On view June 13th - August 3rd
Artists: Lois Bielefeld, Melissa Dorn, Linda Marcus, Alayna Pernell, Nirmal Raja, Alix Anne Shaw, Jaymee Harvey Willms
Temporality and trace are questioned through seven diverse perspectives in more
waiting just a little closer.
Through process, material and labor, artists’ investigate how the passage of time influences our identity and our world. Simple acts, when repeated, can become tests of endurance, gestures of love or just possibly ways to quiet the mind.
Interpreting the pulse and passage of time leaves the artist to wonder:
Where is the mark made?
Who sees it?
What marks remain and what are erased?
What is left behind?
The traces of labor hold a duality in meaning, signifying both the physical act of working and the culmination of the creation process. Informed by feminist perspectives, we interrogate the ways in which gender and power, love and work, intersect with time and memory.
Our work challenges dominant narratives and invites our viewers to reflect on their own relationship with time, memory, and identity. These intersections ask us all to consider not only the past, but also the present and future.
Through the push and pull of action and waiting, we explore what changes become possible if we exercise more waiting just a little closer.
Lois Bielefeld is a queer series-based artist working in photography, audio, video, and performance. Their work continually asks what links routine and ritual to the formation of identity, personhood, and the development of meaning-making.
Currently settled in Milwaukee, Lois has lived on both coasts with a graduate degree from the California Institute of the Arts. Besides photography, they feel passionate about traveling, hiking, eating, and gardening adventures with their wife.
Their work is in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York City, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Museum of Wisconsin Art, Saint Kate Arts Hotel, and the Warehouse. Bielefeld has shown at The International Center of Photography in New York City, The National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC, de Young Museum in San Francisco, The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, and Dom Wein in Vienna. Bielefeld is represented by Portrait Society Gallery in Milwaukee.
Melissa Dorn is a Milwaukee artist obsessed with industrial mop heads, feminism, and labor. Her sculpture, paintings, and installations utilize craft, pulling at threads of her history, midwesterness, and the ordinary.
Selected exhibitions: Fem-utility Closet, IA&A at Hillyer, Washington, DC; Fem-utility Closet, Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts (LHUCA); Sarah Ball Allis Art Museum, Charles Allis Art Museum; Soft Power, Minneapolis College of Art and Design Concourse Gallery; 3 Faces of Eve, 5 Points Gallery; Made in Paint, The Sam & Adele Golden Gallery; Existing in Thought, Scout Gallery; Tension in the Ordinary, James May Gallery; Mobile Home, Var Gallery; Infauxstructure, Opalka Gallery, Sage College; The Book Club: What Would We Do With Lynne Tillman, Frank Juarez Gallery; Mopping Up, Frank Juarez Gallery; The Jump Off, Urban Institute for Contemporary Art; Detroit Biennale, Museum of New Art; Wisconsin Artists Biennial, Museum of Wisconsin Art; Preservatif, Stockholm Gallery; Schematic, UW-Sheboygan; Eight Counties, John Michael Kohler Arts Center; Art Chicago and Aqua Art Miami, Hotcakes Gallery.
Select collections: Saint Kate - The Arts Hotel; Northwestern Mutual; Mandel Group; UW Hospital and Clinics; Milwaukee Area Technical College.
Recent residencies and awards: Ruth Arts + MIAD Grant; Villa Terrace Art Museum Artist Residency; Conversations in Practice Residency, Oxbow School of Art & Artists’ Residency; Artist in Residence, Arts@Large; Sam & Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts Residency.
Dorn earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design (MIAD), where she is an Adjunct Associate Professor in the First-Year Experience program.
Linda b. Marcus b. 1961, Los Angeles, California is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Drawing on her long history as a storyteller in journalism and fashion, Marcus now focuses on fiber and sculpture. Her work is centered on the body and issues of memory, identity, and domesticity.
Marcus recently received her master’s degree in art from the School of the Art Institute in 2024. She also holds a master’s degree in journalism and philosophy from Marquette University she received in 2004 and a bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1983.
Marcus’s work has been exhibited widely in Wisconsin at several museums as well as numerous galleries across the country and in several publications.
Currently, Marcus is a writer for Artdose Magazine and creative director and co-creator of the Saint Kate Arts hotel in Milwaukee Wisconsin.
Website www.lindamarcusart.com
Instagram @lindamarcusdesign
Alayna N. Pernell (b. 1996) is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator from Heflin, Alabama. She is currently the Associate Lecturer of Photography and Imaging at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is also a Content Editor for Lenscratch, an online photographic arts publication, and founder of Surely You Know, an archival photographic initiative dedicated to returning displaced photographs to black families. In May 2019, she graduated from The University of Alabama, where she received her Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art with a concentration in Photography and a minor in African American Studies. She received her MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in May 2021. Her work reflects the shared experiences of Black women, particularly those shaped by the Deep South. Through photography, text, and found materials, she explores the mental, physical, and psychological toll of sustained exposure to injustice, discrimination, and violence in both literal and metaphorical spaces.
She has provided lectures about her work at various spaces including Texas Tech University, Colorado Photographic Arts Center, The Sheldon, and Syracuse University, among others. Her work has been exhibited in various cities across the United States, including FLXST Contemporary (Chicago, IL), Refraction Gallery (Milwaukee, WI), JKC Gallery (Trenton, NJ), RUSCHWOMAN Gallery (Chicago, IL), Colorado Photographic Arts Center (Denver, CO), Griffin Museum of Photography (Winchester, MA), among several others. Her work is currently held in private collections at the Museum of Contemporary Photography and the Illinois State Museum.
Pernell was named the 2020-2021 recipient of the James Weinstein Memorial Award by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago Department of Photography, the 2021 Snider Prize award recipient by the Museum of Contemporary Photography, a 2023 Mary L. Nohl Fellowship Emerging Artist recipient, and a 2024 gener8tor Art x Sherman Phoenix Artist. She was also recognized on the Silver Eye Center of Photography 2022 Silver List, Photolucida’s 2021 Critical Mass Top 50, and a 2021 Lenscratch Student Prize Honorable Mention, among others.
Nirmal Raja is an interdisciplinary artist who recently moved to Cambridge, MA, after living and working in Milwaukee for 24 years. She had lived in India, South Korea, and Hong Kong before immigrating to the United States thirty-three years ago. She holds a BA in English Literature from St. Francis College in Hyderabad, India; a BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She has participated in solo and group shows in the Midwest, nationally, and internationally. She is the recipient of several awards including “Graduate of The Decade” from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Raja received the Mary L. Nohl Fellowship for individual artists for the year 2020 and the Mildred L. Harpole Artists of the Year 2022 award from the Milwaukee Arts Board. Her work is part of several private and public collections, including the Warehouse Art Museum, the John Michael Kohler Art Center, Northwestern Mutual and more. She collaborates with other artists and strongly believes in investing energy into her immediate community while also considering the global. She periodically curates exhibitions that bring people from different cultures and backgrounds together.
Raja is represented by Portrait Society Gallery in Milwaukee
Alix Anne Shaw is a Milwaukee-based sculptor and poet. Using a range of traditional and nontraditional materials, zir work gives voice to the normalized loneliness of modern life and asks us to reconsider the tenuous nature of interpersonal connections.
A graduate of Yale University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Shaw has exhibited internationally at galleries including the Richard Gray Gallery in Chicago, the Museum of Wisconsin Art, and the Sebastopol Center for the Arts in California, Kriti Gallery in India, and the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art in South Korea.
Ze is also the author of three prize-winning books of poetry: Undertow (Persea 2006), winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Prize, Dido in Winter (Persea 2014), and Rough Ground (Etruscan, 2018). Zir work can be found at https://alixanneshaw.carbonmade.com/ and www.alixanneshaw.com.
Jaymee Harvey Willms is an artist living and working in the Milwaukee area of Wisconsin. She was born and raised in Maplewood, Minnesota. From there she moved to South Dakota where she received her BFA in painting and art history from the University of South Dakota. In 2015 she went on to graduate from SUNY Albany with her MFA in sculpture. Currently, she serves her community as Executive Director of the Charles Allis and Villa Terrace Art Museums and an adjunct instructor at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. Jaymee lives with her husband in Hartford Wisconsin. A mother of twin boys, George and Allen, who were stillborn in March of 2021, her current work processes grief, mourning, fear and hope. She believes in fearless advocacy and the power of storytelling. She has had international residencies, shows her work across the United States, and continues to make work in her studio in Milwaukee’s Walker's Point neighborhood.
