‘Florence/Somerset’ at The Alice Wilds

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“Florence/Somerset,” the current exhibition at the Alice Wilds, couldn’t be a more fitting exhibition to punctuate a long, steamy summer. The show is stuffed with images of piney shores, glistening water, sun-dappled cabins, and sculptures of various woodland and non-woodland creatures. There’s even some curtains and a window that could’ve come from the window looking out on the lake. The show runs through the end of September, and though the cultural season begins in earnest right after Labor Day, you might allow Breehan James’ paintings and Barbara Sullivan’s sculpture to keep your summer candle lit for a while longer if you’re still jonesin’ after the holiday. 

James’ paintings in the show are all 10 x 13 inches, and there are a lot of them—34 to be exact. And they are scattered around and between dozens of sculptures and constructions by Barbara Sullivan. If James’ paintings were larger, many would function like picture windows into a simulated woodsy retreat. This is because they read as unvarnished POV snapshots of a very particular, and clearly personally significant site. Unvarnished emotionally, but also materially; their powdery matte surfaces in acrylic gouache make you want to run the backs of your fingers down them even while your eyes chase the spaces within. Those spaces deliver an array of extraordinarily vernacular relics that would make Wes Anderson’s art director covetous. We see the same maroon-colored cabin from different vantages displaying various hyper-specific accents: boat oars-as-ornament; composite photos; vintage mechanicals; wood paneling. If this repertoire wasn’t particular enough, we eventually meet some humans, which happen to be present in just the proportion you’d want in any natural retreat: enough to feel connected but still remote enough to appreciate the remote scenery. 

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Windows to the World

Rather than being agents of bodily immersion, many of James’ landscapes function like actual windows, 60-on-center, woven around Sullivan’s folksy fresco wildlife on the wall and in the interior of the space. James breaks this picture-postcard feel with a number of brilliant split-screen compositions such as Cottage Book: Cottage Night Inside / Outside and Cottage Book: Front Door, which add a proscenium onto her already window-like compositions, taking the work outside of itself by a step. Inside / Outside is especially alluring, with two vignettes of the exterior of the quaint red cottage next to a frame of the interior looking out from inside. It’s as cozy as it is compositionally complex with its glowing lamp lights paired with a gloaming sky beyond. It almost gives you a mosquito bite. 

The show smacks at first glance as an artistic ecosystem with sculptural fauna interspersed with James’ flora in well-curated harmony. It’s not a site-specific installation, but it could be. Sullivan is from Maine and the work feels of a psycho-geographical piece with James’ paintings. Sullivan’s pieces operate in this show the same way a string of decorative fishing lures might on the wall of an unwinterized cottage in the Northwoods of our own backyard, seasoning the brick-and-mortar with an extra-dimension of playful, animated expressiveness that keeps one’s mind in the summer moment. Sullivan’s Iron Skillet, Beaver with Log, Bathroom Sink and dozens of others in the same vein, create a context in which James’ paintings can flourish while still dazzling on their own. Sullivan’s brilliant piece Happy Chair—a plaster-and-paint construction of an embroidered armchair—becomes an apt metaphor for the show: heavy furniture sacrificing itself for someone else’s chance to enjoy the possibility of forgetting such things as furniture altogether. 

“Florence/Somerset” is a nostalgic show, not only because of the obvious connection of the artists to their subject matter, but because it will naturally arouse our collective feelings of those summery escapes that shape our lives; all the fuzzy memories that turn coordinates into sites, and sites into places, and places into memories and histories. It might also make you consider that nostalgia is no more than history framed by a window with one’s own curtains.

Openings September 3–September 9, 2023

Third Ward Art Festival

  • Sunday, Sept. 3, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.

MARN (Milwaukee Area Resource Network + Culture Hub)

  • MISHKA Fashion Showcase
  • Wednesday, Sept. 6, 5–8 p.m.

MARN (Milwaukee Area Resource Network + Culture Hub)

  • Genisx Mental Health Mixer - 'Finding Your Why: Self Mission
  • Thursday, Sept. 7, 6–8 p.m.

Green Gallery

  • Opening Reception, Mike Paré, “Rama Lama Ding Dong”
  • Friday, Sept. 8, 5-7 p.m.

UWM, Peck School of the Arts, Kenilworth East Gallery

  • Department of Art and Design Faculty Exhibition
  • Friday, Sept. 8, 5–7 p.m.

Joy Engine

  • Nitelight, An Immersive Arts + Lights Experience (at 7th and West Historic Mitchell Street)
  • Friday, Sept. 8, 5:30–10 p.m.

West Allis City Hall and Art Gallery

  • Art on the Plaza
  • Friday, Sept. 8, 5–8 p.m.

Real Tinsel

  • Opening Reception, “My Favorite Words Are …”
  • Friday, Sept. 8, 6–9 p.m.

Scout Gallery, MKE

  • Opening Reception, “Family Photos”
  • Friday, Sept. 8, 6–9 p.m.

Joy Engine

  • Nitelight, An Immersive Arts + Lights Experience (at Seventh and West Historic Mitchell Street)
  • Friday, Sept. 8, 5:30–10 p.m.

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Trimborn Farm Harvest of Arts & Crafts Fair

  • 8881 W. Grange Ave., Greendale
  • Saturday, Sept. 9, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

  • Drop-In Art Making: Kohl’s Art Studio
  • Sept. 9, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

  • Story Time in the Galleries
  • Saturday, Sept. 9, 10:30–a.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

  • Drop-In Tour: Architecture and Collection Highlights
  • Saturday, Sept. 9, 2–3 p.m.

MARN (Milwaukee Area Resource Network + Culture Hub)

  • gener8tor Art x Sherman Phoenix Closing Reception
  • Saturday, Sept. 9, 6–8 p.m.