Emerging artists, established artists and ‘Silver Pixels’

Scroll through anyone’s Facebook feed and in that digital tunnel you experience a curated and created picture of life.

By now, we take this for granted as a form of reality, filtered through cameras and virtual dialogue, poured into pixels that narrow the world to the width of a screen.

Maybe that is why Joseph Mougel’s photographs are so jarring. They look like 19th-century landscape studies, the sort that came as explorers and photographers moved through what would become the western United States.

Look more closely and see the fingerprints of Google Earth with directives to “Click to go.” Digital glitches mar the landscape, revealing they are a peculiar sort of truth, but not really “real,” as though the photographer was there on the spot with camera in hand.

Mougel creates his composite images through an ambrotype print process, but the ultimate pictorial sources are satellites and digital captures.

Mougel’s installation, “Silver Pixels,” is part of The Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists 2016 exhibition.

A jury of art professionals from outside the community visit studios of artists who have applied for consideration. Ultimately, two are selected for $20,000 awards in the Established Artist category, and three in the Emerging Artist category with $10,000 grants.

The exhibition, currently on view at the Haggerty Museum of Art, showcases new and recent work by the recipients of last year’s awards.

The exhibition is always a matter of happenstance, as artists are not selected with the design of a cohesive exhibition in mind.

In this year’s case, however, the works of all five recipients complement one another well. Each is on a shared but varied wavelength in a search and dissection of truth.

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In the Established Artist category, Mougel is joined by video artist Jesse McLean. Working with collages of footage, computer images and sound, McLean teases our perceptual realities. As human beings, we invariably slip into the world from a peculiar vantage point. This often means anthropomorphizing the nonhuman world, whether inanimate computers or breathing beings like animals, as McLean explores in “See a Dog, Hear a Dog.”

The perils and promises of the virtual world are prodded in “Wherever You Go, There We Are,” as video of colorized postcards is joined by a coolly dispassionate voice-over of spam emails, discussing all manners of scams and paranoid silliness.

“Climbing” is an endless loop of mountainous peaks scrolling continuously downward while the icon of a hand grabs its way upward, endlessly. The infinite nature of this work and the never successful summiting of peaks seems like a metaphor for the endless rabbit hole of the internet.

The three Emerging Artists also touch on notions of truth. Two create with deeply personal questions on the nature of identity. Brooke Thiele’s “The Fall to a Sea Called Home” is a compact installation with a hanbok, a traditional Korean dress, as its centerpiece. Around this, an audio narrative by Thiele tells of her adoption as a baby from her native Korea, and growing up with a family in Green Bay.

Thiele is a talented storyteller, relaying with poignancy and humor tales about receiving an Asian Raggedy Ann doll and her short-lived high school basketball career. The installation unfolds with changes in light and sound, the inclusion of the drumbeat and singing of a traditional Korean musical story called pansori.

Growing up in between cultures also unfolds in Rose Curley’s epic “The Coloring Book.” Conceived as a graphic memoir, illustrations, notes, text, and dialogue are part of Curley’s description of being of Nigerian and European descent, and raised in a Sicilian-American Irish Catholic family. The array of photographs, objects and ephemera from childhood and daily life are joined by stacks of books related to Curley’s interests and powerful questions about identity. Her array of objects, drawings, and words addresses complex conditions and experiences regarding race, heritage, adoption and the African-American experience in America.

While Thiele and Curley are direct in terms of their narratives, Robin Jebavy’s large, flickering paintings are both still lifes and prisms. Her compositions seem to record stacks of antique glass, with elaborate patterns and textures piled into repeating forms and shapes. They are dizzying and beautifully disconcerting. Even in Jebavy’s arrays of color and representations of glass, it is impossible to find the end, a sense of certainty as everything is in flux.

If there is a truth that threads among the work of these artists, it is that there is always fluidity in what we see and understand. Attentiveness and awareness are required, not only for this exhibition, but also for the world around us.

On exhibit

The Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists 2016 continues through Sept. 17 at Marquette University’s Haggerty Museum of Art, 530 N. 13th St., Milwaukee.

Haggerty Museum of Art

Joseph Mougel: “Silver Pixels” Gallery Talk at 6 p.m. Aug. 10

Photographer and multi-media artist Joseph Mougel will discuss techniques for making the ambrotypes he shows in the Nohl Fellowship exhibition, giving insight into this analog and digital hybrid. An informal tour of the exhibition will follow the presentation.