Eleventh Annual Nohl Fellowship Exhibition Opens at INOVA October 10
INOVA opens an exhibition of work by the artists who received the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists in 2013.
INOVA (Institute of Visual Arts) at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee opens an exhibition of work by the artists who received the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists in 2013. The Nohl Fellowship exhibition opens on Friday, October 10, 2014 at INOVA, 2155 N. Prospect Ave. It brings together work by Ray Chi, Sheila Held, and Special Entertainment (Bobby Ciraldo and Andrew Swant) in the Established category; and four artists in the Emerging category: Cris Siqueira, Tim Stoelting, Eddie Villanueva, and Josh Weissbach.
The Fellows were chosen in November 2013 from a field of 162 applicants by a panel of three jurors: Naomi Beckwith, Marilyn and Larry Fields Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Evan J. Garza, Exhibitions & Public Programs Coordinator at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Co-founder and Assistant Director of Fire Island Artist Residency (FIAR); and Gretchen Wagner, Curator, Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis. Funded by the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund and administered by the Bradley Family Foundation, the Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists provide unrestricted funds for artists to create new work or complete work in progress. The program is open to practicing artists residing in Milwaukee, Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington counties. More information: http://lyndensculpturegarden.org/nohl.
INOVA will host a reception to honor the Nohl Fellows on Friday, October 10, from 5 pm to 8 pm. Two of the 2013 jurors, Naomi Beckwith and Evan Garza, will be in attendance and will give an informal gallery talk at 6 pm. Following the talk, Eddie Villanueva, accompanied by W.C. Tank, will perform Justified.
Eleven additional events have been scheduled in conjunction with the Nohl exhibition (full details in the Fact Sheet, below). Many of these events are free, and include screenings (two of which take place prior to the opening, as part of the 2014 Milwaukee Film Festival), panel discussions and artist talks. An exhibition catalogue will be available for purchase in the gallery during the opening and throughout the exhibition.
Gallery hours are Tuesday-Saturday, 12 noon-5 pm; Thursday, 12 noon-8 pm. The exhibition remains on view through January 10, 2014.
(Please see Fact Sheet, below, for details, and a complete schedule of ancillary events. For images, contact Polly Morris at pmorris@lyndensculpturegarden.org.)
Established Artists
RAY CHI
The instinct for play is an essential function of the human brain. As a species, play has allowed us to interact socially, develop survival skills, and solve problems—in short, to evolve. Children see no boundary between play and work. For them, they are simultaneous and interchangeable actions. The act of playing promotes a diminished self-consciousness, a shedding of inhibitions, and an openness to experiencing the unknown and unpredictable. In his work, Ray Chi taps into the unique psychological state of play—a memory that we all share—embracing aspects of it in all stages of his work: ideation, process, and execution. Landscape architect M. Paul Friedberg, writing in the exhibition catalogue, refers to Chi as a “partner in crime” bent, as he is, on redefining play for children and adults: “By making interactive art, Chi invites the child—and the adult—to participate, and permits participants to change and transform his art through their presence and actions. Instead of confining art to the museum and play to the playground, he allows us all to engage in one of the highest forms of human expression in the environment in which we live.” The abstract and interactive sculptures Chi is exhibiting at INOVA experiment with scale and materials such as polyethylene foam, steel, video, old televisions, wood, plastic and EPDM rubber, and include a fort he has constructed from found materials that invites participation.
Ray Chi is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He holds an M. Arch. from the Southern California Institute of Architecture and a B.S. in Architecture from the University of Michigan. His background in functional design guides his creative output, which includes furniture design, sculpture, film and video, graphic design, and public art. More recently he has been engaged in researching and rethinking playscape design as a viable site for abstract, interactive sculpture. Chi’s work has been exhibited in galleries and theaters in New York, Los Angeles, and throughout the Midwest. He is a recipient of grants from the Wisconsin Arts Board, and in 2005 was named an “Artist of the Year” by the Milwaukee Arts Board. He is an associate lecturer in the Department of Art and Design at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Ray Chi will deliver an artist talk, “Playing for Keeps,” as part of the Artists Now! lecture series at UWM on October 15.
SHEILA HELD
“The weaver of tapestries,” observes E. Thomas Lawson in his catalogue essay, “works within severe constraints. Every row requires multiple decisions about what thread, what color, what texture to use. Four rows further along is a bad place to discover that you have made a mistake. What is marvelous is that within this grid such liberated forms can occupy their place with conviction.” Held points out that tantra means “the weaving,” and that tapestry is a form of tantra: vertical warp threads purusha, unchanging and unseen, the ground of being holding all together; horizontal weft threads maya, ever-varied and visible, the outward manifestation; their union building up an image that appears to be continuous but is in actuality composed of quantified units, like matter itself. Held positions herself at the gap between the ideal and the practical, attempting, in her imagery, to access the point where magic, science, religion, art, and nature intersect and a conjunction of opposites is achieved. She creates her tapestries in thematic series, and she will be exhibiting work–made between 2006 and 2014–from Seductions, Homo Ludens, and Women and Water.
Sheila Held has exhibited her tapestries in solo shows and in invitational and group shows around the country since the 1980s, most recently at the Lynden Sculpture Garden in 2013. She has won numerous awards in exhibitions and received a Wisconsin Arts Board Fellowship in 1994. She has executed many commissions, both private and public, including tapestries for the Medical College of Wisconsin, Marian College in Fond du Lac, and the Bethesda Lutheran Homes and Service World Headquarters in Watertown, Wisconsin. She received her B.A. in Comparative Religions and English from Western Michigan University in 1968 and currently resides in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, where she is a full-time artist.
Sheila Held will host a panel discussion on craft and contemporary art at INOVA on January 10.
SPECIAL ENTERTAINMENT: BOBBY CIRALDO & ANDREW SWANT
The Nohl Fellowships and the Suitcase awards that fund exhibitions and screenings outside the greater Milwaukee area can function as a creative ecosystem for some artists. When Bobby Ciraldo and Andrew Swant first received a Nohl Fellowship in 2008, as emerging artists, they were already at work on Hamlet A.D.D., the film they finished this year and premiered at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art as established artists. In the five-year interval between the fellowships, they received two Suitcase awards, and during the funded visits to California they not only benefited from sharing their work-in-progress with new audiences, but also made essential contacts and shot footage, positioning themselves to complete the film and to elaborate a new distribution model for their work.
For writer Nicholas Frank, Hamlet A.D.D. is both “a rare triumph of perseverance, having no doubt endured countless ‘to be or not to be’ moments” and “a testament to the new global reach of the local” that profoundly complicates our notions of audience. Ciraldo and Swant have long been interested in the relationship between entertainment and art. Their work emerges from an art mindset, but typically references pop culture and aims at inclusivity. It also emerges from the Midwest, and from Milwaukee in particular. “What started as a community-based behemoth, featuring almost everyone they knew,” continues Frank, “eventually became a focused story and a true expression of the pair’s idiosyncratic interests in campy sci-fi, costume drama, stilted William Shatner-style acting, animated worlds, and the potentials of no-budget filmmaking in the dawning age of DIY distribution.” Hamlet A.D.D. is now both a feature film and a web series, a testament to the power of the Internet and the new, decentralized world of production and distribution that makes it possible for meaningful and experimental work to be made in and released from Milwaukee–something that would not have been possible ten years ago.
Special Entertainment is a creative partnership between Bobby Ciraldo and Andrew Swant, who began collaborating in 2003 because they shared an interest in emerging digital mediums and a desire to experiment with and blend the traditional rules of art, entertainment, and humor. In addition to Hamlet A.D.D., which premiered at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in April 2014, their projects include William Shatner’s Gonzo Ballet, an award-winning documentary starring William Shatner, and the YouTube phenomenon What What (In the Butt). Their YouTube videos have been viewed over 65 million times and their films have screened in film festivals and art galleries in the United States and abroad.
Special Entertainment will screen Hamlet A.D.D. as part of the Milwaukee Film Festival on September 27, 2014 (Landmark Oriental Theatre) and October 7, 2014 (Times Cinema), and at the UWM Union Theatre on November 20, 2014 as part of the Locally Grown: The Nohl Fellows series. They will also offer an artist talk, “New Media and Memetics,” as part of the Artists Now! lecture series at UWM on October 8.
Emerging Artists
CRIS SIQUEIRA
In his catalogue essay, James Taylor describes meeting Cris Siqueira at the Sideshow Gathering, “a now long-gone event that was part weekend-long show, part showmen’s club, an event that was as come-one-come-all as there ever was in this business. And Cris was all in: she ogled the talent in all its glory, bought secondhand attractions from showmen, eventually performed in sideshows herself… and got an idea. Because being around too many show people does that.” Siqueira recounts receiving an offer she couldn’t refuse in 2008: she was invited by a sideshow owner to be Monga, the ape girl. On vacation from graduate school, she had plenty of time to hit the road and turn into a gorilla 30 times a day. She came back to the midway every summer, taking different jobs from ticket seller to snake charmer and front talker, and finally committed to a full season in 2011. She helped set up and tear down the tent and lived in her van for five months.
The Monga | Ape Girl project, which will culminate in a feature film, is the result of over ten years of involvement with the Brazilian circus and the American carnival, and four years of field research (Taylor describes Siqueira’s approach as swimming in the subject). Siqueira’s documentation of traveling shows has taken her to low-income neighborhoods in big cities, and to small towns in the backcountry of Brazil and the swamps of Louisiana—the areas where Brazil’s new prosperity and the decline of the North American middle class are most evident. Through a comparison of popular culture in Brazil and the United States–and particularly the girl-to-gorilla shows–her work explores the impact of these larger socioeconomic trends. For the exhibition, Siqueira has created an installation that integrates projected video into a carnivalesque environment featuring the Monga | Ape Girl attraction.
Cris Siqueira is an independent filmmaker and historian from São Paulo, Brazil. She holds an M.F.A. in Film and an M.A. in History from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and her experimental videos have been shown around the world. She started her career at MTV Brazil in the promo department and as a director of live shows. As a journalist she specialized in alternative comics, writing articles for the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo, editing an anthology of American cartoonists, and translating graphic novels into Portuguese, including work by Daniel Clowes and Joe Sacco. She is currently working on her first feature-length documentary.
Cris Siqueira will lead a conversation about “Becoming Monga, the Ape Girl,” on December 4 at INOVA.
TIM STOELTING
Tim Stoelting’s practice centers on subverting and inverting systems, creating opportunities to produce something new and fantastic. He works in a wide array of media, including sculptural furniture, digital printing, object making, and semi-performative documentation. In his Construct series on view at INOVA, he looks at common objects whose existence is taken for granted—2x4s, cinder blocks, bricks—dissects them, identifies their constituent elements and remakes them, calling into question the static nature of the built environment. Stoelting locates his process within a continuous cycle of deconstruction and reconstruction that can produce “shifts and reformations that can be societal, personal, technological, or even contained within the art itself.”
“Central to Stoelting’s practice is the use of optical, physical, and metaphorical illusion,” writes Chris Hatherill in the catalogue, deployed to question “concepts of truth, matter, physical form, and function.” Hatherill identifies the Bauhaus and Russian Constructivist movements as antecedents for Construct, which he describes as “a system for artistic exploration—an alternate reality where the weight, color, transparency and very nature of objects changes. Through the playful use of and experimentation with matter ranging from plywood to concrete, Stoelting uses this new world to test and question iconic objects like cinder blocks—asking how and why they work, and whether they can function in new ways.”
Tim Stoelting is an Artist in Residence with NASA and a co-founder of Imagination Giants, an alternative gallery in Milwaukee. In 2010 he received a B.F.A. from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design. His studio, the local NASA branch, is located in Milwaukee’s Pitch Project.
Tim Stoelting will assemble a panel to talk about art, design and technology at INOVA on November 6.
EDDIE VILLANUEVA
Sandra Erbacher, in her catalogue essay, describes Eddie Villanueva’s installations as “complex emotional charts” animated by the tension between the familiar and the unknown. It is his attention to “the layeredness and ambiguity of the feelings surrounding home-as-place that makes his work so haunting and sentimental. Through his work we recognize our own desire for a homecoming, and yet are reminded that the more we search for home, the more elusive it becomes.” This exhibition represents a new departure for Villanueva, whose Pyne Camp, an immersive, atmospheric installation, fills the darkened, wallpapered gallery with dome tents from which sound and light emerge. Also on view is A Million Miles Away, an iPhone app with accompanying multi-media documentation built around a phrase that conflates geographical distance with emotional loss and longing. Villanueva’s final contribution is Justified, a two part “lecture-performance” that also blurs the lines between mediums and processes. A series of sonic collages that explore contemporary social and art world issues, Justified functions as a platform to rapidly work through ideas that might otherwise materialize as ephemeral or incomplete projects.
Milwaukee native Eddie Villanueva received his B.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and an M.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work has been featured at the SCOPE Art Fair, Miami, and in Global Positioning System at the School of Visual Arts, New York, the North American Graduate Art Survey at the Katherine E. Nash Gallery, Minneapolis, and the Wisconsin Triennial at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. He received a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant in 2012 and has taught at UW-Madison, UW-Milwaukee, and UW-Richland. He is currently lecturing at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
Eddie Villanueva will open and close the 2013 Nohl Exhibition with Justified (October 10 and January 10).
JOSH WEISSBACH
Minou Norouzi speaks of the work of experimental filmmaker Josh Weissbach in terms of disorientation: “Disorientation conjures navigational initiative: Where am I? What am I doing? What is this? If being lost can be considered an honest state, then creative or political agency resides in locating one’s body in space, one’s feelings in time.” Weissbach has said that he is “interested in the contract between the viewer and the screen. I want people to be next to each other when they are encountering the nastiness that’s going on. Until that final moment when the title snaps you back into the space of cinema.” Norouzi, in her catalogue essay, describes Weissbach’s films as an affirmation of the relational: we view them together, as an audience, and respond to the information on the screen, our surroundings, and those around us.
Weissbach used his Nohl Fellowship to make films, hire technical assistance, and experiment with new approaches. The Nohl award helped fund three different 16mm film prints–theoria, Model Fifty-One Fifty-Six, and 200 N.W. 5th Street–and enabled him to use a sound engineer for the first time on two of these films. During the fellowship year, Weissbach began to work with appropriated digital video footage, producing Football Films Presents, 200 N.W. 5th Street and In The Age. Nine of Weissbach’s short films will be looped in the screening room at INOVA; his screening at the UWM Union Theatre will be an opportunity to see some of these films on 16 mm as well as new work.
Josh Weissbach lives in a house next to an abandoned village with his wife, daughter, and three cats. He received his M.F.A in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and his B.A. in Film-Video Production, Photography, and Cuban Studies from Hampshire College. In 2013, he co-founded Microlights, a screening house specializing in avant-garde film and video based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He has shown his 16mm films and digital videos in film festivals, microcinemas, and galleries domestically and internationally.
Josh Weissbach will screen a collection of his 16mm films made between 2011 and 2014 on November 13, 2014 at the UWM Union Theatre as part of the Locally Grown: The Nohl Fellows series.
NOHL EXHIBITION FACT SHEET
CONTACT INFORMATION
INOVA (Institute of Visual Arts)
UWM Peck School of the Arts
Phone: (414) 229-5070
Email: inova@uwm.edu
web: arts.uwm.edu/inova
GALLERY LOCATION & HOURS
INOVA, 2155 North Prospect Avenue, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53202
Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 12 noon-5 pm; Thursday, 12 noon-8 pm.
October 10, 2014-January 10, 2015
GREATER MILWAUKEE FOUNDATION’S MARY L. NOHL FUND FELLOWSHIPS FOR INDIVIDUAL ARTISTS 2013 EXHIBITION
Established Artists
Ray CHI
Sheila HELD
SPECIAL ENTERTAINMENT: Bobby CIRALDO & Andrew SWANT
Emerging Artists
Cris SIQUEIRA
Tim STOELTING
Eddie VILLANUEVA
Josh WEISSBACH
Friday, October 10, 2014, 5-8 pm
Opening reception
Gallery talk by returning jurors Naomi Beckwith and Evan Garza at 6 pm. Following the talk, Eddie Villanueva, accompanied by W.C. Tank, will perform Justified, a series of sonic collages that explore contemporary social and art world issues.
Nohl Exhibition Ancillary Events
Events are free and open to the public unless otherwise indicated.
Saturday, September 27, 2014 at 9:45 pm
MILWAUKEE FILM FESTIVAL
SPECIAL ENTERTAINMENT’S HAMLET A.D.D.
Landmark Oriental Theater, 2230 N. Farwell Ave.
Tickets: $6-$10, available online at mkefilm.org or at the Oriental box office.
Special Entertainment (Bobby Ciraldo & Andrew Swant) screens its ten-years-in-the-making Hamlet A.D.D.: a re-imagining of Shakespeare’s timeless play as a bizarre and comedic tour through the ages with live-action characters in a colorful cartoon world. Emerging with the rise of viral video and filled with local artists on either side of the camera–and the green screen–Hamlet A.D.D. offers a unique view of a literary classic, a vital community, and an epoch in media-making.
Tuesday, October 7, 2014 at 9:30 pm
MILWAUKEE FILM FESTIVAL
SPECIAL ENTERTAINMENT’S HAMLET A.D.D.
Times Cinema, 5906 W. Vliet St.
Tickets: $6-$10, available online at mkefilm.org or at the Oriental box office.
Special Entertainment (Bobby Ciraldo & Andrew Swant) screens its ten-years-in-the-making Hamlet A.D.D.: a re-imagining of Shakespeare’s timeless play as a bizarre and comedic tour through the ages with live-action characters in a colorful cartoon world. Emerging with the rise of viral video and filled with local artists on either side of the camera–and the green screen–Hamlet A.D.D. offers a unique view of a literary classic, a vital community, and an epoch in media-making.
Wednesday, October 8, 2014 at 7 pm
UWM DEPARTMENT OF ART & DESIGN: ARTISTS NOW! GUEST LECTURE SERIES
SPECIAL ENTERTAINMENT (BOBBY CIRALDO & ANDREW SWANT): NEW MEDIA AND MEMETICS
UWM Arts Center Lecture Hall, 2400 E. Kenwood Blvd.
FREE
Information: (414) 229-6052 or arts.uwm.edu
Artists and filmmakers, the collaborative team of Bobby Ciraldo and Andrew Swant (Special Entertainment) are an award-winning partnership known mostly for what they thought of as side projects. Their works include the documentary feature William Shatner’s Gonzo Ballet, YouTube phenomenon What What (In the Butt), and Hamlet A.D.D.
Wednesday, October 15, 2014 at 7 pm
UWM DEPARTMENT OF ART & DESIGN: ARTISTS NOW! GUEST LECTURE SERIES
RAY CHI: PLAYING FOR KEEPS
UWM Arts Center Lecture Hall, 2400 E. Kenwood Blvd.
FREE
Information: (414) 229-6052 or arts.uwm.edu
2013 Nohl Fellow Ray Chi believes that playful experiences need not be limited to children and that they can be integrated into our designed world in challenging and sophisticated ways. Chi will talk about his research into this subject, as well as personal sculptural investigations that promote the effect of play as a uniquely creative state of being.
Thursday, October 23, 2014 at 6 pm
TALKS BY 2014 NOHL JURORS
Reception begins at 6 pm; talk begins at 6:30 pm
INOVA, 2155 N. Prospect Ave.
FREE
The three jurors who will be selecting the seven recipients of the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund for Individual Artists Fellowships (2014)—Courtney Fink, Executive Director, Southern Exposure, San Francisco; Daniel Fuller, Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art at the Maine College of Art, Portland; and Naima J. Keith, Assistant Curator at The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York–will give a public talk about their institutions and curatorial interests. The talk begins at 6:30 pm and is preceded by an informal reception.
Thursday, November 6, 2014, 6:30 pm
TIM STOELTING: ART, DESIGN, TECHNOLOGY, A PANEL DISCUSSION
INOVA, 2155 N. Prospect Ave.
FREE
Join Tim Stoelting, NASA’s Resident Artist, and his guests for a conversation on the intertwined worlds of art, design, and technology.
Thursday, November 13, 2014 at 7 pm
FILM: LOCALLY GROWN
THE VALUE OF DISORIENTATION: 16 mm FILMS BY JOSH WEISSBACH
UWM Union Theatre, 2200 E. Kenwood Blvd.
FREE
Information: (414) 229-4070 or uniontheatre.uwm.edu
This collection of 16mm films made by experimental filmmaker Josh Weissbach between 2011 and 2014 embraces the notion of navigational initiative as a reward of disorientation: Where am I? What am I doing? What is this? If being lost can be considered an honest state, then creative or political agency resides in locating one’s body in space, one’s feelings in time. This is an opportunity to see some of the films in the INOVA exhibition in 16mm as well as films that are not included in the exhibition. Among the films to be screened: the remains of seventeen artefacted flares (negative), 2014; 2843 Colborne St. E, 2012; storm crossings : shifting geometries, 2012; 106 River Road, 2011; Model Fifty-One Fifty-Six, 2014; and 200 N.W. 5th Street, 2014
Thursday, November 20, 2014 at 7 pm
FILM: LOCALLY GROWN
SPECIAL ENTERTAINMENT: HAMLET A.D.D.
UWM Union Theatre, 2200 E. Kenwood Blvd.
FREE
Information: (414) 229-4070 or uniontheatre.uwm.edu
Special Entertainment (Bobby Ciraldo & Andrew Swant) screens its ten-years-in-the-making Hamlet A.D.D.: a re-imagining of Shakespeare’s timeless play as a bizarre and comedic tour through the ages with live-action characters in a colorful cartoon world. Emerging with the rise of viral video and filled with local artists on either side of the camera–and the green screen–Hamlet A.D.D. offers a unique view of a literary classic, a vital community, and an epoch in media-making. A work-in-progress preview screening of Hamlet A.D.D. took place at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) in April 2014, and it was first shown in Milwaukee a month later.
Thursday, December 4, 2014, 6:30 pm
CRIS SIQUEIRA: BECOMING MONGA, THE APE GIRL
INOVA, 2155 N. Prospect Ave.
FREE
Nohl Fellow Cris Siqueira leads a conversation about her immersion field research in traveling shows in carnivals in Brazil and the United States, and the radically independent filmmaking practices she developed to document her subject.
Saturday, January 10, 2015 at 2 pm
SHEILA HELD: CRAFT AND CONTEMPORARY ART, A PANEL DISCUSSION
INOVA, 2155 N. Prospect Ave.
FREE
Sheila Held is joined by artists and curators in a discussion about the place of craft in contemporary art.
Saturday, January 10, 2015 at 4 pm
EDDIE VILLANUEVA: JUSTIFIED
INOVA, 2155 N. Prospect Ave.
FREE
2013 Nohl Fellow Eddie Villanueva performs a series of sonic collages that explore contemporary social and art world issues. Villanueva uses the performance as a platform to quickly work through ideas that might otherwise materialize as ephemeral or incomplete projects. The “concert performance” as lecture, with a cameo appearance by W.C. Tank, will be an unrestricted and engaging outlet for critical debate and discussion.
NOTE: This press release was submitted to Urban Milwaukee and was not written by an Urban Milwaukee writer. While it is believed to be reliable, Urban Milwaukee does not guarantee its accuracy or completeness.
Mentioned in This Press Release
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Thanks for this review, with all the detail particulars of films and lectures that accompany it!