December 2, 2015 at 4:38 p.m.
Rhinelander Stovewood Arts group show: A Traveler's Compendium of Common Beauty
Rhinelander Stovewood Arts group show: A Traveler's Compendium of Common Beauty
At the end of a winding driveway with no mailbox, this unconventional art show will take place in the home of photographer Matthew Rethaber. The cedar log house has a handmade feel, and Rethaber explained, "We wanted it to be a more intimate setting. We are emerging artists, and many of us do not have a gallery, so we wanted to open up a less formal show in our own home."
Rethaber invited a select group of artists with whom he's collaborated, including Rhinelander local Jaron Childs and fellow traveling companions Perre Kerch and Brianna Waltman. Rethaber and Kerch have worked together for the past 10 years, traveling miles across country in pursuit of new experiences.
"In a way it reminds me of how musicians used to be traveling and making work on the road," Rethaber said. "I think art needs that, to be renewed and refreshed that way, as opposed to making something excusively in a studio. Good art is supposed to be from life itself, so that's what we're trying to portray."
Kerch and Waltman are two emerging watercolor painters who make work finding stillness in a life of wandering, the release states. In addition to roaming throughout Wisconsin, the couple has lived in Mississippi, New Orleans, Milwaukee, New Mexico, and now Duluth, Minn. The pair draws inspiration from a life spent working and sleeping outdoors. Kerch seems to treat painting as a form of meditation, and as a tool for connecting back to the natural world. As he writes in describing his and Waltman's process, "Painting allows us not only an escape from the structured world as much as a way to re assemble our souls. By attempting to mimic the natural world in a painting, we are offered every time the opportunity to participate in the choreography always present in nature."
One of Kerch and Waltman's recent shows took place on the banks the Milwaukee River, with paintings clipped to trees.
Childs is an established artist transplanted to Rhinelander from Minneapolis, Minn. Childs brings a kind of hybrid, drawing the best from painting and photography, the release states. Many of his paintings reflect the decisiveness of a fleeting moment captured on canvas.
His compositions are rarely wide angle, resulting in an intimate, close-up view that reveals the subject as the eye would see it. Childs' paintings reflect lived experiences and family life in a way that's similar to photographers like Bill Owens and Larry Sultan, but Childs lends a sense of poetry and dreams overlapping reality, the release states.
Rethaber was born in Antigo and has traveled the country with Kerch and Waltman, who have appeared as subjects in his photographic works for the last decade. "Having graduated from the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies (Portland, Maine), Rethaber depicts friends as a kind of human landscape, and he records personal accounts and intimate lives, portraying the private self and documenting a counterculture of the millennial generation," the release states. "The Stovewood Arts show will be a rare chance to see his prints, as he often chooses instead to display his photographs through live slide carousel shows that enhance the images with performance and storytelling."
The show will be held from 4 to 10 p.m. Dec. 11 at 3985 Tre Fiske Rd., Rhinelander.
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