 PAINTED // CURATED BY TYSON REEDER Liz Craft / Pentti Monkkonen Ben Stone / Geoffrey Todd Smith Michael Rea / Samantha Bittman Sara Clendening / Eric Wesley Rachel Niffenegger / Michael Hunter Amy Yao / Allison Heape Stephanie Brooks / Jim Lutes William J. O’ Brien / Tim Bergstrom Craig Butterworth / Dana Degiulio Michael Rea / Gillian Riley Ron Ewert / Chinatsu Ikeda Liam Neff / Andrew Greene Stephanie Brooks / Andrew Falkowski Mckeever Donovan / Jason Preker Chris Bradley / William Sieruta Amber Renaye / Josh Reames Amy Yao / Allison Heape Exhibition: December 10th - January 15th 2012
Milwaukee, WI -- What happens when a precious object is painted? According to Antiques Roadshow, the object is ruined. Imagine the bummer of painting a beautiful wood floor black, or a gold chain brown. The sadness and anger you feel will prepare you for this show. Where does this anxiety originate? We celebrate Greek and Roman statuary for it’s purity, with the whiteness of the marble equating to a certain civilized restraint, a commitment to form over surface cosmetics. Yet a closer reading of antiquity reveals a garish Technicolor world of pink skin,blue eyes, and orange hair. Can you handle the truth? Clement Greenberg clearly couldn’t when he scraped the paint off David Smith’s steel sculptures, denouncing color as “non-essential" to the work. Nor could Beavis when Butthead sniffed a can of paint thinner and painted a cat blue. (Season 2, Episode 9). In this exhibition, 15 unique objects have been generated from pairing sculptors with painters – one artist makes an object, the other paints the surface. Approaches range from abstract – as with Jim Lutes’ nuanced egg-tempera brushwork on a wooden Stephanie Brooks sculpture, to the surrealist specificity of Michael Rea’s hi-hat obsessively ornamented with black and white patterns by Samantha Bittman. |