Contemporary Portraiture and the ‘Essential You’ at Portrait Society Gallery
As the owner/director of the Third Ward’s Portrait Society Gallery, Debra Brehmer spends a lot of time looking at and thinking about portraiture, in particular the question of the purpose of painted portraits in the age of iPhones. “Before photography, one needed a portrait to anchor one’s legacy or to send a neighboring country your daughter’s image when shopping for a spouse and land treaty,” she writes. Brehmer’s suspicion is that the medium is uniquely suited to capture its subject’s “essential you” in a way that even the most forgiving filter cannot.
Two solo exhibitions representing contemporary approaches to the “essential you” of portraiture are on display at Portrait Society Gallery opening Friday, March 30. Dominic Chambers’ work incorporates personal biography and African American history to reflect on the black body. “Dominic Chambers: In Light our Bodies Shift,” continues the young artist’s investigation of love and the spiritual beings that accompany us. Chambers received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from MIAD in 2016 and is currently completing a Master of Fine Arts degree at the Yale University School of Art.
Skully Gustafson’s paintings have a roughhewn irreverence set off by popping colors and idiosyncratic representations of the human form. Gustafson’s canvasses are busy affairs, rich in detail and demanding considerable interpretive work on the viewer’s part. “Skully Gustafson: Outdoor Wigstore” is the artist’s second major exhibition at Portrait Society Gallery.
Thomas Lemke “Fiddleheads” and “Wolf River”
Fiddleheads Coffee Roasters
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10530 N. Port Washington Road
Thomas Lemke was born and raised near the small central Wisconsin town of Gresham, surrounded by vast expanses of farmland and untamed Wisconsin wild. “Before the term was used for raising healthy chickens,” he quips, “I was free-ranging.” This upbringing, the envy of all would-be Huck Finns, perhaps accounts for Lemke’s sensitivity to the majesty of the natural world. Despite his day job as a company photographer for Northwestern Mutual, making his living with portraiture, public relations and advertising, Lemke has never ceased to photograph nature.
Two bodies of work are on display at Mequon’s Fiddleheads Coffee Roasters through May 31. In “The Fiddleheads,” Lemke photographs the furled fern fronds known charmingly as fiddleheads. Using the photographic technique of “focus-stacking” to bring the fiddleheads into sharp focus, Lemke “transforms these diminutive forest dwellers into impressive presences.” In “The Wolf River,” Lemke continues his lifelong documentation of central Wisconsin’s Wolf River, playing with different lengths of exposure that transform the river’s appearance and reflect the passage of time that characterizes Lemke’s own relationship to the river.
