2019






CAROLINE KENT
WRITING FORMS
Caroline Kent is a multidisciplinary artist working in drawing, painting, sculpture and performance to explore where language, abstraction and painting converge. She states, “To consider how a painting language connects image to object, eludes location and is expanded through acts of translation.”
Writing Forms featured Kent’s specific response to the gallery space with installation consisting of paintings and sculptures that simultaneously articulates and questions language and painting. She asks the viewer to consider language as a form not to be translated but to be deciphered.
Caroline Kent earned a BS in Art at Illinois State University (1998) and an MFA at the University of Minnesota (2008). Kent has exhibited nationally at The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, The Flag Art Foundation, NY, The DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, The California African American Museum, LA, and will be participating in Duro: Seeing Chicago, an upcoming exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Kent has received grants from The Pollock Krasner Foundation, The McKnight Foundation, and The Jerome Foundation. In 2018, she was a Fellow at Paint School, a New York based program of Shandaken Projects. Last year, Kent was a finalist for the Artadia Chicago award. Kent’s work is currently in the collections of The Walker Art Center, MN, the Joyner/Giuffrida Collection and The Art Institute of Chicago.
Her work is currently on view in the exhibition Five Ways In: Themes From The Collection at The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN.
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WALDEK DYNERMAN
oil and cement
November 23 - January 25, 2020
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Waldek Dynerman holds an MFA in painting from the Warsaw Fine Arts Academy. He works primarily in painting and sculpture, often presented in form of installations. Dynerman has shown his work in many solo and group shows, both locally and internationally. He teaches art at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. He spent last spring in Berlin, where he was an artist in residence. In “oil and cement” at the Howthorn Gallery, Dynerman presents large-scale paintings and sculptures, all executed between 2017-2019, strongly influenced by the current political climate and events.
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oil and cement.
instead of artist statement.
Visual art is non-verbal but we don’t seem to be comfortable with that. When faced with a laborious journey to decipher what is there, we desire explanations uncertain of our own ability to feel and imagine. An artist is often tempted to provide the explanation as well to assure communication. Regrettably when done, it often turns poetic to ordinary, beautiful to commonplace and complex to declaratory. Art explained dies.
Only poets know how to do it well. So, no statement here, only a few points to make the navigation of oil and cement easier.
One.
A son of the Holocaust survivor, I was told Shoah stories before I could read or write. It shaped me for life. The horrors of present-day injustices and wars are always in front of me. I cannot look the other way.
Two.
Honesty is important. Pompous and pretentious is hard to stand. Posturing is annoying when done by artists, and scary and dangerous when done by presidents. My work relies on honesty in messaging and processes.
Three.
My work is intensely autobiographical, mirroring past and present. However, it is not important that the personal is deciphered. It only matters to me as a point of departure.
Four.
I want my work to be fun to make and look at. I want it to meander, to be complex and indirect, to be confusing, surprising and unpredictable. I rather make no art, than boring art.
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DOMINIC CHAMBERS & SAMUAL WEINBERG
CHAMBERS & WEINBERG
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14 September - 18 November
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Dominic Chambers and Samual Weinberg render paintings and drawings that involve a translation of pictorial practices and inner mythologies. Chambers uses magical realism and employs concepts such as the Veil, as articulated by W.E.B. Dubois, to examine the black experience in America. Weinberg work features variations on a single recurring character the Pink Man/Pink Men. The hyper and at times absurdly laughable worlds that the Pink Men inhabit reflects the collective yet incoherent voice of modern culture. For each, figures, either in contemplation with themselves or engaged with another, teeter between our reality and another. Chambers and Weinberg both place motifs in their respective work to metaphorically connect their own inner worlds to larger social concerns. The two, pulling from vastly different references and personal experiences, show the breadth of possibility in what narrative art can say and do.
Dominic Chambers will exhibit some of his large-scale paintings and drawings that reference literary narratives cited in books, various mythologies, and African-American history. Working in the realm of magical realism, Chambers creates surreal pictorial environments in which black bodies are shown in moments of leisure and contemplation. Reality, vulnerability, and imagination all merge to examine the fact in fiction and the spiritual in the otherwise mundane. The black experience in Chambers is further explored and examined by specific motifs such as the Veil in which Chambers references W.E.B. Dubois book The Souls of Black Folks. Chambers writes, “To better understand myself as an African-American, and the sociopolitical conditions of black
people, I have developed a body of work that investigates the Veil and its various manifestations.” Bodies are covered by the Veil to disrupt their legibility, or bodies as silhouettes, functioning as a metaphor for the literal representation of skin acting as a Veil. Through his work, Chambers is invested in expanding the concept of the Veil, in understanding its limits and uncovering the Veils unrealized aspects.
Samual Weinberg will exhibit work from his current series which features variation of a single recurring character called the Pink Man/Pink Men. These fleshy pink, wide-eyed beings are mischievous and childlike in demeanor, often playing out scenarios of light competition and past-time fun. The series references the archetypal school-age juvenile delinquency narrative, cult movies, urban legends and internet forums. For visual composition, Weinberg culls images from personal photos, screenshots from film and television programs as well as the millions of images that can be instantly conjured from a Google Image search. From these sources, Weinberg then acts as an animator whose work passes through the Uncanny Valley of hyper realism and horror where time and space are disjointed, relationships between the Pink Men and their doppelgänger ‘selves’ are tentative, and the ‘scenarios’ that ensue provoke a mixture of anxiety and laughter. Weinberg’s work is built from, and thus reflects, the often incoherent, collective noise of our hyper-culture, as well as suggest a weirder world that may lie just behind it.
Dominic Chambers is an African-American emerging artist from St. Louis, MO. Chambers received his BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and received his MFA at the Yale University School of Art. Chambers creates large scale paintings and drawings that references literary narratives cited in the books, various mythologies, and African-American history. His current work is invested in exploring moments of contemplation and meditation through reading and leisure. Chambers has exhibited his work in both solo and group exhibitions regionally. Chambers also has been the curator of exhibitions at the Kravets Wehby Gallery in New York and the Pitch Project in Milwaukee, WI. He has also participated in several residencies including- The Yale Norfolk summer residency and the New York Studio Residency Program in Brooklyn, NY.
Samual Weinberg recently participated in group exhibitions at The Hole Gallery in New York City, While Supplies Last in Seattle, and First Amendment Gallery in San Francisco. He has shown his work in solo shows at Soo Visual Arts Center, Minneapolis, Thierry Goldberg Gallery’s Project Room in New York City, And Fogstand gallery in Taiwan, as well as received a Jerome Emerging Artist Fellowship in 2016 and a MNSAB Artist Initiative grant in 2017. He received his BFA from the University of Wisconsin–Stout in 2013 and currently lives and works in Saint Paul, MN.






SARAH FITZSIMONS
OCEAN OBJECTS
June 08 - August 23, 2019
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Ocean Objects, an exhibition featuring Madison based artist Sarah FitzSimons. FitzSimons' work often involves large-scale sculptures which interact with and derive meaning from their surroundings. With an interest in geology, her site specific sculptures reference oceans, deserts, mountain ranges and rivers. Ranging from temporary interventions to permanently placed objects, FitzSimons' work looks to reconnect our constructed culture with the wider patterns of nature.
Exhibited will be a piece called Pacific Quilt, a giant map-like quilt of the Pacific Ocean. As stated by the artist, Pacific Quilt is “a conceptual project taking textile form... an intermediary sculpture linking the intimacy of the bedroom to the vastness of the ocean.” Years in the making, Pacific Quilt spans 21 ft x 24 ft with one inch representing 25 miles. In translation from ocean to quilt, varying shades of blue fabric convey underwater topography and sewn quilt lines extend out in organic swirls to describe surface currents. As a performative object, Pacific Quilt is designed with the idea of working as functional bedding, “meant to be lived in and wrestled with.” The far reaching size of the quilt in a domestic space mimics the liveliness of water; it covers the bed, spills past its edges, floods the room and sprawls out the door. As a result, the familiarity of our day to day lives is metaphorically connected to that which is incomprehensibly vast—such as the ocean.
FitzSimons has developed site-specific projects for the Chicago Architecture Biennial; Farm Art DTour (WI); Djerassi Foundation (CA); Klemm Gallery (MI); Vadehavsfestival (Denmark); Casa da Inquisição Monsaraz (Portugal); Waldkunstpfad (Germany); Spaces Gallery (Cleveland); and the Hyde Park Art Center, (Chicago). Group exhibitions have included Alps Art Academy (Switzerland); Casa das Artes, Tavira (Portugal); Museum of Wisconsin Art; and Grand Rapids Art Museum (MI). FitzSimons is the recipient of an Efroymson Contemporary Art Fellowship, (2013), and grants from the Ohio Arts Council and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has been awarded residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center, Djerassi Foundation (CA); and Wadden Art Foundation (Denmark).
Her work has been featured by the PBS NewsHour, (American Creators Series, Nov 2018), and reviewed in Deezen Magazine, (London, UK); Azure Magazine (Toronto, CA); Chicago Magazine (IL); Define Magazine (Chicago, IL); and Modern Luxury (Silicon Valley CA); and is featured in the book: The Experience of Modern Sculpture: A Guide to Enjoying Works of the Past 100 Years (2015, Philip Palmedo). FitzSimons received her BFA in Sculpture from Ohio University, and holds an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles.






REMA GHULOUM
PINK SKY, RED SEA
March 09 - May 24, 2019
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Pink Sky, Red Sea is an exhibition by Los Angeles based artist Rema Ghuluom. Ghuluom is known best for her abstract paintings that investigate memory through subtle color relationships. Expressive, atmospheric and rich in texture, Ghuluom pulls from her everyday experience in her studio and its surroundings. Working intuitively, she navigates these internal and external environments; she writes, “The ways in which one sees, feels, recalls, and absorbs an experience fascinate me and I consider how this can be translated and transformed through painting.”
Exhibited at Hawthorn Contemporary is a series of paintings that reflect feelings of intimacy, expansiveness, love and longing. Ghuloum writes, “I try to make work that can be seen, felt, and really experienced.” Her painting practice emphasizes a process, creating living documents that inform one another. Each painting houses its own set of emotions and memories that entice the viewer with a soft, colorful glow. The atmospheric space within the paintings is achieved by a layering process. This process involves slowly building up the color field with thin stains of paint and then sanding in between to preserve the previous layers. Patterns and shapes manifest through this process, embodying a cellular memory of the previous layers, layers now partially obscured. This creates a surface that seems to breathe and remember on its own accord. The paintings begin to appear slightly sculptural, while still remaining in a state of becoming—shifting and transforming, appearing and dissolving. Diffused and ethereal qualities emerge through because of the abstraction of her work, while simultaneously representing reminiscent and lustrous moments in her day to day life.
Ghuluom received her BFA in Drawing and Painting from California State University, Long Beach in 2007 and her MFA from California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2010. She also received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2018; the Esalen Pacifica Prize in 2012; the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in 2010; and was an artist in residence at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans in 2018. Ghuluom has exhibited nationally and internationally at venues like Edward Cella Art + Architecture, the Cue Foundation, UCLA's New Wight Gallery, Five Car Garage, George Lawson Gallery, UC Berkeley's Worth Ryder Gallery, Torrance Art Museum, and Arka Gallery in Vladivostok, Russia.