Strata & Cipher: Barbara Manger and Richard Taylor brings together two artists who work closely with color and layering, and have developed a process-oriented studio practice that transforms surprising source materials into metaphors for their experiences. Manger uses monoprinting techniques to create richly composed images that reference the textures of moving waterways, and Taylor collects found materials to inform his use of shape, color, and surface, creating sculptures reminiscent of weathered urban artifacts.
Read MoreKat Kneevers Interviews Claire Stigliani for the Shepherd Express
Claire Stigliani creatively expresses her ideas of femininity, sexuality, beauty, desire, and female empowerment through paintings, drawings, puppet theaters and videos. In timeless spaces filled with historical portraits, literature, and pop-culture references, Stigliani places fairy tale like characters often based on her own personal identity.
Kat visited Claire's new exhibit, Dream Within A Dream, on display now until June 30, 2017, at Tory Folliard Gallery in Milwaukee's Historic Third Ward.
Claire Stigliani MMOCA Exhibition Review from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Doomed love and fractured fairy tales dominate Claire Stigliani's vision. Her artwork is an imaginative reflection on longing and transgression.
Stigliani sees herself as an artist doomed to indirectly reflect her world, too, and her visions are mediated through layers of objects and mediums in the show. The exhibit features five distinct cycles, or series, each presented through a group of drawings, paintings, video and three-dimensional puppet sets.
Read MoreClaire Stigliani Exhibition, Dream Within A Dream, Featured in Shepherd Express
When I finish a work, I have to distance myself from it. I never want to be the center of attention, and though I hope my work sells (running a gallery is expensive!), it’s because I want to do right by the people I’m working with. But my commitment is to my work, to the next painting I’m making, to this imaginary space that I have created for myself. So maybe it is a kind of sleeping that I’m after…a looking inward rather than outward at the world.
Read MoreWinnowers Artist Alex Orellana's Photographs Reviewed in the Shepherd Express
“For transgender people, there is a prevailing narrative that success entails trading one binary identity for another to pass as the opposite sex,” says Alex Orellana, third-year MFA student in the UW-Madison Art Department. “Despite not wanting to transition, I have my own health reasons to take hormones, and the effects of that process led me to create this body of work. The medicine makes me increasingly androgynous, and I want to share the experience of how that affects my social interactions.”
Read MoreT.L. Solien Exhibition The Foreseeable Past Reviewed in the Shepherd Express
“The Foreseeable Past,” a solo exhibition by T. L Solien at Tory Folliard Gallery, is full of paintings with overtones of tradition, but intriguingly strange despite their friendly, vivid hues. They bring together collage and flat colors with subtle notes of disconcerting places. A companion exhibition by Swedish artist Erika Nordqvist follows suit, but with distinct variation.
Read MoreT.L. Solien and Erika Nordqvist exhibitions reviewed in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
The ruins of time and domesticated dreams currently greet visitors to the Tory Folliard Gallery. T.L. Solien and Erika Nordqvist straddle autobiographical narrative and novelistic fantasy in their concurrent solo exhibits.
Read MoreDerrick Buisch | Artist Spotlight
Brilliant color combinations provide jolts of positive energy in works by Derrick Buisch. Vibrating lines morph into playful monsters and pop culture symbols in his abstract visual vocabulary. Buisch's paintings are meant to be visually engaging and potentially unnerving as he combines evocative imagery with moments of uneasy hilarity.
Read MoreLaurie Hogin's “Implacable Demons and Better Angels” reviewed in Art Ltd. Magazine
Laurie Hogin: “Implacable Demons and Better Angels” at Tory Folliard Gallery
Laurie Hogin’s mutated menageries are simultaneously extremely beautiful and intensely horrific. A bit more the former than the latter, though; this is all as if you took Edward Hicks’ The Peaceable Kingdom (1826) and added to it about 100 years of pesticides, radiation, inbreeding and ecosystem destruction—Hell never looked so gorgeous.
Read MoreLaurie Hogin featured in American Art Collector February 2017
In his novel Barnaby Rudge, Charles Dickens wrote, “It is curious to imagine these people of the world, busy in thought, turning their eyes towards the countless spheres that shine above us, and making them reflect the only images their minds contain…So do the shadows of our own desires stand between us and our better angels, and thus their brightness is eclipsed.”
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