Arts and Literature Laboratory's galleries will remain open on Friday, January 10 from 6:00pm to 8:00pm for a "First Look" at new exhibitions by Hannah O'Hare Bennett; Jennifer Bastian; Sami Schalk and Sam Waldron; and Terri Messinides.
Note: This will be a mask-required event.
Hannah O'Hare Bennett, In the Vernacular: People, Places and Things
Hannah O’Hare Bennett is an artist, experimental papermaker and educator based in Madison, Wisconsin. Between her undergraduate and graduate art degrees, she worked as a farmer, Peace Corps Volunteer (Ecuador, 2004-2006), and produce manager, manual labor that informs her current subject matter and manner of creating art.
In the Vernacular is an exhibition of low relief, multimedia tapestries from Hannah O'Hare Bennett's People Places and Things/Gente Lugares y Cosas project exploring memory, cultural dislocation and adaptation, and love of a very specific place. Twenty years ago, the artist was a Peace Corps volunteer in a tiny village in southern Ecuador called Quillin. This exhibition is a celebration of incongruity, imperfect language, and incredible luck.
Jennifer Bastian, Grief Wave
Jennifer Bastian uses fibers, sculptural and photographic processes to make objects related to the labor of parenting, grieving, and making community. She is the Thurber Park Artist in Residence in Madison for 2024-2026.
"The death of my second mother, Beverly, cracked open a wound in me that I have been unable and unwilling to sew shut. It’s always been there, but for most of my life I was able to hide it. A wound of childhood trauma, unknown neurodivergence, many things one masks to exist in a society not structured for them. All of the work in this exhibition began after Bev’s death and was in direct response to the pain and the very intense love I have for her."
Sami Schalk and Sam Waldron, Pleasure is Power: The Pleasure Art of Sami Schalk and Sam Waldron
Sami Schalk (she/hers) is a fat, Black, queer, disabled pleasure artist and professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison who celebrates and centers pleasure as a tactic for healing and liberation. Sam Waldron (she/hers) is a visual artist based in Madison, Wisconsin whose work centers queer joy, fat liberation, disability pride, and pleasure activism.
Pleasure is Power is celebration of Pleasure Art and Activism. Through photographs, film, and collage, Schalk and Waldron invite audiences into intimate and public spaces where pleasure is a liberatory and political act that centers joy and self-love as tools for a collective revolution.
Terri Messinides, In the Pejorative
Terri Messinides has been an artist since the mid-1990s, first working in clay and now in paper and fiber. Terri uses handmade paper, and collage to explore the issues of social justice, environmental concerns and feminism and women’s rights.
The collage series In the Pejorative examines women’s place in the world in relation to the pejorative words specific to women that are frequently aimed at girls and women, young and old. The English language has over 5,000 words that demean, deride and disrespect women and the lexicon of these words keeps growing.
