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Exhibits |
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Pritika Chowdry: The Crooked Line
July 7-15, 2009. Open 12-5 daily. Other hours by appointment: email Pritika Chowdry or call 608-239-1306. The Crooked Line is a preview of a new body of work in which Chowdry is attempting to make meaning of map-making as a tool of colonization. The 1947 partition of colonial India that created India and Pakistan was a watershed event in the ongoing communal and sectarian violence on the sub-continent. By fictionalizing maps of the Radcliffe line that marks the border and putting these cartographic fragments on clothes, kites, and directly on walls, Chowdry wishes to give material form to the skin of the nation. Implicit in this project is to expose the economic underpinnings of British colonialism, which rested on seven main products from the South Asian sub-continent: cotton, silk, indigo, tea, coffee, spices, and salt. These will be her materials for the next year as she weaves this project and unravels this particularly tainted history. Movin' on Up: The Changing Face of the School of Human Ecology August 29-November 22, 2009. Open weekdays 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Weekend hours tbd. As construction on the University of Wisconsin’s School of Human Ecology building addition will begin in January, this fall will be our last semester in the current Design Gallery space. This exhibit will present models, plans, and design details for the addition and the renovation of our 1914 building, providing a road map for this major transition. A portion of the gallery will also be devoted to a rotation of class critiques, portfolio reviews, and temporary installations of student work. With extended open hours, we hope that this exhibition will become an informal gathering place where the SoHE community can celebrate and anticipate the exciting changes to come, and visitors can visualize our future.
Past Exhibits: Maura Schaffer: Bon Appetit
September 3 - 28, 2008 Maura Schaffer’s multi-media sculpture and installation work uses the familiar trappings of domestic life to convey aspects of the human condition. Made with fabric and wire, her anthropomorphic, gestural chairs, tables, windows and doors dance, argue, make love, and share angst-ridden meals in poetic and often painfully funny tableaux. Schaffer’s work is truly interdisciplinary in conception and process, addressing concerns about relationships, domesticity, family and gender while drawing on her background in interior design and the applied arts. Schaffer’s unusual background and the interdisciplinary nature ofher work offered a unique perspective to her fall 2008 stint as a Brittingham Visiting Scholar in the UW’s Design Studies department.
Ofrendas: Carolyn Kallenborn October 11 - November 9, 2008.
Carolyn Kallenborn’s installation work is profoundly rooted in her object-making, her relationship to fabrics and metals, and her engagement with textures and surfaces. It is also inseparable from her concern for justice. Inspired by her involvement with a community of artists and teachers in Oaxaca, Mexico, Kallenborn’s recent series of ofrendas, or altars, are interactive pieces infused with her anguish about political strife, economic injustice, and the barriers to cultural understanding. This exhibition also included Ausencia, an installation about the deep sense of loss felt by Mexican families whose children have crossed the border to the U.S.
Mary Hark: SeamNovember 15 – December 14, 2009.
Mary Hark’s recent paintings combine handmade flax and kozo papers and cloth into an intricate ground, stitched together with thread and built up into a complex stratigraphy with paint, wax, textile dyes, inks, and pencil marks. Large in scale, they appear both delicate and resilient. Their layered surfaces invoke the patina of time: the slow, subtle erosion of a well-thumbed page, the careless beauty of mended clothing, the evocative fissures in an old painted wall. Hark’s dedicated study of both paper and textile techniques lends her surfaces a particular depth. She crosses traditional boundaries with knowledge and respect, creating a rich and surprising body of mixed-media work.
A Fairyland of Fabrics: The Victorian Crazy Quilt January 21 – March 8, 2009. A fascination with fairyland permeated American art, literature, and theater in the late nineteenth century. Overlaid in the popular imagination with the exotic Orient, fairyland was seen as an aesthetically charged, otherworldly place: dream-like, fluid, and sensuous. Crazy-quilt makers cultivated fairyland as an aesthetic experience, and stepped into its dream-like quality as a way of intensifying and enriching their lives. Their quilts were visually dazzling, with bright, kaleidoscopic colors and rich fabrics sparkling with beguiling images and fine embroidery. Like the fairy spectacles on contemporary stages, they offered spectacular effects, shimmering light, and a bright array of fairy-identified motifs like butterflies, dragonflies, woodland flowers, owls, and crescent moons. Curated by Professor Beverly Gordon of the Department of Design Studies, the exhibition presented these themes through a selection of quilts from the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection and the International Quilt Study Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, accompanied by large-scale detail photographs of fairyland fabrics and motifs found on the quilts and in other period sources. Design 2009 March 27 – April 26, 2009. Showcasing the best of class and research projects by students in theUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Design Studies, “Design 2009” was the latest in a series of annual juried exhibitions juried by professionals in the field. This year's juror for interior design was Ed Linville of Linville Architects, LLC, in Middleton, a full-service architecture and design firm with a reputation for organic design principles and environmental respect. For textile and apparel design, the juror was Elizabeth Tuttle, a Madison fiber artist known for her experimentation with color and innovative approach to crochet. Warped: A life-size kaleidoscopic environment May 6 – May 17, 2009 Heather Macali’s MFA exhibition focused on digitally woven compositions which play on the use of pattern, distortion, line, and vibrant colors. Each individual weaving was linked to the weavings near it through color gradation, implied line, and pattern. Macali’s work created a complete environment reminiscent of the 1980s with a contemporary twist, a space covered in pattern and color, a place she describes as “my ultimate universe.” |
