Visual Voices: Jill H. Casid

THURSDAY FEBRUARY 24, 2022 – 5:00-6:00pm

GCC, Horowitz Auditorium

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.

Mauricio and Leonardo Lasansky: Works from the Bradley University Collection

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.

Playful Nostalgia: Remembering Brian Kjellenberg

JANUARY 19th – MARCH 4th

Hartmann Gallery

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.

sublime idiom

Lisa Raabe. MFA THESIS EXHIBITION

OCTOBER 25th – DECEMBER 10th

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.”

In-Person Exhibitions Return To Our Galleries

Aug 23rd through Sept 24th 2021

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

Seen but not Felt

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.

Sample Chapters: A Virtual Exhibition by Paul Krainak

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.

Holly Roberts – Visual Voices Lecture Online

Supplicant II, mixed media, 2017, courtesy of Tilt Gallery
Join us for an archive Visual Voices Lecture from March 2019, presented by our 2019 Bunn photographer Holly Roberts.

This lecture will be available for online viewing March 4th – 11th 2021.

From the artist:
I work intuitively, painting an abstract image before applying bits and pieces of photographic fragments and other materials on the surface of the painting. What I am trying for is a painting that can stand alone but that won’t dominate the collage that is to follow. However, in large part, it is the painting that determines what is to follow; the colors, the movement, the essence of the paint.

Once I start forming the image, I select materials that speak to me. Most of what I use are photographs that I have taken and materials that I have either made or collected. These bits and pieces will provide the structure of the story as it unfolds, giving me the clues I need to understand where I’m headed. It’s much like following a trail of breadcrumbs through the forest; not knowing where I’m headed but trusting that I will, eventually, arrive. The collage works best when the pieced photos make up something that they aren’t about literally, but have a metaphorical or poetic connection, either through subject or texture.

The large concerns in my life are at the core of my work: the degradation of the environment, spiritual meaning in a world of polarized and extremist views, the stress and fear of aging, the daily fears and anxieties of being alive in the world today. My default subjects are usually awkward, sometimes threatening, and most often, a little lonely. My work is about the people, animals, and landscapes which inhabit my world, both urban and wild. As well, I have always had an ongoing fascination with portraiture, trying to capture an essence without being too literal.
These collages allow me to continue to do what I have always done with my art; by processing the world through my eyes and my hands, I am able to make a greater sense of the confusion, the complexity, and the humor of the world around me.

This program has been made possible by the support of The Bunn Lectureship in Photography series. Endowed by a generous donation from Bradley alums, Jacob and Lorrie Bunn, for over 20 years The Bunn Lectureship in Photography has brought nationally and internationally recognized photographers to Bradley’s campus. With the goal of broadening and enriching students’ educational experience, this program supports exhibitions, lectures, and workshops where students benefit from direct interaction with professional photographers.

View lecture HERE.

This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.

Holly Roberts

Visit our facebook page or click HERE to view a virtual exhibition of artwork by Holly Roberts.

Special loan of the artwork “Being Saved” made possible by the generosity of John and Jeff Heintzman.

Exhibition installed and designed by Taylor Fawcett.

This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.

From the artist:

I work intuitively, painting an abstract image before applying bits and pieces of photographic fragments and other materials on the surface of the painting.  What I am trying for is a painting that can stand alone but that won’t dominate the collage that is to follow. However, in large part, it is the painting that determines what is to follow; the colors, the movement, the essence of the paint.

Once I start forming the image, I select materials that speak to me. Most of what I use are photographs that I have taken and materials that I have either made or collected. These bits and pieces will provide the structure of the story as it unfolds, giving me the clues I need to understand where I’m headed.  It’s much like following a trail of breadcrumbs through the forest; not knowing where I’m headed but trusting that I will, eventually, arrive. The collage works best when the pieced photos make up something that they aren’t about literally, but have a metaphorical or poetic connection, either through subject or texture.

The large concerns in my life are at the core of my work: the degradation of the environment, spiritual meaning in a world of polarized and extremist views, the stress and fear of aging, the daily fears and anxieties of being alive in the world today. My default subjects are usually awkward, sometimes threatening, and most often, a little lonely. My work is about the people, animals, and landscapes which inhabit my world, both urban and wild. As well, I have always had an ongoing fascination with portraiture, trying to capture an essence without being too literal.

These collages allow me to continue to do what I have always done with my art; by processing the world through my eyes and my hands, I am able to make a greater sense of the confusion, the complexity, and the humor of the world around me.