Warehouse Art Museum Collection - Photographed by Avery Pelekoudas
'Young Girl' by Charles Searles
Charles Searles, 'Young Girl', Gelatin silver print
“Pause/Connect” at Warehouse Art Museum is an unconventionally arranged exhibition of some 80 photographs from private collections, most from the collection of Jan Serr and John Shannon, plus five videos. Work from 16 nations is represented with a time frame spanning 1910 through the present, including original commissions by Serr and Shannon. The exhibit is not arranged chronologically, nationally or biographically, but thematically.
Serr and Shannon chose the work with curator Lisa Hostetler, formerly of the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Smithsonian and now with the Eastman Museum. “Many people sometimes think that if I had the right equipment and stood in the same spot, I could take that same photo,” Shannon says. “I question that.”
Warehouse Art Museum Collection - Photographed by Avery Pelekoudas
'Ben' by Lois Bielefeld
Lois Bielefeld, 'Ben', 2014, Gelatin silver print
“Pause/Connect” refers to the thought that occurs even when catching a moment on the fly and especially when the photograph results from a plan, such as the two pictures at the exhibit’s entry from Dawoud Bey’s “Birmingham Series.” Both are formal portraits of Black males: on the left, a distinguished gentleman perhaps age 70; to the right, an adolescent boy. Shannon explains that the boy represents a victim of the white supremacist terrorist attacks of the early 1960s. “The man is who he would have been if he hadn’t been killed.”
Bey’s Chevis II (1996) is a quadriptych, a large Polaroid of face framed in four spaces, as if lacking wholeness. A similar theme can be discerned in Serr’s Agra Train Station (2009), a diptych of a passing passenger train with faces and silhouettes in each window, each person disconnected yet part of the same picture. Coming from a different aesthetic altogether, Barbara Morgan’s Martha Graham, Lamentation (1935) is a powerfully expressionist portrait of the dancer and the shadows she cast.
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.
“Pause/Connect’s” four loose themes concern the nature of their subjects “Between and Among” includes photos of relationships between people, notably Gordon Park’s beautiful gelatin silver print Music—That Lordly Power(1993), an emotionally intimate scene of a woman learning her head on the shoulder of a barefooted cellist, a slightly askew ancestral portrait photo hanging on the wall behind them. “Toward” consists of photographic documents of places; “As” looks at the photographic medium’s exaggerated relationship to “reality” when applied to mysterious situations. The photos of “Within,” according to Hostetler’s catalog essay, “direct us to internal phenomenon, impressing upon us the photographer’s interest in metaphorical suggestion over literal description.”
Warehouse Art Museum Collection
'Train Diptych' by Jan Serr
Jan Serr, 'Train Diptych', 2009, Inkjet print
The exhibit also includes the Midwest premiere of Carla Gannis’ Virtues and Vices (2023). The 19-minute video cross examines AI and ChatGPT, humorously and provocatively exploring the abrupt emergence of a technology whose consequences could be staggering.
“Pause/Connect” runs through Nov. 10 at the Warehouse Art Museum, 1635 W. St. Paul Ave. For more information, visit WAMmke.org.
