Sub-Rural #49.5, Door County Contemporary Art Fair

Milwaukee artists and entrepreneurs Shane McAdams and Shane Walsh began planning last week’s Door County Contemporary Art Fair some four years ago while teaching at the Peninsula School of Art, the eventual site of the fair. McAdams recalled, “We ran it by the school…and when they agreed we started building a plan.” The selection process first involved exploring a Milwaukee cohort of galleries where they discussed their ideas further. Gradually, they had an organization, staff and team of advisors that promoted the plan to galleries and project spaces in Chicago, Minneapolis, Nashville, Kansas City, etc. “The idea was to create a fair that was a breezy Up-Northy getaway and all-around Midwest DIY art gallery convening place. Everything exceeded expectations.” The final event  reflected an ease and buoyancy of the galleries and artists.

McAdams added “We worked with a number of other organizations, from Kohler to Gener8or to Madison MoCA to Bridgework…but next year we will flesh out the programming even more. This whole thing was a wild moonshot of an idea and by all accounts it worked….that it worked gives me hope in art and culture and how it integrates with our lives.”

McAdams and his group of artist/curators produced a celebration of art that emphasized place and history, in this case the iconic “round barn” Guenzel Gallery and the utopian Madeline Tourtelot Studio Buildings of the school, along with the surrounding beauty of Fish Creek, the bay, and Door County. For the most part the gallery participants shared a commitment to art of the region, to cosmopolitanism and rurality. The result was a production that was opposite of the market-driven, doctrinal spectacle of large art fairs whose competitiveness and exclusivity precludes place and congeniality, opting instead for “arcade frenzy.” The following deferential, occasionally waggish, notes attempt to mirror a pleasurable, turned-out, three-day culture drive.

“The Plan,” a Chicago-based artist run Gallery known for assembling post-conceptual mind-probing exhibitions on subjects like “pata-physics,” internal emotional landscapes, and performative interventions, was one of the non-traditional, post-material project spaces welcomed at the fair. The space’s deftly fragmented installation by Chicago sculptor Ari Norris which included masking tape and “Pink Pearl” eraser sculptures constructed of wood and paint, was among other things a “fruitful” Mauritzi Cattelan/Claes Oldenburg wisecrack.

 

At “Western Exhibitions” Deb Sokolov’s drawerly tour de force faux-documents of McDonalds was, of course, a mock trial, but dialectically graphic. If you like seeing the drawing medium tested and pushed to the margins, this is how it’s done. She never missed a beat adjacent to Richard Hull’s formidable thawing membrane portraits. My vote for the most memorable booth.

Debra Brehmer was one of the most engaging owners at the event as she was widely knowledgeable about the history of Milwaukee’s contemporary art spaces. She published an artist’s zine for years, writes a regular newsletter about her Portrait Society gallery, and is one of the must-see dealers in the city blending vernacular and contemporary art. A recent project, titled “Everyday Heaven,” at her Milwaukee space is based on the same compelling body of images early 20^th century photographer Charles Van Schaick explored in the 1974 book phenomenon “Wisconsin Death Trip.” Like the fair directors Brehmer is committed to exploring the depth of regional art production with all its rural and historical virtues.

Hawthorne Contemporary, also from Milwaukee, showed the noteworthy instrumentalist forms of Derrick Velasquez. Organic layers of colored vinyl strips stack securely over maple armatures. Nonstandard military epaulettes only fuse paradoxically with powdered wig dreams.

Angee Lennard and Jessica Cochran’s “Process/Process” print studio was represented by a selection of artist projects that reflected their “fresh is more” experimentalism. A significant grouping included a smart Magalie Guerin anti-formal print jumble, and classically contained and massaged prints by Alice Tippit, Michelle Grabner, Candida Alverez, and Kay Rosen.

Kristin Van Loon and Ryan Fontaine’s Minneapolis gallery “Hair and Nails” had an especially busy weekend with six of Jonathan Herrera Soto’s radical “Deterritorialization” charcoal drawing series. The partners, who recently opened an additional space in New York commented, “there was a strong contingent of institutional curators, artists, and collectors in attendance who we were able to connect with. The consensus from folks we talked to was positive and we would definitely do it again. In fact we’ve already begun thinking about what our presentation might look like with the benefit of experience.

Devening Projects was a key contestant in Door County. The booth included the esteemed Chicago sculptor Allison Wade, printmaker and scholar Christopher Michlig, collagist and noted recording and performance artist Zander Raymond in a spacious corner space perfect for displaying the material and conceptual intricacies required of the early 21st century artists in D.D.’s. sanctuary. Hard to beat.

Green Gallery featured a suite of delicious hand-painted bronze jelly jar tops by the indefatigable Michelle Grabner. Nine faux Bonne Maman cadmium red-gridded flavors were presented on one wall just below eye level, confirming expectations about shelf appeal and high margin placement. Les murs ont tes yeux!

Katie Geha, who in the last year became only the 2nd Director of the University of Wisconsin’s Tandem Press, featured stalwarts Richard Bosman, Andy Burgess, Suzanne Caporael, Robert Kelly, Marie Lorenz, and Judy Pfaff. Get more in an unforgettable tour of the rest of what Tandem offers the next time you’re in Madison.

If you like art venues that contextualize something other than commerce, imports, and art paroxysms, and prefer substance on the growth of culture framed “elsewhere” that you can chew on with artist/curator hybrids, keep next June open in Door County.