Evil Twins DIY space hosts Brooklyn’s Rachel Yanku

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Photo via Evil Twins Gallery - Instagram

Evil Twins Gallery

Evil Twins Gallery

Like the Lone Biker of the Apocalypse, the Pandemic of 2020 was especially hard on the little things. Almost four years on, the megafauna of the art world have returned, but the smaller, humbler creatures that fed the ecosystem are in shorter supply. Starting a space in an attic, a basement, or an abandoned storefront used to be a viable alternative to a higher ed degree in art. It was our version of a post-graduate fellowship or PhD program. Yet, like so much of our culture in recent years, the middle is deteriorating. The art landscape has retained the students and the lovers on one side, and the Christies, Sothebys, SAMS, PAMS and MAMS on the other, but life in-between could be more robust. Any hope for this will come from the very art students hit hardest by 2020.  

Two of those students, Isabel Cooling and Maxwell Volk, recently hatched a DIY space called Evil Twins that’s enough to make a guy like me nostalgic. Located at 3238 N. Downer Avenue, right across the street from their erstwhile haunts of UWM, the Twins are busy conspiring and producing in their new digs. Their parlor has been transformed into a public gallery, the magazines switched out for press releases, and the light fixtures replaced with gallery floods. It opened last week with an exhibition by Brooklyn-based artist Rachel Yanku called “Constructing Alongside the Fractal,” open by appointment through January 7, that couldn’t have been better imagined for its Milwaukee habitat. Yanku’s painted wall works possess the same mix of high/low ambition as its temporary East Side interior, with exposed glue and drywall screws, gaps in seams, and crude articulations. Like an old house, the work feels worked in rather than worn out. Yanku assembles pieces of reclaimed lumber into gnarly, improvisational chest-sized constructions that feel like sculpture and act like painting. They lean naturally toward a certain monochromic allover unity, with only spasms of analogous color and chromatic noise here and there. 

A high-pitch coral-colored vertical piece with an ochre boot-like form at the bottom suggests a figure, while a plum colored orthogonal might be a waist-worn S-and-M contraption. Yanku’s work begs to be read figurally and/or representationally like so many clouds that might be shaped like animals. Despite this, each bizarre assemblage is a formal delicacy pitting a Povera ungainliness with Calderesque balance like a circus performer who’d grown up a ballerina. A small burnt sienna and blue work on a piece of mitered trim functions like punctuation mark at the end of the show’s long Dickensian sentence with colorful, ramshackle dynamism with the restraint to stop on a dime.  

Yanku’s esthetic is a perfect fit for an aging Victorian home that’s been remade by will and muscle into something else entirely. The only danger is that the Evil Twins project is so spot-on and transformed that it risks employing Yanku’s assemblages as a piece in their more general assemblage. The gallery-as-artwork, just like it was back in the old days. Nothing evil about a little reverence for the past. 

The first show I ever wrote about in Milwaukee in 2012 was at a space called Imagination Giants run by four artists, all of whom would go on to establish themselves as makers. It was a fertile time that came with a presumption that art was a natural system, cycling through generations and orbits like cicadas, tides, or carbon. There were grimy basements, abrupt shutterings, spilled beer and lots of bohemian poverty, too, but it all came with the excitement that flourishing ecosystems always possess: potential, vitality, danger, and renewal. Let’s hope the Twins are the beginning of a lot of new leafy artistic growth in Milwaukee en route to an eventual return of those salad days.

Event Listings: December 10 – December 16, 2023

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Drop-In Art Making: Kohl’s Art Studio
• Sunday, December 10, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.

Kellner Greenhouse

• Kellner Greenhouse Holiday Craft Fair
• Sunday, Dec. 10, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.

Saint Kate – the Arts Hotel

• Holiday Marketplace
• Sunday, Dec. 10, 11 a.m.–4 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Drop-In Tour: Architecture and Collection Highlights
• Sunday, Dec. 10, 2–3 p.m.

Wustum Art Museum

• Watercolor Wisconsin 2023 Opening Reception and Award Ceremony
• Sunday, Dec. 10, 2–4 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Museum Store Ornament Signing
• Thursday, Dec. 14, 1–4 p.m.

MARN Art + Culture Hub

• Junk in the Trunk Social Mixer
• Thursday, Dec. 14, 2–5 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Member Mingle + Gallery Talk: “Art, Life, Legacy”
• Thursday, Dec. 14, 5–7 p.m.

MOWA-DTN (at Saint Kate – the Arts Hotel)

• Artist Talk: Lon Michels and Vaughan Larsen
• Thursday, Dec. 14, 5:30–7:30 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Gallery Talk: “Art, Life, Legacy”
• Thursday, Dec. 14, 6–7 p.m.

Grove Gallery

• Reception: “David Jones: Shadow Play”
• Friday, Dec. 15, 5–9 p.m.

David Barnett Gallery

• Rogues in the Attic
• Saturday, Dec. 16, 11 a.m.-4:30 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Drop-In Art Making: Kohl’s Art Studio
• Saturday, Dec. 16, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Story Time in the Galleries
• Saturday, Dec. 16, 10:30–11 a.m.

Mitchell Street Arts (MiSA)

• Arts & Crafts Market
• Saturday, Dec. 16, 12–4 p.m.

Black Husky Brewing Co.

• Red Magic Holiday Art Market
• Saturday, Dec. 16, 12-11:59 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Drop-In Tour: Architecture and Collection Highlights
• Saturday, Dec. 16, 2–3 p.m.

INOVA Gallery at Kenilworth East

• UWM BA/BFA Fall Exhibition
• Saturday, Dec. 16, 4–7 p.m.

Saint Kate – the Arts Hotel

• AIR Time Art & Studio Tour
• Saturday, Dec. 16, 5:30 p.m.

Brewery District MKE, 923 W. Juneau Ave.

• Locally Made Art & Craft Pop-Up
• Saturday, Dec. 16, 5–10 p.m.