‘Out of Sight, Out of Reach’ at the Trout Museum of Art

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Photo by Shane McAdams

‘Out of Sight, Out of Reach’ at the Trout Museum of Art

J. Parker Valentine's Untitled (Failure Envelope) in ‘Out of Sight, Out of Reach’ at the Trout Museum of Art

The exhibition Out of Sight, Out of Reach, curated by Milwaukee-based artist/gallerist/curator John Riepenhoff, features work by 10 artists—Naotaka Hiro, Hana Miletić, Devin T. Mays, Yuki Okumura, Joseph Grigely, Nicholas Frank, Mamuka Japharidze, Anne Eastman, J. Parker Valentine, and Riepenhoff himself—whose work resists the most basic invitation of visual art: making itself readily available for our engagement. In one way or another, every work in the exhibition is motivated by withdrawal and retreat—conceptually, visually, socially, or symbolically. Assembling such a demurringly coy selection in the cavernously bare spaces of the new Trout Museum might seem counterintuitive, but that apparent contradiction becomes the method behind a surprisingly seductive madness.

“Out of Sight, Out of Reach” is up at Appleton’s Trout Museum of Art through August 2.

Resisting regard takes many forms throughout the exhibition. One of the most compelling efforts—perhaps the show's great formal hook—is J. Parker Valentine's Untitled (Failure Envelope), a zigzagging six-foot-high metal armature with looping cables spreading across its faces. The curlicues of lariat cord resemble the paths of rogue alpha particles, or perhaps napkin doodles made to ground an intensely frustrated phone conversation. They're as crisp, marginal, and queer as a rogue hair corkscrewed into a bar of borrowed soap. That unwillingness to be found out or named is the work's strength: big and small, organized and gestural, subatomic and cosmic all at once. And still, kind of gorgeous.

Aggressive Abstraction?

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Photo by Shane McAdams

‘Out of Sight, Out of Reach’ at the Trout Museum of Art

Nicholas Frank's Bio III in ‘Out of Sight, Out of Reach’ at the Trout Museum of Art

Nearby, Nicholas Frank's Bio III, installed on the adjacent wall, likewise resists easy identification. It initially appears as a gnarly, aggressive abstraction, perhaps smuggled from the studio of a forgotten 1950s Ab Ex-er. In fact, the piece is residue lifted from the floor of Frank's workspace, which supports a decidedly more conceptual practice. It wasn't created to be seen, and the marks it bears are, paradoxically, the kinetic residue of a practice occurring more in the mind than in the feet—an indexical displacement that brings action all the way back to thought.

Farther into the museum's vast interior is an extraordinarily unassuming work by Devin T. Mays. Mays's practice plays with space, scale, and contexts of reception, and Flag continues that investigation with remarkable subtlety and economy. His taxidermied boar's head feels as lopsided on the left side of a temporary wall as the work itself feels within the hangar-like back gallery. That it's nearly lost in the expanse is brilliant, given that its subject is synonymous with personalized and private spaces. The odd composition also denatures and aestheticizes the feral subject, transforming it into something improbably mundane, inert, and even pathetically funny.

Georgian artist Mamuka Japharidze's work, unlike some of the other efforts in the exhibition, is less of a shrinking conceptual violet. His connection to the show's premise stems from years of working through the shifting political climate of his native Georgia. In 1995, disguised as a technician for a television station of his own invention, Japharidze talked his way into Tbilisi’s fire-gutted broadcast tower and climbed 270 meters up its inner ladder with a video camera fastened to his head, filming and photographing the civil-war-scarred city below. The video was screened exactly once, the following day. Shortly after, his studio was broken into and the tape was lost. What survives are the negatives—the photographs on view here. In this context, they become eerie and plaintive, assisted by the asymmetry between Appleton, Wisconsin’s quaintness and the recent history of the Caucasus his work represents.

Permission of Creation

Around a corner, a work by Hana Miletić appears like caution tape around a wine spill. It’s typical of her textile pieces which arise from small moments of public impasse, which are then transformed by the artist into soft sculptures. Miletić takes moments of prohibition and empowers them with the permission of creation. Like much of the work in the exhibition, Materials occupies its space with quiet insistence: two red-striped textile works hang from the wall, secured by yellow bands—not to prevent, but to enter. If control and fear are the engines of prohibition, openness and optimism are the engines of production. One celebrates what shouldn't be; the other, what could be. Miletić's weaving, knitting, and embroidery become ways of opening possibility in the face of resistance, and her work reminds us that art isn't simply objects or actions, but a general willingness toward transformation and potential.

Perhaps the most movingly spot-on works in the exhibition are those by Chicago-based conceptual artist Joseph Grigely. Grigely, who is deaf, alters publications by removing textual accounts of sonic events. His Songs Without Words (Pearl Jam) features a spread from The New York Times with the text describing the performance excised. The work is both a reflection on his own point of view and an investigation into language's capacity to represent subjective experience. Beautifully elegant and quietly critical, it epitomizes the hushed conceptual jujitsu guiding the exhibition.

"Out of sight" proves remarkably elastic. It suggests disappearance and withdrawal, but as an expression it also implies aspiration and possibility in equal measure. Rather than resolving those tensions, the exhibition inhabits them. What ultimately distinguishes Out of Sight, Out of Reach is not simply its roster of artists but the relationships that sparked it. Organized through Riepenhoff's decades-long network of collaborators across Milwaukee, Tokyo, Brussels, Tbilisi, Los Angeles, New York and elsewhere, the exhibition reads less like a survey than the visible trace of countless ongoing conversations. The works share a willingness to remain open to uncertainty as a productive working method rather than a fixed shape or form. That makes sense given Riepenhoff's trajectory: after years of looking at art, understated surprises often become more rewarding than expected brilliance. Yet remarkably little formal opportunity is sacrificed on the altar of obscurity at the Trout. The exhibition asks for commitment—but only a little. In return, it offers the possibility that viewers may come to value art's subtlest, most understated moments, those that expand rather than resolve, and that reward sustained attention with ever unfolding surprises.