Three professors to discuss art in Neville talk June 16

UW-Green Bay faculty artists Sarah Pearl Detweiler, Carol Emmons, and Alison Stehlik, whose artworks are included in the 2010 Wisconsin Triennial, will discuss their works in an illustrated talk in Green Bay on Wednesday, June 16. The free talk is organized by the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art in conjunction with the Triennial exhibition. The 60-minute program will be presented at the Neville Public Museum of Brown County, 210 Museum Place, from 6:30 to 7:30 pm.

Detweiler, Emmons, and Stehlik will address how living in Green Bay has shaped their creative approaches, subject matter, and other artistic choices; and their roles in the community as artists and teachers. Their artworks in the Wisconsin Triennial demonstrate the artistic range of the exhibition overall.

Detweiler says her practice with photography is “rooted in the belief that photographs are made, not taken.” The three diptychs on view in the Wisconsin Triennial are drawn from her series Sometimes we just don’t feel like ourselves, which shows Detweiler and her husband dressed in costumes in side-by-side photographs. Detweiler draws inspiration from “popular culture, B-movies such as Franken Hooker, local histories, personal events, and places I have lived to create characters that are general yet recognizable.”

Emmons often works on a large scale, creating site-specific installations that incorporate constructed elements, light, and found objects. For the Wisconsin Triennial, Emmons has created a participatory installation titled Here. There. Viewers are invited to climb steps to a wooden platform where they can use a telescope to read written fragments of Madison history contributed by city residents and placed around the gallery. As Emmons says, “We might think of place as a palimpsest: revealing traces of its inhabitation as inscribed on its geography, and viewed through the filter of each person’s experiences and desires.

Stehlik says the eleven sculptural portraits on view in the Wisconsin Triennial are inspired by her curiosity about genealogy and ancestry. “The entirety of my ancestor’s lives is summarized in vital records: the times and places of their birth, marriage, and death. My knowledge of them will always be drawn from limited documentation and my own speculation. Incomplete and mysterious, they are relics.” Stehlik’s sculptures are from the series Family Hairlooms; the series includes imagined family members of the future, as well as her ancestors.

The 2010 Wisconsin Triennial is the twelfth statewide survey undertaken by the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. This year’s Triennial features works by 42 individual artists and two pairs of artists working in collaboration. The exhibition will be on view at the museum, in downtown Madison, through Aug. 15.

For additional information about the talk or exhibition, call the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art at (608) 257-0158.