These Walls are a Stage: Colleen Keihm & Andrea Wilmsen

 

We are thrilled to announce the opening of a new exhibition by Chicago photographers Colleen Keihm and Andrea Wilmsen entitled, These Walls are a Stage, which runs February 3 – March 18, 2023 at The Alice Wilds. This will be their first exhibition in our space and both artists will be in attendance for an exhibition opening on Friday, February 3rd from 5-8PM. The following text has been written for the artists by Jennifer Murray, an artist, educator, and curator who lives and works in Chicago. We hope to see you all soon!

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These Walls Are a Stage asks us to reconsider how we see and understand a photograph – how its very nature, and even purpose, can be questioned. Our day-to-day experiences are filled with photographs – advertisements, social media posts, and family and friends sharing their meals. But photography is not a truthful medium — no more so than painting or drawing. The photograph is always a performer, and the photographer is always the director. Furthermore, photography occupies a liminal space between three dimensions and two. A printed photograph is at once a flat piece of paper, and one that signifies depth, always working hard to create the illusion of three-dimensional space. The language we use to differentiate areas within a photograph further support this performance as we remark upon the foreground, middle ground, or background of an image – when really, it’s still a flat piece of paper or screen that we are looking at.
 
In These Walls Are a Stage, Colleen Keihm and Andrea Wilmsen present the viewer with images that perform in all the ways we expect from a photograph –- images that describe and attribute, codify, and index in the language of photography. But their compositions reflect a tension within the dynamics of the photographic language that leave us reconsidering what we thought we knew. Using valued spaces as subjects, both artists are critical of commemoration – the ritualized acknowledgment of history — and present bodies of work that disorient and question the social contract we have with photography and space, particularly within the history of art. Through their images, our physical experience of space is disrupted, and we must question the power systems at play in these reimaged spaces.
 
Colleen Keihm creates collages of gallery and museum spaces from art history books and auction catalogs. Using a combination of scanning, printing, tearing, and rephotographing she builds compositions that interrogate the discursive spaces of art history. Conflating the 2D and 3D aspects of the photograph she disorients our expectations of space and scale asking us to reconsider the value placed on these cultured spaces and the artists found therein. Gleaning source material that is decidedly documentation based –- art history texts, photographs of well-known artists’ works, and installation images from white cube gallery spaces — she upends our expectations by collaging them into fabricated, deconstructed spaces calling into question the veracity of the photograph and the validity of our cultural histories. By working on a smaller scale, Keihm asks us to approach and get close to her compositions where we have a more intimate experience parsing out the complexities she creates.
 
Andrea Wilmsen’s series B.ODE examines the museum as place, a site of power and authority. Instead of documenting the majestic within the museum, Wilmsen’s photographs of the Bode Museum in Berlin reveal architectural corners, edges, and other transitional spaces that recall the museum’s history. As opposed to focusing on the objects collected in the museum, her choice of subject asks us to reconsider valued space and the authority we assign to a culturally loaded building like an art museum. Much like a cathedral, a museum’s reliance on size, scale, and aggrandized architectural elements succeeds in establishing it as a site of authority. Yet Wilmsen’s subtle compositions force us to contend with the predictability of the building itself. Her photography leans on the 2D aspects of the photograph to compartmentalize the grandiose space of the museum into minimalist fragments, breaking down the illusions of 3D the photograph could provide.
 
-Jennifer Murray
 

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Colleen Keihm
Colleen Keihm is a photographer based in Chicago, IL. Keihm received her MFA at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a BA in Photography at Drexel University. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, FLXST Contemporary, Flatland, Roman Susan, Gallery 400, and Tiger Strikes Asteroid in Chicago. She has been an artist in residence at Hatch Projects within the Chicago Artist Coalition, Institut fur alles Mogliche in Berlin, Germany, and Studio 3325 in Chicago. Her work is a part of the photography collection at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, and she is a proud member of the Midwest Photographers Project. Keihm is an educator at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the Executive Director of LATITUDE.

Andrea Wilmsen
Andrea Wilmsen is a German photographer, living in Berlin and Chicago. Wilmsen studied communication science and deepened her studies with Eva Bertram at Neue Schule für Fotografie in Berlin, Germany, and with Valérie Jouve within a grant from the University of Fine Arts in Salzburg, Austria. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, a.o. Sprengel Museum Hanover (2022/23), Chicago Architecture Biennial (2021), European Month of Photography (2020), Le Festival Voices Off des Recontres d´Arles (Fotohaus Paris-Berlin, 2019), Goethe Institute Los Angeles and Chicago, Villa Aurora in Pacific Palisades, and is featured in art and architecture magazines. Wilmsen´s work can be found amongst other in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, within the Midwest Photographers Project.