So many good things happened in the quiet hour-long event called The Moving Archive/What Is Remembered last Saturday at The Warehouse, the new art space so generously created by Jan Serr and John Shannon for Milwaukee artists of proven skill to take risks and show work.
First, there was the space itself: a big white, well-lighted room with four fat pillars you could lean against and a clean stone floor you could sit on if you felt like it. A few movable chairs were there for the taking. Mostly, the audience stood or walked about in plain view, part of the show. You didn’t want to stay too long in one place since there was art to look at everywhere, and one key part of it was always moving; specifically, the dancers Maria Gillespie, Joelle Worm and Chanteé Kelly. Since big walls with big photographs and floor-to-ceiling projected videos by artists Lois Bielefeld and Nirmal Raja filled the room’s center and blocked sightlines, you had to follow the performers as they’d vanish around corners or wait for them to circle back, which took a while. You might decide to linger near the cellist Janet Schiff whose slow, low, deep original music made every second feel essential; her practiced improvised compositions as powerful a source of emotion as your memories.
On Belonging was the terrific exhibition by Bielefeld and Raja on the walls, there through May 31. Raja immigrated to Milwaukee years ago from Chennai (formerly Madras), the cultural capital of south India. For many months, Bielefeld, a Milwaukee native, photographed Raja in radically different but culturally meaningful local settings, always beautifully dressed in saris. A second photographic series shows Raja entirely wrapped in thirty yards of organdy fabric, her brown hands and feet the only clues to her identity. She’d covered the fabric with rubbings from an engraved timeline of Wisconsin history found somewhere along the Riverwalk. Her video art shows a performance by nineteen Milwaukee women from diverse backgrounds connected by that fabric.
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That fabric lay heaped on the floor near the entrance, with director Gillespie, invisible, wrapped in it. Worm and Kelly lay similarly wrapped at other spots. Ever so slowly, they moved, unwound, unfurled the cloth, paraded it, moved on, in, against and apart from it, reminding us that we are all immigrants to this place and time, living artifacts, physical cultural records, together here. Now what?
Visit thewarehousemke.org to book a free visit to the exhibition. Stay posted for a repeat of the dance installation.
