VAR GALLERY
ON 2ND STREET
BRIDGE WORK 08
Olivia Elaine Lorber
Reagan Mulvey
Eduardo Zavala
RECEPTION JULY 15 2022 | 5PM-9PM
At Var Gallery on 2nd
Sept 30 - Nov 19
Olivia Elaine Lorber is an artist from Baltimore living and working in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She received her BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design in 2022, majoring in New Studio Practice with a minor in Art History. Olivia is currently part of a year-long residency, Plum Blossom Initiative // Bridge Work 08. She was awarded 1st place in the Grilled Cheese Grant earlier this year, which will result in her upcoming solo show in the spring of 2023. Olivia has exhibited her paintings at Var Gallery; Between Two Galleries; UWM’s Union Art Gallery, and local Milwaukee publications like UWM’s Furrow Mag and artist-run magazines. Olivia’s figure paintings combine representational and abstract stylistic approaches using acrylic paint occasionally embellished with other media. Her studio practice revolves around the body, womanhood, and physical and mental health issues.
Reagan Mulvey is an artist working in Milwaukee, WI. She received her BFA from
the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design (Milwaukee). Mulvey has exhibited at Between Two Galleries (Milwaukee), New Visions Gallery (Marshfield), and The Alice Wilds (Milwaukee). Working with Bernard Art Studio LLC and James Barany Studios LLC, she has painted murals across Wisconsin. She has recently completed an extension of Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project in collaboration with Sculpture Milwaukee. Currently she is preparing to show her work in the eighth round of Plum Blossom Initiative’s Bridge Work program.
Eduardo Zavala (they/he) is a nonbinary multidisciplinary artist based in Milwaukee, WI whose work focuses on lens-based media, video and live performance, and installation work. Zavala received their BFA in New Studio Practice: Fine Arts at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design in 2022. They create queer realities where they can reshape the binaries within their own context by using natural and constructed spaces and materials. Utilizing installation design, they can create spaces where they exist free from the constraints of the gender binaries. They are currently an artist in residence for 2022/23 Bridge Work Cycle 08.
VAR GALLERY
ON 5TH STREET
SEPT 17 - NOV 20
PARADISO
ADAM STONER
RECEPTION SEPT 17 6 - 9 PM
Var Gallery is pleased to announce Paradiso, works by Adam Stoner at Var’s 5th Street location.
The images in this body of work have grown out of a fascination with architecture’s penchant to imitate and reinforce our deepest origin stories. One part the book of Genesis and one part Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, paradiso is an exhibition filled with walled gardens, obsessive miniatures, and cities etched in stone. Drawing on the empty architecture of the Romanesque and the barren cityscapes of Giorgio de Chirico, these places speak a wordless language of entrances and exits, alleyways and courtyards.
This exhibition is also the premiere of new sand animations. In this type of stop motion video, a camera is suspended over a light table while the artist uses their fingers, brushes, or knives to sculpt a drawing in layers of sand. Once the drawing is satisfactory, it can be manipulated repeatedly to create a sequence; and with each successive photograph, the medium appears to move and breathe.
Adam Stoner (b. 1989) received his Master of Fine Arts in Intermedia Studies from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee in 2019, and his BA in Studio Art and Theater from Williams College in 2011. Stoner makes paintings, drawings, and video installations that visualize the intimate connections between architecture and our memories. How are we mutually inhabited by the very places we inhabit? If we build structures, do they also build us? Stoner is the recipient of UWM’s Chancellor’s Graduate Student Award, Layton Fellowship, and Williams College’s Gilbert W. Gabriel Prize in Theater. Originally trained in scenic design, Adam’s research frequently explores the language of space, the latent agency of materials, and the architectures—visible or invisible— which resonate endlessly in our daydreams. Adam lives and works in Milwaukee; he teaches drawing at UWM’s Peck School of the Arts.