Study for a Strange Hole

1/6 nAbr presents, Study for a Strange Hole by American Fantasy Classics.

OPENING RECEPTION
Detroit
516 NE Lowry Ave, Minneapolis
Saturday, April 16, 2016
7-11 PM

“The roots of this chamber of eternal display are to be found not in the history of art so much as the history of religion, where they are intact even more ancient than the medieval church. Egyptian tomb chambers, for example, provide an astonishingly close parallel. They too were chambers where an illusion of eternal presence was to be protected from the flow of time.”  -Thomas McEvilley on the white cube.

Sacred ceremonies of exhibition within gallery space allow the audience to sacrifice their expectations of reality at the door and enter into a sympathetic magic. Study for a Strange Hole by American Fantasy Classics, pulls back the vale revealing an entrance to the mysticism beneath the dogma of artful space.

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Less Room for the Living

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Less Room for the Living

OPENING RECEPTION
Green Gallery West
3849 Palmer St., Milwaukee
Saturday, October 24, 2015
5-8 PM

nAbr gallery is pleased to present Less Room for the Living by Derek Ernster.

Me: In my memory, this room was larger. This room and others I have been in before this, empty rooms, all of them are so spacious…

You: (Interrupting) That’s because you aren’t in the room when you recall it, you are just disembodied eyes moving about in no space at all, seeing what you want to see, seeing what you please. When is the last time you saw your boots on your feet when you remembered a room? Or felt your sore feet in your boots? How long have we been standing here, anyway?

Me: We just walked in.

Me: Or the floor, you won’t remember those dusty footprints! Or the outlets in the wall? Could you find your way around this room in the dark, or would you just walk around with you arms stuck out like a child?

Me: It might feel bigger if you were someplace else, just myself here, in this room alone. Its like dropping an ice cube in a glass of water that is already full. All of the space I remembered is just trickling over the edge, moving somewhere else.

You: Like we ought to be doing anyhow. Just bobbing around in an empty room and he calls me an ice cube. We’re both ice cubes, melting as we stand here talking about nothing in an empty room!

Me: Then the next time I pass through, it will be full again, not a space at all, just a collection of odds and ends. A room that is occupied is hardly a space at all. It calls for a handshake, not a stroll.

You: Try not to blink.

How to Avoid Huge Ships, Second Edition

nAbr gallery 1:6 is excited to present its first exhibition in the micro ratio space with new work by Xav Leplae. Leplae was born in Brussels Belgium, 1966, currently lives and works in Milwaukee Wisconsin. ‘How to Avoid Huge Ships, Second Edition’ will be on view September 18 during American Fantasy Classics’s ‘Reunion’ show at Usable Space.

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OPENING
Thursday, September 18, 2015
6 – 9 PM
Usable Space
1950 S. Hilbert St., Milwaukee, WI

Let’s Build Something Together

“Let’s Build Something Together”
– Lowe’s Home Improvement Store slogan, 2006

nAbr gallery is excited to present “Let’s Build Something Together”, an ephemeral, interactive instillation by Ashley Morgan. In this instillation the work exists solely on materials provided by the surrounding environment (snow) and the participation of those who encounter it, to manifest into its own space: an awesome snow fort.

“In much of my past sculptural work, I have explored ideas around building a domestic space, maintaining a sense of control, and leading viewers towards an experience of comfort. However, the unique opportunity to work in the indoor/outdoor nAbr Gallery space, the very snowy Wisconsin winter, and this event’s timing with the Lynden Sculpture Garden’s Winter Carnival have taken my interests in a different direction. For the first time, I am asking others to work with me to build a place of shelter. By working collaboratively with anyone who chooses to help, by allowing others to shape the work, and by relying on the natural snow as a central building material, we will achieve uncontrolled and unanticipated results.” -Morgan

Resort

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Resort

Opening: November 23, 2013 2-4pm
Duration: November 23- December 31st 2013
2145 West Brown Deer Road
Milwaukee, WI 53217

Resort is the latest in a series of installations that investigates survivalist culture. Situated in the Lynden Sculpture Garden, nAbr gallery stands among other outdoor sculptures as a representation of traditional indoor spaces of presentation (four white walls). Hideous Beast has attached a series of ten-foot-high periscopes to this structure that can be used to survey the surrounding landscape and sculptures. This intervention inverts the traditional relationship of the viewer to the gallery space, allowing vision to extend beyond its walls. Other projects in this series have explored similar forms and methods of separating oneself from the world in order to gain a clearer picture of it. For survivalists, this act, rooted in fear, is a planned defense against future threats. Resort is an attempt to understand this culture of fear; to ask if art production and presentation could be embedded in the same conditions; and to investigate how the two cultural spheres might affect one another.

Hideous Beast is a Chicago-based collaborative effort between Josh Ippel and Charles Roderick. They have worked together since 2004, organizing participatory events, publishing how-to manuals and, most recently, creating interactive sculptures and installations that examine survival culture. Hideous Beast has exhibited their work at a variety artist-run spaces, galleries, museums and festivals nationally and internationally. More information on Hideous Beast at http://hideousbeast.com/.

Frame of Season

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Frame of Season

Opening Reception: Sunday August 11th (Free)
On View: August 11th through September 8th

Sarah Luther has spent the past year soaking up the landscape, sculptures, weather and elements at the Lynden Sculpture Garden as she produced a series of four very tight and particular drawings of the garden’s landscape, one for each season. Her exhibition, Frame of Season, will be a more playful and abstract descriptions of these experiences, displaying an interpretation of each of the four seasons on the four walls of the gallery space. On view through September 8.

Sarah Gail Luther was born in Milwaukee, and is devoted to creating work that expands her knowledge of her city. She’s worked with IN:SITE, a Milwaukee-based temporary public art organization for three years, as well as other public art projects including The Amplifier, a pop-up community center located in Milwaukee’s Silver City neighborhood, which was funded by the Wisconsin Arts Board.

She has exhibited work at The Green Gallery, the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee, and The Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design. As well as the La Esquina Gallery, Crossroads Gallery, and Dolphin Gallery in Kansas City, and the Transformer Gallery in Washington DC. She has lectured on public art and performance at The Chicago Art Institute, MIAD and UWM.

Poetry and a Picnic

When words reach beyond their given definition they become poetry. Like visual art, poetry allows audiences to extract significance from the spaces between what is said in order to discover what is meant. In this way, the practice and consumption of poetry is important to defining language by deconstructing it in its simplest and most complex forms. Please join us at nAbr gallery on the grounds of the Lynden Sculpture Garden for Poetry and a Picnic, July 31 from 6-7:30pm, to honor poetry and the way it makes space for an uncertainty about what exists between definitions.

Poetry submissions will be juried by Karl Saffran. Please send up to three of your poems for consideration. If your submission is accepted, you will receive free admission to the sculpture garden that day and will be expected to read during the event. Please send all submissions to nAbrgallery@gmail.com no later than July 29, 2013.