Parker Markin ‘and now I am lost in it’ at Woodland Pattern

by

At the moment of these words, Downtown Milwaukee is being retooled to accommodate the circus that will be the 2024 Republican National Convention. The avenues around the recently completed Baird Center are lined with portable commodes and barricades line the adjacent thoroughfares in hopes of absorbing the seepage from thousands of Republican apparatchiks poised to descend on the city. Downtown Milwaukee, with its rising glass and steel towers cuts a profile that matches the ambitions of the event: purposeful, practical, populist and power-seeking. Meanwhile, a mile away, the low-flung neighborhood of Riverwest shuffles through summer’s dog days with a breezy detachment as if nothing much is happening; like a precocious child making magical drawings in the shadow of her high-strung parent’s elaborate dinner party.

At the edge of the sprawling Riverwest community of humble Milwaukee denizens, Woodland Pattern Book Center, a quietly wonderful shop and general cultural treasure, buzzes with an understated energy. Its hand-painted sign and unassuming exterior on Locust Street disguises the treasures of literature, history, and community simmering inside. When I visited the space to see an exhibition by artist Parker Markin, perfectly titled, “and now I am lost in it,” (through August 11), the bookstore was teeming with poetry nerds, while in the adjacent art gallery two associates engaged in a heated video conference on a laptop about the circumstances surrounding the Democratic Party’s current uncertainties. Around their ambient discussion wrapped a frieze of unframed prints by Martin, placed therein like a symbolic gift.

Markin’s work is nested within the already nested sanctuary of Woodland Pattern. The prints in the exhibition, bearing the unifying title, the dairy queen parking lot at 3:47 on a tuesday afternoon, offers reductive relief prints inspired by the landscape that surrounded him during a period of reckoning while at his parents’ home. Making art was his outlet while there, and the works bear the focus of an individual determined to locate order amid uncertainty. Each naked letter-sized print contributes to a story about the purposeful impracticality of art.

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Without individual titles, the story allows the works to exist without the stultifying pressures of final purpose. And in this space, his works are permitted to thrive as a pure expression of a state of mind. There, beautiful things bubble up and flesh out one-by-one. In bold and insistent fields of color, he captures the abstract panorama of marshes, lemon trees, and rosemary bushes informing him from a makeshift studio in California. His reductive process reveals layers of juicy color vibrating at the edges of his ambiguously representational vegetal forms. Minimal, unfussy, delicate, and sometimes virtuosic, they build a story of therapeutic and honest production that makes one want to keep looking…and then go make their own stuff. The exclamation point is Markin’s artist book, in the midst, which offers a final intimate perspective on his period of transition and uncertainty. Each delicate and misshapen page within is as tactile and seductive as one’s own skin, metaphorically tracing Markin’s searching material sensitivity to a specific mental state and place.

It was only when I finished gently paging through Markin’s artist book that I again noticed the rollicking discussion continuing in the center of the room again. And I was quickly delivered from an artist’s interior space and into another reality. But a personal one, and inside a heroic space, embedded in a vibrant neighborhood, that just happened to be shouldered up against a juggernaut fueled by the most intense and self-fulfilling insistence. All of it stood as a telescoping set of nested realities that would make anyone with half a soul respect the inward visions and private humanities offered by art.

Woodland Pattern will be closed Sat. July 13 through Thur. July 18, 2024.

Event Listings: July 14 – July 20

Milwaukee Art Museum

  • Drop-In Art Making: Kohl’s Art Studio
  • Sunday, July14, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

  • Free Days Presented by Baird
  • Sunday, July 14, 10 a.m.–5 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

  • Drop-In Tours: Architecture and Collection Highlights
  • Sunday, July 14, 2–3 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

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

Milwaukee Art Museum

  • Free Days Presented by Baird
  • Tuesday, July 16, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

  • Free Days Presented by Baird
  • Wednesday, July 17, 10 a.m.–5 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

  • Drop-In Art Making: Kohl’s Art Studio
  • Wednesday, July 17, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

  • Drop-In Art Making: Kohl’s Art Studio
  • Wednesday, July 17, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.

Kohler Art Center

  • Artist and Curator Tour of Clocking In
  • Wednesday, July 17, 12–1 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

  • Free Days Presented by Baird
  • Thursday, July 18, 10 a.m.–8 p.m.

Wisconsin Museum of Quilts and Fibers

  • 2024 Fiber Friends At WMQFA- Third Thursdays!
  • Thursday, July 18, 10:30 a.m.–3:30 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

  • Thursday Nights at MAM
  • Thursday, July 18, 4–8 p.m.

MARN ART+CULTURE HUB

  • Milwaukee Fashion Network
  • Thursday, Jul 18, 6–8 p.m.

Gallery Night MKE

Milwaukee Art Museum

  • Drop-In Art Making: Kohl’s Art Studio
  • Friday, July 19, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

  • Free Days Presented by Baird
  • Friday, July 19, 10 a.m.–5 p.m.

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Milwaukee Art Museum

  • Free Days Presented by Baird
  • Saturday, July 20, 10 a.m.–5 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

  • Story Time in the Galleries
  • Saturday, July 20, 10:30–11 a.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

  • Drop-In Tours: American Art
  • Saturday, July 20, 2–3 p.m.

Saint Kate – the Arts Hotel

  • AIR Time, Art & Studio Tour with AIR Anwar Floyd-Pruitt
  • Saturday, July 20, 6:30 p.m.