opening next week...

THE 2011 GREATER MILWAUKEE FOUNDATION MARY L. NOHL FELLOWSHIPS EXHIBITION, OCTOBER 5 – DECEMBER 9, 2012, Peck School of the Arts, 2400 E. Kenwood Blvd., Milwaukee, WI 53211

Established artists Nicolas Lampert, Brad Lichtenstein, and Sonja Thomsen and emerging artists Richard Galling, Hans Gindlesberger, Sarah Luther, and the American Fantasy Classics group (Brittany Ellenz, Liza Pflughoft, Alec Regan, Oliver Sweet) report in a year after being selected as 2011 Nohl Fellows as part of the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fellowships for Individual Artists. The exhibition presents a range of new work in painting, photography, film, printmaking, and installation. This presentation will mark the ninth annual exhibition of fellowship winners at Inova and will be accompanied with a catalogue. The Greater Milwaukee Foundation Mary L. Nohl Fellowships for Individual Artists program is administered by the Bradley Family Foundation. The exhibition is guest curated for Inova by Nicholas Frank.

From Press Release...

SONJA THOMSEN “This has been an explosive and pivotal year of new endeavors,” declares Sonja Thomsen. She travelled to Iceland for her first international museum show; produced her first collaborative public art project in Milwaukee; participated in the birth of a collective; and relaunched her website to more accurately reflect the recent direction of her work. The fellowship award enabled her to hire studio assistants and expand into a second workspace, making it possible to investigate larger-scaled projects and three-dimensional works. Thomsen brings several of these new experiments into the gallery for the Nohl exhibition. Her first foray into sculpture, trace of possibility, is a steel and polycarbonate structure covered in silvery, reflective vinyl that stands 14 feet tall. It is placed in relation to witness, a large photograph on vinyl, and can be entered, like a mirrored cave, or circumambulated. Two new works, nexus, a changing series of archival pigment prints resting on an 8-foot wooden shelf, and vessel, nine small white-on-white still lifes on vinyl displayed with a larger, figurative image, some of its emulsion peeled away, attest to Thomsen’s belief in “the power of the sequence to carry content” and her related interest in installation. Britt Salvesen, writing in the catalogue, identifies trace of possibility as the pivotal work in Thomsen’s exhibition, functioning “metaphorically as a translation of the expansive landscapes she shot in Iceland, and as an imagined interior of the vessels she shot in the studio.” Salvesen notes that for Thomsen, “temporality is an artistic medium and a conceptual space….While time is the declared motif, even obsession, of many contemporary photographers, it is rare that an artist can get at its paradoxical nature, as if setting the clock to wind in both directions, or conjuring an hourglass to trickle sand upward and downward. Sonja Thomsen, in her exploratory, empathetic work, manages something like this.” Sonja Thomsen was born in Chicago in 1978. She received a BA from Kenyon College in 2000 and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2004. Exhibitions include the Reykjavik Museum of Photography, Iceland; Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago; the New Mexico Art Museum, Santa Fe; Silverstein Photography, New York; the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art; Cynthia Reeves Gallery, New York; David Weinberg Gallery, Chicago; Silver Eye Center for Photography, Pittsburgh; and the Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee.

More about all of the artists in the show here.