Package Paintings & Scientific Sculpture @ The Museum of Wisconsin Art

Feb. 13, 2012

10:21 p.m.

The Museum of Wisconsin Art (MWA) opened three new exhibitions in January, two in their smaller galleries. In the One From Wisconsin Gallery, Green Bay's Alison Stehlik presents her 3 dimensional wall hung “package paintings.” The museum's lower level Focus Gallery features Lisa Koch. who combines sculpture and science. At an opening reception, Koch and Stehlik were eager to answer questions about their art. Stehlik's “package paintings” play on Andy Warhol's fascination with pop culture and product brandings seen in his Brillo Pad boxes and Campbell Soup can graphics. Stehlik's sculptural works hang on the wall in three dimensions, with applied tapestry like patterns covering the surfaces. These patterns incorporate the domestic environments that consumer products are brought home to and present a context that the products are used in. <o:p /> One of Stehlik's paintings titled Thin Spaghetti #9 resembles the long, narrow familiar box only colored with a red and green pattern ornamentation over the box. Another titled Drops reminds the viewer of assorted candies, fruit flavored gumdrops one used to sneak from a striped container, sweet and sticky. Almost as familiar to the viewer as the Lifesaver packaging, an iconic candy everyone remembers. These common, ordinary products as Stehlik explains, “ transcend class and culture.”<o:p /> Stehlik makes a conscious decision to blur the text on her packaging, which allows the packaging and products to become symbols. Symbols that ultimately connect many people in a larger human race and evoke memories of domestic spaces and what one chooses to bring into those personal spaces. <o:p /> Madison's Lisa Koch works in a genetics lab. This surprising woman holds a degree in Biochemistry and an MFA in Sculpture and Glass. Yet, there's no surprise that her artworks marry these two diverse backgrounds. <o:p> </o:p>In the MWA exhibition at the Focus Gallery, “A Collection of Fleeting Moments,” Koch envisions how water unites humanity from all around the globe. Clouds, oceans and rain float through her artworks that often appears to deconstruct H20 to its visual molecular elements. Several of her wall sculptures feature silver glass shapes that Koch blows from glass and then applies a chemical deposition of silver similar to a mirror, which Koch paints on from the inside. While the paint gives a reflective quality to her forms, the color slyly reflects the “silver lining to every cloud.” Another work titled Full of Good Ideas was constructed from glass, steel, various metals and rocks. This long, thin glass tube bubbles with tiny glass teardrops (also made from water) filled with found objects and other elements. Over 200 of these bubbles were hand blown to fill the tube, each one filled with an earthy and unique element in Koch\'s very interesting merger of an instrument that could measure rainfall or resemble a test tube. Koch reiterates that the human body contains a high percentage of water, with water moving around and through one human being every second of the day in desperate forms for divergent reasons. This fact relates a truth relevant outside the human body. Whether in the form of air or clouds, rain or snow, ice or steam, this critical element, water, influences every person on earth, reflecting a perhaps crucially environmental issue more necessary then food. Visit these intriguing exhibitions at West Bend's Museum of Wisconsin Art along with another take on Wisconsin outsider art in “Bernard Gilardi: Into the Light” through March. For further information visit the Museum of Wisconsin Art website: www.wisconsinart.org <o:p> </o:p> <o:p> </o:p>

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