With Milwaukee's outdoor music festivals fast approaching, remember to visit the smaller art venues when any thunderstorms pass through. Smaller galleries offer a quiet, peaceful space to escape the summer crowds and an opportunity to study less exhibited artists and their work. Perfect to peruse on a rainy day or at lunch time, Mount Mary College's Marian Gallery (2900 North Menomonee Parkway) presents Janet Roberts in the exhibition, “Unlikely Muses.”
Roberts unconventional materials pervade her paintings, but ever so elusively. These include remnants from the past that she skillfully applies to the canvas or around the frames: vintage wallpaper, old newsprint, black and white family photos, strips of pompom or heavy fringe, recycled flags and retro fabrics. They never intrude without reason. Indeed, these fabrics become the backdrops for her figurative work, singular individuals or emotionally attached groupings.
Roberts' retro fabrics translucently appear from behind and through her paintings, adding an otherworldly dimensionality where the individuals in the images meld into the background, or the backgound merges into her familiar images. Her engaging faces and figures incorporate themes that Roberts' reinforces with other memorabilia scattered within her picture frames deepening the intellectual content behind the images. Each title provides a touchstone to her unspoken ideas.
One immediately appreciates her skill with these oil pigments because her figures attract attention, specifically to their poses and faces, which the artist imbues with warmth and life. In her painting Trophy Wives, Roberts lines several advanced middle aged women shoulder to shoulder across the canvas, perhaps replicating a photo from the 1940's, who all appear as close friends that clutch their bowling trophies in hand.
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.
In another almost life size portrait, Roberts marries the iconic kewpie and cut-out doll to depict an earlier vision of Barbie in her one person painting Alterations. Painted over paper thin dressmaker patterns, Roberts portrays a women waiting to be fitted, or even adjusted from her original self. Newspaper ads surrounding the curvaceous body relate how women try and supposedly 'fit' into a man's dreams. An actual reused corset and netted petticoat appropriately cover the figure while confetti strands overflow from the woman's corset cups.
This expansive exhibit features numerous paintings, along with several sculptures, that transfigure the old into new with contemporary resonance. Find some time time to enjoy this solo exhibition and Roberts, whose sheer artistic abilities combined with an inventive collage/assemblage painting format enhances the college's Marion Gallery. (Open 9:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. on weekdays, and 1:00 to 4:00 p.m. on weekends in Caroline Hall until the exhibition closes July 9.)
