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.
When surveying the damage of these collisions, the mind wanders away from the art historical canon towards the less rarified sensation of coming across paint in everyday life – on a denim jacket, a duck decoy, a fire hydrant or a finger nail. Simple forms get dressed-up and tricked-out, or flash gets muted with monochrome sludge.
"Also, it’s a holiday party." - Jake Palmert