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The "Home" Show
Lindsey Wolkowicz, Dean Valadez, David Kasir, Brian Carlson, Reginald Baylor
Curated by Fahimeh Vahdat
Woodland Pattern Book Center
720 E. Locust St., 414-263-5001
www.woodlandpattern.org
Through March 16, 2008
By Sally Kuzma
Home Depot whose big box stores have sprawled across the country. The giant
warehouses stamped with a familiar square orange logo (pms 165) supply the
infrastructure of American dream homes, doing it with an economy of scale and
marketing reach that make family-owned lumber and hardware stores obsolete.
They trade on optimism, on the belief that a home is something we can repair or
remake to our liking, and on faith in the transformative power of elbow grease
and a few key purchases. Their motto: “You can do it. We can help.”
The “Home” Show at Woodland Pattern Bookstore moves the quotation mark back
a notch and turns our attention to home as a construct that shapes us – as
individuals and family units, as neighborhoods and cities. The work by five
contemporary artists - all with Milwaukee ties, selected by curator and MIAD
faculty member Fahimeh Vahdat - was chosen for its engagement with the psycho-
dynamics of “home”. In painted, printed, filmed and constructed images, they
tease out some of the “various and often conflicted meanings” that reside there.
Optimism is one strand of the conversation, as is a sense of struggle and
entrapment.
“By remembering ‘houses’ and ‘rooms’ we learn to abide in ourselves,” writes
Bachelard in Poetics of Space; “they are in us as much as we are in them.”
Memory, architecture and identity are subjects of Lindsey Wolkowicz’s work. The
pieces in this show combine found objects, salvaged architectural elements, and
plywood cutouts with images of hands, feet, torsos. Her renderings have the
softness of charcoal drawings (many of them are Xerox transfers from her original
work) and are glued onto surfaces layered with peeling paint and delicate
swatches of faded flesh-colored wallpaper. The tension between object and image
are strongest in the simpler pieces. A mute metal fusebox cover bears the image of
a hand and wrist whose surface is peeled like an anatomical drawing. Where the
wiring of muscle, tendons and nerves would be we see a boarded up space. (p)
reserve marries the image of a pair of windows staring out of a sagging shed
wall, onto a small slatted door, the kind that might have covered a cupboard or
crawlspace. In both these pieces the doors mark the existence of a deeper space
behind the surface, a place whose depths the artist attempts to gauge.
Milwaukee painter Reginald Baylor’s work takes us into the bright outdoors, and
commands the small gallery space with two brilliant paintings of Milwaukee
neighborhoods. They feature the small-scale tudors and arts-and-crafts bungalows
of our older neighborhoods, flattened to perfection: clean-lined brick, seamless
gutters, freshly painted siding. Their cartoonish simplifications emit a cheerful
optimism that the candy-color light both supports and subverts. The colors are as
serendipitously weird as they are designer-perfect: electric blue hedges vibrate
against the jutting orange edge of a front porch, and everything else is calculated
to keep the optical excitement high and almost lurid. It’s in the burgeoning blobs of
foliage that one gets a sense that all is not as controlled as it seems. In the daylight
of Next Door Neighbor bulbous hedges jostle into position in the foreground. An
exuberant graffiti animates them, joyfully irrelevant to any actual botanical form. In
the background a jumble of trees stand like icons of modernist sculpture, the push-
pull of their playful organic geometry getting more forceful as they rise up and
reach toward the houses. In the nighttime scene Last Next Door Neighbor, treetops
take over the whole sky, inscribing it with wild loops, a storm of dark energy
barely held at bay by the luminous swaying arc of a bright porch light. They are
the repository for incomprehensible forces lurking around the perfectly delineated
edges of Baylor’s neighborhoods.
Brilliant color signals a different mood in David Kasir’s work, where it functions
as charged field on which poignant family dramas are played out. The house-
shaped canvasses are thickly painted stage sets for situations that speak of
domestic violence, the vulnerability children, the anger of men and the sadness of
women. Figures gesture without eyes; their outlined forms could be fleshed out by
people we know, the roles are familiar. Disembodied arms rise up to protect the
victim or protest the aggressor. These homes are no refuge from the world’s evils,
and may even be abetting them. There are intimations of complicity, but not much
doubt as to who the villains are. Ida Applebroog’s intimate and spooky narratives
come to mind; Kasir’s world holds less ambiguity and more earnest concern for
the actors in these unhappy homes.
Dean Valadez’s vision of home life also lies on the other side of happiness, but
there is irony and dark even humor in his dystopic tableaux. In a series of small
digital prints, suburban neighborhoods are peopled with figures whose identities
are murkier and messier than their neat surroundings would suggest. Valadez’s
figures are disturbed – their surfaces are erased, smeared, smudged with paint,
dissolved with water. And while some of them traipse along obediently with the
family dog in tow, their angsty interiors all aglow (Family Fun), others are bent on
more rebellious antics – digging in garbage cans, cavorting on rooftops, climbing
up the sides of buildings.
Social critique moves toward activism in Brian Carlson’s video/installation No
Home. A small TV screen offers us a walk through some of Milwaukee’s
homeless haunts, many of them just a short walk from the gallery along the river.
Carlson focuses on traces of human habitation – sleeping bags, rags, tarps,
cardboard tents – evoking the presence of a nearly invisible sector of society.
From his research, he assembles a depressing statistics: six hundred thousand
people are without shelter on a given night in this country, a population as large as
the city of Milwaukee. Yet there seems to be no public outcry about this and very
little collective will to fix the problem. Carlson’s message is direct but not
confrontational. He wants to move us to act by appealing to the spiritual side of
human nature. The structure of split logs he assembles in front of the video screen
is meant as an improvised sacred space, a place of offering and perhaps
contemplation of the facts. Yet the most moving part of his piece happens off
screen, described in the notes to his video, when he takes a homeless person out
to lunch and finds himself talking with a fellow human being, someone not that
different from himself. One wishes this encounter could have been the central part
of the video or performance, not just an aside, because it’s so powerfully open-
ended. In a sense it doesn’t fix anything, and he admits this. But breaking bread
together is a radical act of faith with a long history in art and life. Learning the
name of the guy who sleeps in the weeds under the bridge – and sharing a
sandwich - might teach us a lot about what it means to improve the world we call
home.
Sally Kuzma is an artist from New York who now lives in Milwaukee.
Lindsey Wolkowicz, Dean Valadez, David Kasir, Brian Carlson, Reginald Baylor
Curated by Fahimeh Vahdat
Woodland Pattern Book Center
720 E. Locust St., 414-263-5001
www.woodlandpattern.org
Through March 16, 2008
By Sally Kuzma
Home Depot whose big box stores have sprawled across the country. The giant
warehouses stamped with a familiar square orange logo (pms 165) supply the
infrastructure of American dream homes, doing it with an economy of scale and
marketing reach that make family-owned lumber and hardware stores obsolete.
They trade on optimism, on the belief that a home is something we can repair or
remake to our liking, and on faith in the transformative power of elbow grease
and a few key purchases. Their motto: “You can do it. We can help.”
The “Home” Show at Woodland Pattern Bookstore moves the quotation mark back
a notch and turns our attention to home as a construct that shapes us – as
individuals and family units, as neighborhoods and cities. The work by five
contemporary artists - all with Milwaukee ties, selected by curator and MIAD
faculty member Fahimeh Vahdat - was chosen for its engagement with the psycho-
dynamics of “home”. In painted, printed, filmed and constructed images, they
tease out some of the “various and often conflicted meanings” that reside there.
Optimism is one strand of the conversation, as is a sense of struggle and
entrapment.
“By remembering ‘houses’ and ‘rooms’ we learn to abide in ourselves,” writes
Bachelard in Poetics of Space; “they are in us as much as we are in them.”
Memory, architecture and identity are subjects of Lindsey Wolkowicz’s work. The
pieces in this show combine found objects, salvaged architectural elements, and
plywood cutouts with images of hands, feet, torsos. Her renderings have the
softness of charcoal drawings (many of them are Xerox transfers from her original
work) and are glued onto surfaces layered with peeling paint and delicate
swatches of faded flesh-colored wallpaper. The tension between object and image
are strongest in the simpler pieces. A mute metal fusebox cover bears the image of
a hand and wrist whose surface is peeled like an anatomical drawing. Where the
wiring of muscle, tendons and nerves would be we see a boarded up space. (p)
reserve marries the image of a pair of windows staring out of a sagging shed
wall, onto a small slatted door, the kind that might have covered a cupboard or
crawlspace. In both these pieces the doors mark the existence of a deeper space
behind the surface, a place whose depths the artist attempts to gauge.
Milwaukee painter Reginald Baylor’s work takes us into the bright outdoors, and
commands the small gallery space with two brilliant paintings of Milwaukee
neighborhoods. They feature the small-scale tudors and arts-and-crafts bungalows
of our older neighborhoods, flattened to perfection: clean-lined brick, seamless
gutters, freshly painted siding. Their cartoonish simplifications emit a cheerful
optimism that the candy-color light both supports and subverts. The colors are as
serendipitously weird as they are designer-perfect: electric blue hedges vibrate
against the jutting orange edge of a front porch, and everything else is calculated
to keep the optical excitement high and almost lurid. It’s in the burgeoning blobs of
foliage that one gets a sense that all is not as controlled as it seems. In the daylight
of Next Door Neighbor bulbous hedges jostle into position in the foreground. An
exuberant graffiti animates them, joyfully irrelevant to any actual botanical form. In
the background a jumble of trees stand like icons of modernist sculpture, the push-
pull of their playful organic geometry getting more forceful as they rise up and
reach toward the houses. In the nighttime scene Last Next Door Neighbor, treetops
take over the whole sky, inscribing it with wild loops, a storm of dark energy
barely held at bay by the luminous swaying arc of a bright porch light. They are
the repository for incomprehensible forces lurking around the perfectly delineated
edges of Baylor’s neighborhoods.
Brilliant color signals a different mood in David Kasir’s work, where it functions
as charged field on which poignant family dramas are played out. The house-
shaped canvasses are thickly painted stage sets for situations that speak of
domestic violence, the vulnerability children, the anger of men and the sadness of
women. Figures gesture without eyes; their outlined forms could be fleshed out by
people we know, the roles are familiar. Disembodied arms rise up to protect the
victim or protest the aggressor. These homes are no refuge from the world’s evils,
and may even be abetting them. There are intimations of complicity, but not much
doubt as to who the villains are. Ida Applebroog’s intimate and spooky narratives
come to mind; Kasir’s world holds less ambiguity and more earnest concern for
the actors in these unhappy homes.
Dean Valadez’s vision of home life also lies on the other side of happiness, but
there is irony and dark even humor in his dystopic tableaux. In a series of small
digital prints, suburban neighborhoods are peopled with figures whose identities
are murkier and messier than their neat surroundings would suggest. Valadez’s
figures are disturbed – their surfaces are erased, smeared, smudged with paint,
dissolved with water. And while some of them traipse along obediently with the
family dog in tow, their angsty interiors all aglow (Family Fun), others are bent on
more rebellious antics – digging in garbage cans, cavorting on rooftops, climbing
up the sides of buildings.
Social critique moves toward activism in Brian Carlson’s video/installation No
Home. A small TV screen offers us a walk through some of Milwaukee’s
homeless haunts, many of them just a short walk from the gallery along the river.
Carlson focuses on traces of human habitation – sleeping bags, rags, tarps,
cardboard tents – evoking the presence of a nearly invisible sector of society.
From his research, he assembles a depressing statistics: six hundred thousand
people are without shelter on a given night in this country, a population as large as
the city of Milwaukee. Yet there seems to be no public outcry about this and very
little collective will to fix the problem. Carlson’s message is direct but not
confrontational. He wants to move us to act by appealing to the spiritual side of
human nature. The structure of split logs he assembles in front of the video screen
is meant as an improvised sacred space, a place of offering and perhaps
contemplation of the facts. Yet the most moving part of his piece happens off
screen, described in the notes to his video, when he takes a homeless person out
to lunch and finds himself talking with a fellow human being, someone not that
different from himself. One wishes this encounter could have been the central part
of the video or performance, not just an aside, because it’s so powerfully open-
ended. In a sense it doesn’t fix anything, and he admits this. But breaking bread
together is a radical act of faith with a long history in art and life. Learning the
name of the guy who sleeps in the weeds under the bridge – and sharing a
sandwich - might teach us a lot about what it means to improve the world we call
home.
Sally Kuzma is an artist from New York who now lives in Milwaukee.
| Copyright 2008 Art History Chicks LLC |
| Reginald Baylor, Next Door Neighbor |
| David Kasir, Echoes |
| Dean Valadez, Family |
| Brian Carlson, No Home |