and bacteria as that yoghurt, are much smaller to the earth (universe!) as that rat or rock are to us. We are a habitat as much as we inhabit, and can easily fall prey to what we ingest or what infests us, to pollution or other environmental factors.

And we must start to think in different scales and times if we are to survive, together. Klassen asks us to attune to the usually softly-spoken life and non-life around us. He makes it sad but beautiful, quirky and ethical, humorous and loud. Attunement recognizes different notes and tunes we make and are a part of, which always resonate with and across one another in the everyday. We may not hear or perceive each and every note, we may or may not be in harmony, but there are always multiple songs and scales, improvisations, chords, and tunings. When we attune, we listen to and act on our and other resonances, creating purposeful harmonies and amplifications, interferences and differences, in dialogical, playful, and/or productive styles.

And while I’m on the topic…an exhibition review within a feature!

Greg’s Plants is shown alongside another work of his: Tropical America, a colorful drawing of a toucan, circa 1973 – a very early artwork for Klassen. Obviously somewhat tongue in cheek, Greg also not-so-subtly reminds us that we think about these things, though perhaps can’t articulate them quite so precisely, from an early age. Who among us has not played with life and death, with color and matter? What child does not wander and wonder on where they themselves, and their rooms, homes, and habitats begin and end? And… a tropical America. I mean, why not?

These two works are exhibited as part of “Back to School,” which, according to the organizers, “invited a select list of accomplished artists to display artwork from their current portfolio alongside work they created while they were in school, presenting unexpected juxtapositions of past and present that reveal insights into both the changing perspectives and the persistent threads of artists’ pursuits over time.” (Co-curated by Brent Budsberg.) It’s an impressive list of regional artists, several of whom I’ve already written about even in the short time since this blog’s relaunch: American Fantasy Classics, John Balsley, Demitra Copoulos, Nicholas Frank, Nina Ghanbarzadeh, Zach Hill, Jon Horvath, Greg Klassen, Kim Miller, Harvey Opgenorth, JoAnna Poehlmann, Miguel Ramirez, and Lynn Tomaszewski.

What I like about this “back to school” show (launched shortly after the semester started!) is that it is almost like a bunch of abridged retrospectives. The reason why I love solo exhibitions so much is that these are less about a curatorial vision that is umbrella-ed by a current theme, and more about a kind of material research practice, over years, which we can engage with in an artist’s work. And here, we see some art from each artist (or collective) from decades ago, alongside their current inquiry, to see and feel a similar long-term quest. And each artist also writes about that trajectory, in a fun and free notebook/catalog as part of the show.

For example, there is Jon Horvath (my first reboot review!) and his ongoing and playful portraits of and with his father (recent video clip shown above as a GIF). Harvey Opgenorth shows his ongoing material/visuality investigations, which have become more subtle over time. And Nina Ghanbarzadeh explores life and materiality with/in paint, contrapuntally getting rougher and more physical over the years.

Check out “Back to School,” and especially Gregory Klassen’s work, at the Villa Terrace in Milwaukee until January 28, 2018 (Wednesday – Sunday, 1-5). The show overall provides several interesting, potential research narratives, and Klassen, specifically, asks us to listen to humans, nature, and politics, together and apart – then act in accordance. His is subtle and important work.

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04 December 2017 by nathaniel

Details for “The World After Us: Speculative Media Sculpture Project” roundtable, Wed, Dec 6th 2:00

Please join us this Wednesday afternoon in the Digital Humanities Lab (2nd floor, UWM Golda Meir library) for the latest installment of our Research Round Tables – refreshments provided! Discussion and feedback encouraged! Co-sponsored by the Office of Research.

Wed, Dec 6th | 2:00 p.m.
The World After Us: Speculative Media Sculpture Project (A “Working on it” Research Round Table), Nathanial Stern, PSOA and Carol Hirschmugl, Physics.

Tentatively titled “The World After Us,” Physics Professor Carol J Hirschmugl and Art and Design Professor Nathaniel Stern are working towards a multidiscplinary project that will hopefully have outcomes in the forms of new coursework, educational gallery installations, and more fine arts-oriented sculptures. Drs. Stern and Hirschmugl are together asking: What are aesthetic, conceptual, and pedagogical ways of re-presenting geological time and concerns, and their relation to our media devices? How might we artistically embody and point to real and cutting edge sustainability research? How can energy concerns be manifest, as digestable information, affective installation, and understandable curricula? They are speaking and working with engineers, artists, physicists, and environmental scientists to learn about such things precisely so that they might embody them in a series of artworks, narrativize the process, and make this project pedagogical as much as it is aesthetic and conceptual.

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18 November 2017 by nathaniel

Syllabus sharing! Interactive and Generative Art – a Max, MSP, and Jitter class at UWM

Welcome back to another episode of syllabus sharing here at Implicit Art!

“Bound by periphery,” Caitlin Driver in Art 316

This class focuses on interactive technologies and aesthetics in contemporary art. Students will learn basic software development and real-time computational methods. They simultaneously learn and make projects with MIDI sounds or drawings, digital audio, human interface devices (USB game controllers, Bluetooth phones and more), and recorded and live video files for mixing and computer vision (body- and motion-tracking, for example). Assignments include many small projects with varying technical goalposts, as well as a mid-term and final artwork that will be more focused on conceptual-material aesthetic themes.

Most of my students have little or no background in coding, so, like my Electronics and Sculpture class, this syllabus works as an introduction to interactive art. That said, I offer it at the 300-level, so that my digital art students will understand bits and bytes, audio and video, how computers “think,” and my other artists will be able to bring their skills with crafting images or objects (etc) into the mix. I also “stack” it with a 400-level class, so grad students, or advanced students that want to take it a second time, can add another dimension of creativity and criticality.

I teach this in Cycling74’s Max: a visually-based, object oriented programming environment. What does that mean? You build a flow chart for your data (whether that be sensors from a phone, a video feed, sounds, etc), and that input is transcoded and turned into something else. Come again? OK. For example (an example I give on the first day, and that I remade in my PJs while typing this – shown left), plug a microphone object into a meter object to see how loud real-time sound is. Take a video grabber and plug that into a screen (“world”) object to see your live webcam. Use a multiply (“*”) object with each stream on either side, and you get a live video that fades in and out based on how loud your subject speaks into the microphone. (Kitty, from kitchen: What are you yelling about in there? Me: Just blogging!  Kitty: ???) It’s relatively easy, super cool, and completely visual. (Processing, which is more direct coding in Java, is actually taught in the music department at UWM, and I often recommend my students take that, too).

Joe Grennier’s “Faces” in Art 316

I’m gladly sharing last year’s syllabus and calendar online. It is under a CC-by license (Creative Commons Attribution), meaning, you can do whatever you want with it (use, distribute, remix, etc), so long as you credit me and acknowledge the license I used, link back to this page, and do not prohibit anyone else from doing said same.

The semester arc is project-based, and I teach ‘objects” (in the flow chart) and data dynamics (etc) as we go along with make, make, making. This is the order:

“R2-generator”
A generative “doodle” of software-based sound, which often sounds like R2D2, using MIDI and/or digital signal processes, and any combination of buttons, toggles, metronomes, randomizers, counters, and/or other learned objects.

“Pollack-bot”
A small, generative drawing project using jit.lcd or jit.gl.sketch, math, decision trees, gates, switches and/or the keyboard or mouse.

“Vizzie Visualizer and/or BEAP beater”
A generative or interactive project that uses randomness, feeds, and/or live input towards somewhat interesting or provocative ends. Students will be required to use both video (live and/or pre-recorded) and digital audio (live and/or pre-recorded) as part of this project – and pre-made patchers from the Vizzie and BEAP libraries are most welcome.

“Stupid pet trick” (mid-term)
An interactive art work with some form of external input (Human Interface, Computer Vision, Arduino, etc). uses pre-recorded video and/or live or pre-recorded sound along with some other form of input/output. Students will write a brief statement about their work (less than 300 words), and their technical abilities and use of inventive juxtapositioning will be judged against this text’s framing of concept, creativity and both interactive and visual aesthetics.

Final Project
A large-scale interactive and/or generative and/or networked installation, performance, tool or art object. Again, students will be graded against their artist statements, on technical abilities, conceptual frames, creativity and both interactive and visual aesthetics. Undergraduates will show complete and working software, budget, and sketches for the full installation. Graduate students must set up the full installation somewhere in Kenilworth as part of their final critique.

Of course, as with all my classes, there are consistent discussions around the aesthetics and ethics of our work. The readings for undergrads are:

  • “Action, Reaction and Phenomenon,” Rhizome.org (free online) (2008)
  • Katherine Hayles: Flesh and Metal: Reconfiguring the Mindbody in Virtual Environments (available via Muse) (2002)
  • Philip Galanther: What is generative art? Complexity theory as a context for art theory (available from CiteSeer) (2003)
  • Nathaniel Stern: Interactive Art and Embodiment (introduction) (2013), made available by the instructor.
  • “The Aesthetics of Play,” from The Aesthetics of Interaction in Digital Art, by Katja Kwastek.

Grad students do additional readings and context-based work, and are additionally required to read (and we discuss):

It is SUCH a fun class, with great work, and a high satisfaction factor as I watch my students learn to think differently: about technology and data, about art and aesthetics, about interaction, relationality, and ethics. AND, while I’m on parental leave, I’m very excited to see what new dimensions Jessica Fenlon can add to the class and program. I’m working on getting her in at UWM – and look out for a feature on her work on this blog in the coming weeks…

Here’s the Interactive and Multimedia Art syllabus, in Word format. Enjoy art, teaching, and learning!

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10 November 2017 by nathaniel

Review: The Shape of Things to Come, Karin Haas, Harvey Opgenorth, and Keith Nelson at Galerie Kenilworth

Nine Sages of Images, Harvey Opgenorth

Though I missed the inaugural show at Galerie Kenilworth, I was quite pleased to make it to their second exhibition, The Shape of Things to Come. The gallery itself is a cool story. Amy Brengel owns the building, lives in the flat above, and had Village Bazaar – selling interesting multicultural jewelry and gifts – in the space below for years. But, with the East Side (my neighborhood!) changing, “growing up a bit,” she decided that it might be time to fill it with an exhibition space. And Brengel signed on none other than Jessica Steeber to manage it. A veteran of the art world (who gave me my first ever Milwaukee exhibition!), Jessica was half of the Armoury Gallery / Fine Line Magazine team (with Cassandra Smith) in the late 2000s and early 20-teens, and the main reason I wanted to make it out tonight – and I’m glad I did.

Nine Sages of Images (detail), Harvey Opgenorth

The Shape of Things to Come is a beautiful exploration of, well, matter – and why it matters. It is a minimalist show, to be sure, in that it invokes non-representational shapes (Haas, below), and textures (Ogpenorth, above), and materials (Nelson), asking us to focus in on in how we perceive (and thus act), when there are no recognizable “signs” to “read.” This exhibition has us, rather, think-with process, and relation, and bodies in space (both human and non-human).

But, The Shape of Things to Come is also a more contemporary revisiting of Minimalism, in that it is not only about phenomenology – a human perception or experience. Here, shelves, or concrete, or wood, for example, are themselves uncomfortable. They are twinned yet their own. They are mean or light, funny or jarring; they tell their own stories, whether or not we are listening.

Untitled (Shelving), Keith Nelson

What is that sphere thinking? Why is that shelf holding on? Where are those fibers going? Idle, weird, rhetorical questions, maybe… but also worth asking. What does our world want, and are we doing right by it?

Untitled (Diptych) and Untitled (Diptych) by Keith Nelson

My two favorite pieces on show are both called Untitled (Diptych), and by Keith Nelson. Gray concrete and gray concrete. Natural, shellacked wood and natural, shellacked wood. Each half is, described that way, identical. But even the image above shows how different the twins are. Minor shifts in color and shape, in space and shadow, are… annoyingly jarring. A diptych is always meant to be inherently in tension. I feel this tension more and more, the more time I spend staring at how off-kilter, and unshapely, and simply distracting these “same-things” are in their difference.

What else can concrete and earth, wood and trees, tell us in their sameness and difference? It is worth sincere consideration.

Galerie Kenilworth is at 2201 N Farwell Ave Milwaukee, and open Tuesday – Friday 3 – 7pm, Saturdays 12 – 4pm. The Shape of Things to Come is on show until the new year.

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04 November 2017 by nathaniel

Review: Greg Martens’s Out From the Darkness at Grove Gallery

Greg Martens holds a very special place in my heart.

He was a traveling salesman who dropped out of college and married the love of his life with whom he raised three children, eventually becoming a cobbler out in Wauwatosa, WI – where his whole family helped fix shoes in their busy little shop. At the age of 46, Martens was diagnosed with very aggressive bone marrow cancer, and given two years to live. He shut down his store, proclaimed the love his family certainly already felt, said his goodbyes, and prepared for what he was told would surely come. At the 11th hour, he was offered an extremely experimental surgery that “may or may not work,” and figured, “It can’t get any worse.” After several surgeries, transplants, being in and out of the hospital all the time, financial ruin to the point of bankruptcy, and foreclosure… Greg went into remission. He was given, he has told me many times, a new lease on life. Literally.

And then? He went back to school to study visual art.

ink on paper self-portrait by Greg Martens

This is when I met Gregory Martens: as a non-traditional, working class, undergraduate printmaker in his fifties, happy, and making, and chatting almost all the time – dedicated to telling the stories of machinists, cobblers, and his blue collar peers, all performing their livelihood, and finding their place in the New American System. I watched and participated as he finished that degree, and then a Masters, exploring everything from celebratory woodcut portraits of his fellow Milwaukutians (I am told that this is not a word, but I am going to use it because I like it better than Milwaukeean) to photography and storytelling around his own journey with illness. He now teaches printmaking part-time in the Peck School of Arts at UW-Milwaukee, and works in his own Hip Joint Press studio.

“Out From the Darkness,” Greg’s solo exhibition, recently premiered at Grove Gallery – run by current UWM grad student and entrepreneur, Adam Beadel of Team Nerd Press. According to the artist, the “darkness” he is coming out of (and I’ll admit I have some mixed feelings about this) “refers to letting go of the influences and pressures of academic training” (ha!), as he is “just trying to channel the teenaged kid back in the 1970’s who loved drawing for endless hours while listening to rock and roll on the 8-track.”

update! The artist emailed me, re:above

Regarding the theme of my show, “Out from the darkness” using “darkness” to describe academic training and influence does seem a bit counter-intuitive, but ever since I entered the art world as a maker, the brass ring has been the New York market, Art Basel, and Documenta. Global, intellectual, heady ideas shaped into visual brilliance. Work worthy of the attention of Artforum, Art in America, and Hal Foster. Work that demonstrates a fully realized appreciation, mastery, and relevant commentary of art history, art theory, and art criticism. But aspiring (and failing) to reach these heights left me in a dark place. The heart of it all for me is drawing, and upon reflection, my purest experience drawing was as a long-haired “freak” in high school in the mid 1970’s. So, I have tried to recreate that experience in my studio and the results are the work in this exhibition. No strategy, no expectations, no pressure.

In Distractions, above, we see the artist on an accordion, behind a drum set and guitar, a baby (his grandkid?), monsters, and skeletons, and more. He is in front of a library, and beside a poster for a production (his studio, maybe?)… but that studio is on the move, transporting good(s) via truck. Honestly, his distractions and work both sound a lot more fun than my own bureaucratic, academic emailing and paperwork; heck, I’m having more fun writing about his distractions, and I suppose blogging is one of mine.

As is his usual, odd and graphic style, there is a combination of homage and darkness in all the drawings, paintings, prints, and sketchbooks-as-anthologies on show, which depict, he says, “demons, comics, snakes, skeletons, monsters, crying babies, bad boys, and cool cars,” with a sense of often political humor.

Sadly, I only made it out to Martens’ exhibition today, the last day – and there was some confusion about gallery hours… so the above shot is the utterly glorious window, and I was able to view only this and what I could see beyond, as well as what is on the two sites linked to above. But it, along with what I already know, is enough to recommend curators and galleries consider his work, and artists and art appreciators visit his site, or any other upcoming exhibitions (he’s also got a few pieces on permanent view on the ground floor of the Engineering building at UWM – where I helped to arrange some purchases!). And… definitely speak with him (or Adam about his gallery and print shop!) if you get the chance. Greg is an inspirational person and artist!

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