Gallery Visits
William Lemke
Bill Lemke is a photographer, and his photographs were some of my favorite I saw during Gallery Night. His photos are traditional silver gelatin prints, which I thought were incredible. The process involves silver suspended in gelatin, black and white film, etc. In a world dominated by digital works and photography, seeing the rich tones that can be produced by this process makes me happy. Not only the process, but the composition of his shots are incredible.
Hal Koenig
Hal Koenig was also an artist who I was very interested in when I saw his work. His paintings are all oil, and clearly impressionist inspired. I enjoyed his work because it gave me a new lense on the city. Milwaukee isn't the prettiest around, especially the downtown area. But his combination of iconic buildings and the beautiful scenery of the places from which you can see said buildings in the distance. The almost fauvist colors give Milwaukee a look of vibrancy, and almost makes you forget how awful our city can be.
Thomas Shea
Thomas Shea's work was really intriguing to me. All of the oil paintings he was showing were of people in a museum, looking at paintings and other art. Looking at it almost made me a little bit uncomfortable, as if they were making fun of me somehow, and the irony of looking at paintings of people looking at paintings wasn't lost on me. Beside that, these are like studies on how each person exists. How they stand, what they may have, how they hold things, all while not paying attention to how they may look. None of the paintings show their faces either, giving each individual person a sense of anonymity even if defining details are there.
Audrey Dulmes
Dulmes' pieces all have a soft quality to them, as they are either oil or pastel. The focus on landscapes and nature lends itself to that, not necessarily needing the fine details to understand what the object is. It's all really similar to impressionism, with colors that are likely similar to how they were in person, capturing that moment in time. I liked her work, except that the colors all tended to be very orangey, which I'm not big on. My favorites are the ones with a purple hue involved. She tends to use a lot of secondary colors, rather than primary colors.
Terra Paulsen-Chmielewski
Paulsen-Chmielewski's pieces are relatively interesting, with an unusual abstract look to it. It involves mostly geometric shapes and straight lines with industrial colors. It doesn't look like anything else I've ever seen before. This isn't necessarily a good thing. It feels kind of gross, like mechanical guts or something, and the colors aren't very attractive. It feels kind of dumb and shallow.
Alison Hiltner
I went and visited the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and while I was there I saw this local artist installation. Hiltner's piece is basically a simplified ecosystem, focused on the symbiosis between humans and algae. There is a strange mouthpiece attached to the wall, with instructions to blow into it. The CO2 that is put into the mouthpiece travels into the bags of algae which transform it into oxygen, bubbling all the while. The whole piece is very alien, and walking around in there feels like you're in some strange lab and some sort of creature may rise from the algae and tear out of the bag.