Portrait Society's Collaborative 'Winter Chapel'

Portrait Society Gallery is getting ready to brighten this chilly season with its annual “Winter Chapel” installation, opening on Gallery Night, Jan. 20. This year features a free-standing room constructed by <strong>Keith Nelson</strong> and decorated by <strong>Paula Schulze</strong>.<strong><em><br /><br />How did you become involved with the “Winter Chapel” project?</em></strong><br /><br />Paula Schulze: I approached Debra (Portrait Society director Debra Brehmer) about doing something and we talked about the idea of a collaboration. She had seen Keith's work at The Green Gallery. She mentioned him, and I said that would be great. I like Keith, I love his work, and she had the idea of making a room within a room.<br /><br />Keith Nelson: Debra had seen a piece I had at The Green Gallery West in June, which was an empty-box construction. She really liked it and threw out the idea of building a room in a similar way. Originally that's what I was going for, making it out of empty boxes similar to that piece. As I got into thinking out how this was going to work, making a constructed room became easier and more stable.<br /><br /><strong><em>How did you come up with the interior design?</em></strong><br /><br />P.S.: I have been doing some drawings and prints based on Islamic geometries and I wanted to do something with that. A friend of mine sent me a link to an article on the BBC website about scientists who were looking at a specific type of Islamic pattern, and they were drawing parallels with that and quasi-crystalline structures. I thought that was interesting, so I made my templates based on that particular geometric structure because I liked the association with science.<br /><br />The window, I was experimenting with that. I did a piece for IN:SITE Milwaukee a year ago in the fall; it's still up on the A.O. Smith office building on Hopkins. I was using 4-by-8-foot sheets for cutouts and I had one in the garage. If you go to the Alhambra, or look at any kind of Islamic architecture, they have wooden cutouts that are windows. And I thought, “I want to make something like that.” So I just did it, with my limited woodcut skills and my saber saws.<strong><em><br /><br />How do you define a winter chapel?</em></strong><br /><br />K.N.: My initial thinking was of it as some type of intimate space. It's pretty smallyou could get four people in there comfortably, but I totally see one person sitting there. You want it to be a little bit of a warm place, and the intimacy adds to that warmth. Closeness.<br /><br />P.S.: I was thinking there's not going to be a lot of color. That's very wintry, to have the silver, the whites, the gray, the pencil line. It will be very spare in a way. There won't be an overload of color. There will be plenty to look at, but it won't be like a tropical summer kind of thing.<em><br /><br />Portrait Society Gallery is located at 207 E. Buffalo St., fifth floor. </em>