Tim Hutchings, Assistant Professor of Game Design, will be exhibiting three bodies of work, all from 2020 or later. Lines drawn to solve the computer game Freeways are translated into paint, creating convenient nonrepresentational artworks reminiscent of Brice Marden. Collages created to spur book-based game play have a very different presence in a gallery. Amusing, playful processes make awful glitter scabs on panel.
A consistent theme across the work is a playful (or selfish, or commercial) rearrangement of when the artwork is actually experienced in its most intended form.
Caleb Cole is a Midwest-born, Boston-based artist whose work addresses the opportunities and difficulties of queer belonging, as well as aims to be a link in the creation of that tradition, no matter how fragile or ephemeral or impossible its connections. They were an inaugural res-ident at Surf Point Residency and have received an Artadia Finalist Award, Hearst 8×10 Biennial Award, 3 Magenta Flash Forward Foundation Fellowships, and 2 Photolucida Critical Mass Finalist awards, among other distinctions. Caleb exhibits regularly at a variety of national venues and has held solo shows in Boston, New York, Chicago, and St. Louis, among others. Their work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Newport Art Museum, the Davis Art Museum, Brown University Art Museum, and Leslie Lohman Museum of Art. Caleb teaches at Boston College and Clark University and is represented by Gallery Kayafas, Boston.
A theorist, historian, and practicing artist, Dr. Jill H. Casid is Professor of Visual Studies in the Departments of Art History and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Talk title: Melancholy as Medium
What to do with the ways we’re being undone? Casid will present their new film, Untitled (Melancholy as Medium) to pursue the refusal to move on as a necessary queer, crip and trans* activist medium for our moment of disposability. The film calls up an activist wake that remains stubbornly attached to the unmourned dead. Unfolding a ritual of mediumship, the film conduces our outraged grief as catalytic for the uprising and care work of living with more than one virus, amidst more than one pandemic, carrying our as yet unaddressed losses into the battles we’re still waging in the name of supports for the thriving of Black, Brown, Indigenous, crip, queer and trans vitalities. Centered on a set of fragile Polaroids, the film conjures with the material fragility of analogue photography to commune with the incalculable but still powerful presence of unredressed loss. In reversing the primacy of showing over telling, the film incorporates disability access as aesthetic gain by making closed captioning integral and image description its primary vehicle.
JANUARY 19th – MARCH 11th (updated from March 18th on previous web and printed publications)
Heuser Gallery
Mauricio Lasansky (1914-2012) has been described as one of the fathers of 20th century American printmaking. With his masterful technique, Lasansky expanded the field of intaglio printmaking—a process that combines methods of engraving, etching, drypoint, and aquatint to create an image on a metal plate that is then pressed to paper. Born in Argentina but having lived most of his life in Iowa, Lasansky taught at the University of Iowa. where he developed a printmaking workshop that became one of the best in the world. His son, Leonardo Lasansky followed in his father’s footsteps with vivacious drawings that conjure topics from the intensity of war to the sensuousness of human intimacy. The younger Lasansky has an international exhibition record that includes the Brooklyn Museum and the National Museum in Poland. He has chaired the department of studio arts and art history at Hamline University in St. Paul Minnesota since 1995. These works by this father and son pair demonstrate the quality of works housed within the Bradley University Collection.
Brian Kjellenberg was the sculpture area technician for around fifteen years. Affectionately known to everyone as “Kj”, he was a retiree from his work as an aircraft engine mechanic at the 182 Airlift Wing National Guard base in Bartonville. After previously enrolling at Western Illinois University, he began to take sculpture and printmaking classes at Bradley. We were able to offer him the part time sculpture technician position at a point where there was an opening. Kj could fix anything, and enjoyed building tables, stools and cabinets. Kj opened the studio at 8 am on the days he drove in from Yates City and always had a pot of coffee brewing for everyone. He was prolific making sculptures out of a number of different materials. His energy and playful spirit kept the studio warm, and his handiwork, and some of his artwork, are daily reminders of him in the sculpture studio. We are very pleased to honor him with a solo exhibition and hope you are also warmed by his playful nostalgia.
Lisa Nelson Raabe is a collage artist who creates an emotional sense of place by using pigments, metal filings, glass, bits of nature and thread in combination with acrylic mediums to transform color and texture. Using both flexible and solid surfaces, the pieces hang in space or are mounted on the wall as images. The works exhibited in Sublime Idioms are investigations, questions and answers in search of a balance between the everyday and the substantive esoteric. I offer an internal world of presence seen and felt through a density of physical materials and structured line. My aim is to engender wonder and something beyond oneself as a tool to cultivate calm, self acceptance, joy and peace within a deeply receptive openness to the unexplained randomness of the everyday. As Thomas Merton is quoted, “Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”
Finally, we’re back and able to present both our Gallery Exhibitions and our Visual Voices Guest Lecture Series in-person for the Fall 2021 semester and beyond.
And what better way to launch the new academic year than with an exhibition of Faculty, Adjunct and Emeritus art and design.
We’re really looking forward to welcoming our students back to campus with this first show. It is, quite rightly, a celebration after the past year of turmoil and uncertainty. However it also reflects the caution for our immediate future – Are we now truly entering post-pandemic… or is it simply a lull before another outbreak ‘storm’?
Here is the Fall 2021 semester line-up of exhibitions and Visual Voices guest lectures…
Gallery opening hours will typically be: Mon – Thur. 9am – 6:30pm. Fri. 9:30am – 4:30pm. Closed Weekends. However please call/contact our main office before hand: 309 677 2967/sjg@bradley.edu
The Department of Art and Design and Bradley University Galleries are proud to present our 2021 Student Portfolios. Please visit the exhibition websiteto view the work of our MFA, BFA, Photography and Graphic Design students.
View Virtual Exhibition: HERE View Exhibition Video: HERE
Because of Covid precautions, Bradley University Galleries are bringing exhibitions to the public virtually. However, the exhibitions themselves are very real! Director of University Galleries Erin Buczynski is staging all exhibitions in the gallery space, so that the artwork can be experienced as authentically as possible, though only through documentation. Unable to invite visitors to campus to view the artwork, curators Erin Buczynski and Hattie Lee devised an exhibition concept that responds to the limitations of this moment. Seen but not Felt fills the void left when visitors are not allowed in the gallery. The artwork inhabits the floor plane, stretching from wall to wall and up to windows.
The population that can actually view the artwork is an important one, the students in the Department of Art & Design. From the second floor gallery overlook, students have the ideal vantage point. The gallery skylights and floor-to-ceiling windows illuminate the collaged, undulating surfaces. What was a ground plane has become a picture plane filled with lush textures, objects, and imagery.
From curator Hattie Lee: Seen but Not Felt is an exhibition borne out of the impact Covid-19 has had on our society, which becomes reflected in our public spaces; empty galleries with paintings on the walls, but void of visitors to roam the floor and appreciate them, artwork seen through computer screens or windows without the physical space being activated by human presence to complement the artwork. What does it look like to create an exhibition of art pieces that are made to exist on the floor- a space usually open and maneuverable, but not available for usual function anymore? Seen but Not Felt is a collaboration of artists across multiple mediums, to create an installation in the Heuser Art Center Gallery that is designed to be seen from windows or on a screen. The space functions in a new way, just as we are all learning how to navigate space differently.Congratulations to participating artists: Heather Brammeier, Loreeta Brammeier, Erin Buczynski, Alexandra Dupont, Heather Ford, Nina Gospodin, Nichole Gronvold-Roller, Mie Kongo, Hattie Lee, Nicholas Nyland, Dylan Paschke, Lisa Nelson Raabe, Sydney Ryan, and Trish Williams.
Exhibition photos by University Photographer Evan Temchin. Video by Jake Anderson.
This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.
Visit the virtual exhibition HERE View Video Walkthrough HERE
Paul Krainak’s new paintings plot fragments of industrial design, typography, and textile patterns in constructivist spaces. The images are post-vernacular, recognizing craft, outsider art, and regional architecture as aesthetically foundational.
Krainak is a painter and art writer who retired from Bradley University in 2020. He was Department Chair for ten years and the Founder and Director of the Inland Visual Studies Center for six. The Center was a collaborative project with the Sam Fox School of Art & Design at Washington University, St. Louis and the Department of Art at The Ohio State University in Columbus. He was awarded Professor Emeritus at Bradley in 2020.
Krainak has exhibited widely throughout the U.S. and internationally and lectured in numerous venues in the U.S., China, and Eastern Europe. He’s exhibited at Fassbender Gallery, N.A.M.E. Gallery, and the Hyde Park Art Center, in Chicago. He’s also shown at The Umbrella Factory, Nijmegen, Holland, Fay Gold Gallery, Atlanta, GA, and Semaphore, New York, NY. He is a former Associate Editor and Corresponding Editor of the New Art Examiner and ARTpapers. He’s contributed essays on contemporary art to numerous journals, exhibition catalogues and academic presses. These include the Kemper Museum of Art in St. Louis, The Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University, Sculpture Magazine, Afterimage, and Indiana University Press.
