Location
Debbie Kupinsky: Recollections
Debbie Kupinsky combines images of mundane objects and natural forms in service to her investigation of everyday life, identity, and the nature of memory. She works primarily in clay, creating slip-cast replicas of found objects and hand-formed shapes from nature that become elements of larger tableau which also include actual found objects, drawings, and wooden supports. Unmoored from their original contexts, the objects Kupinsky chooses to recreate evoke a consideration of the way we mediate experience through material things. They are markers of significant events, the focus of nostalgia, and reminders of the past, both real and imagined. Through casting, rendering, and drawing, Kupinsky enlists repetition and transformation to explore how we remember and reinterpret ourselves and the world we inhabit.
Click here to read an article about Debbie Kupinsky in the Wisconsin Gazette.
Wetlands, by Debbie Kupinsky from Vimeo. Though none of Debbie Kupinsky's work is kinetic or makes noise, we made this video so you could hear the beautiful sounds her porcelain pieces make!
Allison Welch: Meet Allison, an American Girl
Allison Welch was eight years old when Molly, a 1940s girl from Indiana, came into her life. Poring over the American Girl series of six short novels about Molly, Welch obsessively dove into the doll's world. While many of us have experienced the immersive quality of a favorite story, Welch has found a way to utterly lose herself in a book. In her ongoing project Meet Allison, an American Girl, Welch recreates the wardrobes, accessories and stories of American dolls and uses self-portraiture to reimagine herself in her childhood world. She meticulously replicates and constructs the costumes and stages the photographs in locations that are historically accurate to the American Girl stories. Through the research and compulsive attention to detail involved in creating these images, Welch interweaves their stories into her own and explores a peculiar place between reality and play. The resulting photographs subtly consider questions of race, culture, femininity, and the role of domesticity in the face of history.
This exhibition will focus on Welch's recreation of the Josefina stories, about a girl living in Spanish colonial New Mexico in 1820s. Along with a series of portraits of Welch as Josefina, it will include the costume, props, and some of the tools used to create these elaborate fictional tableau.
Opening Reception: Friday, January 15, 5:30-7:30pm, with informal gallery talks by the artists at 6:30pm.
