It’s almost as difficult to review The Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists 2018 as it is to say it. The exhibition is in its second year at the Haggerty Museum of Art (1234 W. Tory Hill St.) and runs through Aug. 4. It features five fellows from the tri-county area—two “established” and three “emerging.” The work is chosen based on individual merit rather than interrelationships, so we see five very different solo shows that create a range of conversations across the galleries. Some conversations are more productive than others.
The “established” fellows are Chris Cornelius and Keith Nelson. Cornelius is an architect by training who sources his Oneida identity and contemporary design for his show. He makes great use of the high ceilings at the Haggerty to display a soaring teepee-like structure which emerged from an assiduous process of drawing, three-dimensional sketching and finally constructing a full-scale monumental and enveloping environmental experience. The gnarly and irregular branch and wire mesh construction is embedded with antlers and other embellishments that speak to things natural, cultural, technological and personal. His wonderful conceptual dwelling conspicuously straddles a network of clean geometric linework on the floor underneath that forces a collision between divergent histories.
Cornelius’ imaginative juxtapositions are amplified by the cross-gallery conversation with Nelson’s selection of specific objects. If Cornelius is deconstructing modern art history against a personal history, Nelson is consolidating material and circling right back into the canon. His work is strongly indebted to artists like Carl Andre and Don Judd from the late 1960s, though he updates the story for a 21st-century public more interested in the social implications of industrial and, in his case, post-industrial materials. Nelson’s utopian vocabulary, unlike his forebears, begins with stained sheets, discarded mattresses and grimy ceramic toilet tank tops arranged with purpose and precision. His manicured works simultaneously disguise and confront the nastiness of their impoverished circumstances and emphasize the lifespan of the mass-produced junk our culture consumes and discards with alarming ease.
Stay on top of the news of the day
Subscribe to our free, daily e-newsletter to get Milwaukee's latest local news, restaurants, music, arts and entertainment and events delivered right to your inbox every weekday, plus a bonus Week in Review email on Saturdays.
I’ve heard gripes that the Nohl, like many artist awards c. 2019, is forced to grapple with inclusivity to the point of self-consciousness, trying to impossibly resolve cultural pressures and quality given a limited number of awards. The Nohl for established artists, however, is blindly selected by three non-local curators. In the case of these two grantees, the incongruity of their works forms a productive and improbable relationship a more orthodox curatorial program might not have.
The “emerging” fellows have their own notable individual merits, though they don’t achieve the same level of cross-pollination. Self-taught artist Rosemary Ollison’s stitched and colored forms on black are as effervescent and generous as the artist who made them. Anyone who’s met her can attest. Her colorful and patchy sewn tapestries in the show feel only a little upstaged by the surprise of a large shaggy tower of accumulated leather and fabric rising to the rafters in the gallery. It stands as a soaring font of creativity that reflects Ollison’s practice and attitude perfectly.
Makeal Flammini’s contribution, irreverently titled How About I Eat You, features a salon-style arrangement of several dozen equally irreverent and informal drawings pinned frameless on the south wall of the museum. Next to that stack of drawings is a vibrant, 10-foot-high, mountain-shaped patchwork image obsessively executed in crayon. They play strangely with the wild range of declarative textual “notes” and rendered images adjacent to them, but ultimately, they build to a funky personal narrative with oddly formal preoccupations. The deliberate composition, with its informal and somewhat comically abject components, gives the show a Mission School kind of insouciance; a little vulnerable, a little edgy.
Identity and making are woven literally into a single practice in Nazlı Dinçel’s work, which combines performance, video and fiber arts. As part of the exhibition, she is regularly engaging in performances at the Haggerty that has her weaving impressions of her body on a large loom in the gallery. Her exhibition truly requires live viewing, which vitally connects us to her. In her absence, though, the space feels trespassed upon and slightly unsettling. Some very involved, diaristic text and tape-based collages accompany the in-process social sculpture, but in the end they only force one to consider how much personal material one is willing to sift through without an invitation.
Without her presence, Dinçel’s piece underscores a significant issue descending on the current art world, where we seem to be experiencing a growing schism between depersonalized Instagram-driven delectations and hyper-personalized, diaristic and identity-based art. Neither is illegitimate even in its most pronounced instance, as expression is a glorious thing most of the time. However, when a work of art presumes to be a form of communication, we hope it will create revelations outside itself. We hope it will create conversations between itself and others and between its audiences. It’s a tall order in a fellowship show like this one, full of private and disparate stories, all destined for the public. In this particular case, the circumstances allow us to see both the disadvantages and the surprising advantages of such an inherently diversified selection of work.
