KATE E. SCHAFFER
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Nicola López @ Hawthorn Contemporary

5/11/2018

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Jason Yi's new space, Hawthorn Contemporary, is currently showing Relics, Fibs, Trash, and Treasures, a set of prints and an installation of things by Brooklyn artist Nicola López. I cannot possibly post pictures or describe this show in way that would do it justice, so see it yourself before it closes on May 26. 

While you are there, support the local arts economy by checking out artist in residence Monica Miller's space "Facilitating Situations."  
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Jessica Meuninck-Ganger @ The Alice Wilds

5/6/2018

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Picture
A touch of domesticity goes a long way. Milwaukee artist Jessica Meuninck-Ganger questions the formality, sterility, impersonality of the white cube in Inbound East at The Alice Wilds in Milwaukee’s Walker’s Point neighbor.

​The exhibition is a combination of prints and large-scale installation that emerge from Meuninck-Ganger’s walks around Milwaukee. A light (prussian) blue wall softens the harsh lighting of gallery, transforming the viewers experience from looking to meandering. Enveloped in this blueness, my eyes may roam the walls, following Meuninck-Ganger’s path of prints, walking with her from 71st street toward Lake Michigan. This route mimics tree branches growing over the gallery walls.

Meuninck-Ganger’s installation is quick to remind me that I am inside (in a gallery) and not outside walking or waiting under a tree. An installation piece sprouts from an outlet while another springs from the floor. This miniature skyline is dwarfed by the soaring blue wall.

The play of interiority and exteriority allows me to move out of the work and into myself as I consider the details of the exhibition. A ramshackle fence, feathered, floats away from a fieldstone wall; fragile buildings emerge from a pile of timbers. All are bits of screen-printed paper mounted on light blue board.

My meandering leads me to Sebald’s seminal writing The Rings of Saturn. Is “the narrative in question...aimed at creating a new reality, in the course of time, by way of the unreal”? Meuninck-Ganger, like Sebald, uses the narrative of the walk, inverts inside and outside, and destabilizes the grid. Inward Bound plays with interiority and exteriority, and like Sebald’s Somerleyton, “transitions from interiors to exterior….open(s) the interior onto the outside, and inside the landscape [is] replicated on the mirror walls...on the slopes of man-made mountains, between banks and spinneys...and the whole incomprehensible glory of Nature and of the wonders placed in it by the hand of [wo]man [are] reflected in...unruffled waters.”

In the end, Meuninck-Ganger’s exteriors become interiors, my interior becomes exterior, and as I leave, I am inward bound.

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Settling (a poem from poetry month)

5/5/2018

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the flatness of the brick
and mortar
catch my eye
I ignore the window
and for a moment you

things settle

wordwise and generous
you find something
here other than
pizza and poetry


my beer-hazed consciousness
paired with your
clear cultural consciousness
provides an intimate understanding
of disappointment and fortitude

for instance
your seventh grade self
is disappointed with
how far we haven’t come
my seventh grade self
doesn’t want to
hang around anymore

you settle

finding fortitude
at the bottom of
a pint
a PBR in Jared’s case
or a point
reminded me of
Lynne Tillman
or of you

I  settle

we come into
our consciousness
at different times
I cross this off
the to do list
I haven’t written
rambling
as you mop up

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    3rdCoast4thWave

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    Kate E. Schaffer: artist, writer, weirdo.

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  • home
  • TN(r)P project
  • portfolio
  • 3rdCoast4thWave
  • bio
  • cv
  • contact
  • fishing