One photograph in the Weeknight Dinners series by Lois Bielefeld. This series is a part of the Portrait Society Gallery's current exhibitionm "Homely (part two)."
“What’s in a home?”
The proposition reads like a riddle.
Sofas, lamps and drapes? Or bizarre family histories, wistful nostalgia, failed first steps, unmet social progress, public permanence, private impermanence and enduring aspirations?
The current exhibition “Homely (part two)” at the Portrait Society Gallery takes a stab at those impossible questions with a curatorial tidiness that, as with most homes, superficially belies the chaotic uniqueness of the stories inevitably loosed when the shades are undrawn.
From her series Weeknight Dinners, Lois Bielefeld’s photographs in the main gallery capture families in a variety of casual dinner settings. Their polish and crispness hint at some level of choreography, and indeed the actual experiences with theatrical embellishment. In their orchestration and repetition, the array of prosaic diners feels a little like a general index of various American dinner rituals: some kind of pictorial supper liturgy.
James Hagner’s nearby installation of grocery store shopping lists appears hilariously uncooked in the shadow of Bielefeld’s slightly more boiled stills. The work is simply an arrangement of papers he’s accumulated over the years as a grocery clerk. Where it sacrifices metaphor, it gains indexical presence. Like an exquisite fossil, it simply tells us what happened, and that’s enough. Collectively his lists retain a strange residual energy from the individuals who left them behind. They also remind us that handwriting is increasingly rare, exceedingly beautiful and often used in the absence of smart devices to spell the names of many groceries incorrectly.
Journalist Erin Richards and photojournalist Angela Peterson have collaborated on a long-term project investigating the effects of housing instability on academic performance. Housing Instability and our Schools traces struggles in the lives of teenagers Donovin Harris and Rayshon Sykes leading up to their high school graduations. Their research lives in this show as a photo essay, though Richards will cover the subject further in a series of features in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel this fall.
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Richards and Peterson summarize a general social condition by using particular photographs of two flesh-and-blood teenagers. Knowing the teens’ stories, we empathize, though “knowing their stories,” is crucial here as the photo alone don’t quite capture the depths of their backstories.
One wonders how much more impact an image of an individual has over a statistic or an inanimate symbol. How many unspeakable truths go unnoticed because we have only numbers or artifacts to confirm the occurrence of a traumatic event? Some might favor the weightiness and depth of documentary over more symbolic communication: the power of the literal over the metaphorical. Yet somehow, the saddest and most pathetic sequence in the show is a series of photographs from a company tasked with evicting people from their homes. There are no faces, no names. Only a few personal items left behind, and an eerie set of numbers in the lower right corner of each photograph indicating the time and date of the event for reference. Like Hagner’s grocery lists, the absence of presence here may be more moving than absence or presence alone. It makes one wonder if we have a natural drive to connect with such impressions. Think of the handprints at Chauvet cave, or the final scrawled letters “C-R-O-A-T-O-A-N” left by the colonists of Roanoke.
Just food for thought. Obviously, documentary and symbolic communication each have their place and will endure as separate tools for seeking answers. As for “Homely (part two),” it arrives at a still greater point about the purposes and methods of visual communication, and credit goes to Deb Brehmer . Curatorially she has taken the term “home,” dismantled and exploded it. Complex ideas naturally want to consolidate into stereotypes, and it’s the job of any socially minded creative to frustrate this tendency. “Home” may not be as high as some on a list of terms demanding semantic deconstruction, but it’s the process that’s the point. And Brehmer proceeds by reminding us of the countless social, economic and personal perspectives that can take a solid house and make it a fluid home.
“Homely (part two)” runs through Sept. 1. A free discussion with Richards and Peterson takes place on Thursday, Aug. 16, at 6 p.m.
