A reception for the current exhibitions at Arts + Literature Laboratory will be held on Friday, April 4, 2025 from 6:00pm–8:00pm, featuring work by Paulina King, Sally Hutchison, and Vera Scekic. Hannah O'Hare Bennett's exhibtion, In the Vernacular: People, Places and Things has been extended through April 12, 2025, and will also be on display.
Paulina King, recipient of the 2025 ALL Prize, will present an artist talk at approximately 7:00pm. The ALL Prize is awarded to an outstanding graduating MFA student from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, selected by the ALL Visual Arts Curatorial Team.
Paulina King, All the while, the earth was humming
King's MFA thesis exhibition is a series of site-specific installations at the Arts + Literature Laboratory and the UW-Madison Arboretum, in which King collaborates with natural phenomena. Inside ALL, acrylic forms flutter in response to a wind sensor placed in the arboretum, mimicking the dance of leaves. Outside at the arboretum, terracotta vessels capture rainwater to create reflection pools. In both locations, prose highlights the sites of experienced phenomena, inviting the viewer into King’s process. King is an installation artist interested in the relationship between society and the world we enhabit. King is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Madison, Wisconsin and she received her BA in Practice of Art from Princeton University.
Sally Hutchison, Continuum
Hutchison's exhibition features geometric-style paintings, drawings, and collages that sometimes gesture toward landscape, still life, or architecture. Hutchison's influences include Mondrian, Malevich, and Morandi. The works presented are a "series" of imagery including architecture, snippets of political history, and images of meteorological events. Hutchison begins with something that provokes her interest and explores ways of representing new subject matter. She employs the hedge shape in the drawings of the "Weimar Series," with collaged banknotes, inspired by the geometrically designed hedges of the Versaille gardens. Hutchison lives in Madison, Wisconsin.
Vera Scekic, Recombination
Adopting the visual culture of biology as metaphor and armature, Vera Scekic treats paint as if it were an organism, exploring its material, chromatic and formal properties using a process that combines chance occurrences with a systematic approach. Scekic's practice is an analog response to developments in the life sciences that are enabling alterations to the genomes of a range of organisms, including humans. Recombination refers to a process whereby genetic material from disparate sources is combined, either naturally or in the lab, to create new DNA, proteins and organisms. The biological process parallels the way Scekic creates her paintings: by repeatedly inserting chance into a “rules-based” method of working while reintegrating elements from prior paintings into new works. Scekic lives in Racine, Wisconsin.
