SIXTH ANNUAL NOHL FELLOWSHIP EXHIBITION
October 9-December 13, 2009
Opening: Friday, October 9, 6-9 pm
with gallery talk by curator Nicholas Frank at 6:30 pm. Xav Leplae will undertake a film shoot/performance in the gallery during the opening

Inova opens an exhibition of work by the artists who received Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists in 2008. It brings together work by four artists selected in the Established Artist category: Xav Leplae, Shana McCaw & Brent Budsberg (a collaborative) and Iverson White; and five artists selected in the Emerging Artist category: Tate Bunker, Bobby Ciraldo & Andrew Swant (a collaborative), Frankie Latina and Barbara Miner. An exhibition catalogue will be available for purchase in the gallery during the opening and throughout the exhibition. For more about the Nohl Fellowship program, click here.

Ancillary Events
About the Artists

Ancillary Events
Eight additional events have been scheduled in conjunction with the Nohl exhibition. These programs take place in Inova/Kenilworth unless otherwise noted and are free and open to the public.

Friday, October 9, 6-9 pm
6-9 pm: Leplae’s The Shooting of the Misanthrope, a performance/film shoot. 6:30 pm: Opening night gallery talk with Inova curator Nicholas Frank.

Wednesday, October 28, 2009 at 7 pm
Bobby Ciraldo & Andrew Swant: Special Entertainment
Arts Center Lecture Hall, 2400 E. Kenwood Blvd. on the UWM campus
Bobby Ciraldo & Andrew Swant share their thoughts about film and new media, distribution possibilities, and publicity, and offer advice about how to navigate the entertainment industry without having to move to Los Angeles. (Artists Now! Lecture Series)

Thursday, October 29, 2009 at 6 pm
Talks by 2009 Jurors
The three jurors who will be selecting the four recipients of the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund for Individual Artists Fellowships (2009)—Brooklyn-based artist Jennie C. Jones; Toby Kamps, senior curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and Barbara Wiesen, director and curator of the Gahlberg Gallery in the McAninch Arts Center at College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, Illinois--will give a public talk about their institutions and curatorial interests.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 7 pm
Shana McCaw & Brent Budsberg: Smallification (Undermining Preciousness)
Arts Center Lecture Hall, 2400 E. Kenwood Blvd.
Shana McCaw and Brent Budsberg discuss their use of small scale architectural forms in their site-specific installations and how miniature representations affect us psychologically and perceptually.

Thursday, November 12, 2009, 6:30-7:30 pm
Barbara J. Miner: Anatomy of an Avenue: North, from the Lakefront to Pewaukee
More than any other major thoroughfare in the Milwaukee area, North Avenue links neighborhoods, cities and counties. Barbara J. Miner has organized this one-hour panel discussion in conjunction with her photo essay, “Anatomy of an Avenue,” which follows North Avenue and examines what unites and divides Milwaukee as a community. It is designed as a visual spur to challenge assumptions and to encourage people to get to know neighborhoods that may seem as distant as far-away countries but that are, literally, only down the street. The panel will be emceed by Joel McNally and Cassandra Cassandra, co-hosts of Morning Magazine on AM 1290 WMCS, and will include Miner and other representatives from the communities along North Avenue.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 7 pm
Locally Grown: The Nohl Fellows/Program One (Bobby Ciraldo & Andrew Swant and Frankie Latina)
UWM Union Theatre, 2200 E. Kenwood Blvd.
The first of three programs featuring current recipients of the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund for Individual Artists Fellowship. Tonight's program will feature an excerpt from Special Entertainment’s Hamlet A.D.D. (Bobby Ciraldo and Andrew Swant),and Frankie Latina’s Modus Operandi (77 min., Super 8, color and b/w, English and Japanese, 2009).

Wednesday, December 2, 2009 at 7 pm
Locally Grown: The Nohl Fellows/Program Two
An Evening with Iverson White
UWM Union Theatre, 2200 E. Kenwood Blvd.
This screening features the work of Iverson White, showcasing White as director, photographer writer and actor. Among the works to screen: The Funeral, Self-Determination, and The Johnson Girls.

Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 7 pm
Locally Grown: The Nohl Fellows/Program Three (Tate Bunker and Xav Leplae)
UWM Union Theatre, 2200 E. Kenwood Blvd.
This program pairs two short films by Tate Bunker (Starlite, The Albatross) with Xav Leplae’s feature-length Rasmalai Dreams.

About the Artists
Established Artists
XAV LEPLAE
Filmmaker Xavier Leplae describes his presence in the gallery as “Leplae’s The Shooting of the Misanthrope, a shootformancetallation.” The performance/film shoot will take place throughout the opening on October 9, and will form the basis of a changing gallery installation.

Leplae will screen his latest video, Rasmalai Dreams (63 min., Hindi with English subtitles, 2009) on December 9, 2009 in the UWM Union Theatre. He directed the documentary in a movie studio in India with the assistance of his brother, Didier Leplae. The video was edited by 2007 Nohl Fellow Dan Ollman. Shot entirely in 3D, the video knits together performances by actors, dancers and comics from throughout the “extreme city, Bombay--heart of India's Bollywood cinema.” The featured auditions, over a variety of colorful backgrounds, are selections from more than one hundred who came in response to media solicitations for "...an upcoming American film.” According to Leplae, “The video spans a wide range of emotions, but the overall message is about surviving and perhaps even making it in one of the biggest and  toughest entertainment capitals on the planet.” (Rasmalai is a refreshing dessert of paneer cheese soaked in sweet milk referred to longingly in the film.)

Christine Ferrera, in her catalogue essay, describes Leplae as an essential community artist: “For close to twenty-five years he has been crucial to the vitality of Milwaukee’s experimental art scene while his enchanted film and video store has served as its nerve center.”

SHANA McCAW & BRENT BUDSBERG
Shana McCaw and Brent Budsberg have collaborated for the past eight years on site-specific sculptural installations and performances. Their recent work focuses on the use of realistic architectural miniatures and their effect upon our perception of space. Both are also founding members of the WhiteBoxPainters, a performance art group specializing in public projects. McCaw received an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Minnesota, in 1999. She currently teaches at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and Cardinal Stritch University. Budsberg earned a BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2000. He is a 3-D lab supervisor at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. He has also worked as a finish carpenter and a set designer for the film and theater industries.

McCaw and Budsberg are exhibiting two works. “Reaction” consists of two identical, small-scale farmhouses—both starting to decay. The houses are attached at their bases like conjoined twins, forming a sphere: no particular side is “up.” Like a boulder, the houses may have rolled into place, finally coming to rest on the gallery floor.  An intermittent blue light beckons from within the house(s). Dorota Biczel, in her catalogue essay, observes that the “dual position the beholder takes in relation to McCaw/ Budsberg’s constructions—being both in danger and the danger itself—seems to aptly reflect today’s radically distinct, ambiguous attitude to a house.”

“Ground” is a row of miniature power lines mounted in reverse. Descending from the ceiling, the lines sag in response to the altered gravitational situation, calling into question the orientation of ground and sky.  Emerging from a wall near Inova’s entrance, the piece extends toward the center of the space where it tumbles downward in a disorganized cluster. The installation functions as a drawing in space: linear silhouettes and shadows are cast upon a backdrop of white walls.

McCaw/Budsberg will deliver an artist talk, Smallification (Undermining Preciousness), on the Artists Now! lecture series on November 11, 2009.

IVERSON WHITE
“Before he became a filmmaker, Iverson White was a poet,” notes Sandy Adell in her catalogue essay. “His poetic sensibility, his way with sound, words and images, defines his aesthetic. Drawing on African American history and his passion for exploring relationships between black women and men, White makes films that are as much intellectual pursuits as they are efforts to refine his craft.”

White will be screening his latest film, The Funeral (13 min., 2009), in the Inova Screening Room (it will play every 30 minutes, beginning on the hour and half hour). It is closely related to Self-Determination, a film White made in 2008 that also explores relationships between men and women while paring narrative to its barest essentials.

The public will have an opportunity to see The Funeral on a large screen on December 2, 2009. Iverson White’s work will be surveyed in An Evening with Iverson White at the UWM Union Theatre. The screening will feature several works by White including The Johnson Girls (1995), Self-Determination and The Funeral.

White has been writing, directing, producing, acting in, and shooting stills, film, and video for forty years. His work reflects his personal concerns, including sexual politics and “the persistence of racism and combating it.”  A native of Detroit, Michigan, White received a BA in Mass Communications in 1980 from Wayne State University. He was a member of the Graduate Repertory Company at the University of New Orleans before transferring to the University of California, Los Angeles’s film school where he received an MFA in Theater Arts in 1985. His films have screened both nationally and internationally in the Southern Circuit Film tour, the Pan African Film Festival, the Torino Film Festival and on PBS. White has received numerous awards for his work, including a Rockefeller Fellowship and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Iverson White is an associate professor in the Department of Film at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Emerging Artists
TATE BUNKER
Tate Bunker will show Mickey Burgermeister in a projection in the gallery—or what he calls a “video painting.” Mickey, the heroine and “a rollerskating angel” joyfully floats around the rink until danger intervenes in the form of a red bull. Shot in slow motion, the piece “embraces movement and the moment.” Bunker will also screen two earlier works, Starlite (17 min., 2006) and The Albatross (13 min., 2008), on December 9, 2009 in the UWM Union Theatre. 

Bunker’s work process is designed to “free up narrative possibilities for confusion, disorder and the unpredictable.” He attempts “to merge the beauty of common moments with the mythical to create an innovative style in which neo-realism meets magical realism.” Bunker has directed over thirty films in the last ten years, and is one of Milwaukee’s premiere cinematographers. His award-winning career in film and television includes an Emmy for his production work on Gumbo TV, two additional Emmy nominations, two Milwaukee International Film Festival “Best Milwaukee Filmmaker” awards and a Paris Film Festival “Best Cinematography” prize for his short, Starlite. Bunker freelances and teaches film production at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee as well as directing his own films.

BOBBY CIRALDO & ANDREW SWANT
Bobby Ciraldo and Andrew Swant have been collaborating since 2003. They share an interest in exploring and bending the rules of art and entertainment: “We are drawn to unusual and experimental themes, but we also love big audiences, especially when they’re laughing.” They strive to make their work as accessible as possible by using “humor, eye-catching imagery and the common language of a particular medium.” David Robbins, in his catalogue essay, describes their production model as “aggressively protean” and the result of the spaces opened up by the Internet: “To be an artist of this new medium first involves…innovating forms and practices that are authentic to it; these, to be authentic, will be mapped onto the distinctive freedoms the Internet bestows.” They are not bound by a particular medium, instead choosing the one that best fits an idea: a viral video, a web site, a live performance, a documentary film, or a narrative film. Robbins suggests that their true medium is “the “vast, globe-encircling media-scape that these popular formats engage.”

Ciraldo & Swant have been working on Hamlet A.D.D., a feature-length comic version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet--filmed entirely in front of a green screen with live-action characters in an animated universe--for many years. Their gallery installation, Special Artifacts, is comprised of “visible” and “invisible props,” and related video clips, from the film. They will also screen an excerpt from Hamlet A.D.D. on November 18, 2009 at the UWM Union Theatre, and will offer an artist talk, Special Entertainment, on the Artists Now! guest lecture series on October 28, 2009.

Bobby Ciraldo is a video artist and former computer programmer who attended Grinnell College and later collaborated on the creation of ZeroTV.com, a precursor to MySpace and YouTube. Andrew Swant is a writer and filmmaker who studied film at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and art at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. He was a Sundance TV Lab finalist and has exhibited work in New York and abroad. Working as Special Entertainment, their titles include The Robot Mousetrap; the award-winning Studying the Lie, with artist David Robbins; Zombie Killer, a music video for the band Leslie & the Lys with guest vocals by Elvira; and the legendary YouTube video What What (In the Butt), which was featured on the television show South Park in an extensive shot-for-shot re-creation. Current projects include Something Theater, a television show that airs in the Milwaukee area, and William Shatner’s Gonzo Ballet, a documentary featuring William Shatner, Ben Folds, Henry Rollins and the Milwaukee Ballet.

FRANKIE LATINA
“With the much anticipated, long-time-coming debut of his latest film, Modus Operandi, director Frankie
Latina has emerged from the nadir of anonymous struggle into the seminal fringes of national notoriety,” writes Mark Borchardt in his catalogue essay. Modus Operandi (Super 8 on DVD, 77 min., 2008) was greeted enthusiastically at the CineVegas Film Festival a few months ago, and was recently screened as part of the Milwaukee Film Festival.

While Latina’s magnum opus will screen on November 18, 2009 at the UWM Union Theatre, his gallery presence harks back to his long apprenticeship. Latina’s Hack (1999-2005, Super 8, 16mm and Mini DV on DVD, 15:00) will alternate with Iverson White’s The Funeral in the Inova Screening Room. Hack documents “the five failed films of Frankie Latina,” which embody his six-year struggle to legitimize himself as a filmmaker in Milwaukee.  Despite never-ending financial trouble, tragedy, and constant self-doubt, Latina and his film-making family refused to quit. Given the recent festival success of Modus Operandi, Latina's Hack has become a poignant retrospective of the challenges that must be overcome to succeed not only as an artist and a filmmaker, but as a human being.

Frankie Latina began as a sales clerk in video rental stores across the city of Milwaukee, shooting experimental films on the weekends with friends and family. Eventually he crossed from experimental work to narrative storytelling, blurring the line between the two along the way. “To me, the appeal of cinema lies in its ability to enable a person to escape their reality for the length of a film while they sip their soda and eat a bucket of popcorn,” says Latina. “The structure of my work is a collage of old architecture that will probably get demolished and vivid October color.” Story lines and ideas come from life experiences, daydreaming, photographers like Helmut Newton and filmmakers such as Jørgen Leth, John Cassavetes, David Lynch, John Waters, Wes Anderson, Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, Quentin Tarantino, Wong Kar-wai, and Jean-Pierre Melville. “I would like to reach a point where I can work full time on filmmaking and not worry about being able to afford milk for my cereal,” Latina continues. “Beyond this, the only thing you can count on in life is uncertainty….so throw your trash away after you watch your next film—I could be the usher who has to clean it up.”

BARBARA J. MINER
Photographer Barbara J. Miner has been a reporter, writer and editor for more than thirty years, and when she began to focus on photography she did so with a journalist’s sensibility and eye. She acknowledges that her approach to photography is best summed up by essayist John Berger in Ways of Seeing: “The way we see things is affected by what we know and what we believe. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.”

For this exhibition, Miner has filled 70 linear feet of gallery space with Anatomy of an Avenue, a photo essay comprised of sixty 14” x 9” black & white photographs, taken in 2008 and 2009, displayed side-by-side, as if one were traveling along North Avenue from east to west. Anatomy of an Avenue begins, like North Avenue, at the Milwaukee lakefront and ends sixteen miles to the west as North Avenue dead-ends in the formerly rural, now exurban town of Pewaukee. Miner chose North Avenue because it connects more neighborhoods, communities, cities and counties than any other major thoroughfare in the metropolitan area. “It is a microcosm of who we are as a community—both what unites us and what divides us,” according to Miner. “The photo essay is designed as a visual spur to challenge assumptions—for instance, that the central city is defined by black poverty and crime—and to encourage people to explore neighborhoods that may seem as distant as far-away countries but that are, literally, only down the street.”

As Jasmine Alinder observes in her catalogue essay, “The result is a group of empathetic, nuanced and aesthetically complex black and white images that together create an affecting portrait of bounded communities.” It is a portrait that challenges some assumptions while leaving others intact; ultimately, it is one that reminds us that “we are interconnected.”

Miner has assembled a stellar panel to consider what North Avenue has to tell us about what unites and divides Milwaukee as a community. The one-hour panel discussion is scheduled for Thursday, November 12, 2009 at Inova and will be emceed by Joel McNally and Cassandra Cassandra, co-hosts of Morning Magazine on AM 1290 WMCS. The panel will include Miner and other representatives from the communities along North Avenue.

Miner’s work has appeared in publications ranging from the New York Times to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the Nation. She has a bachelor’s degree in journalism, a master’s degree in English literature and an associate degree in photography.