We started the day at the Milwaukee Art Museum, which is down on the waterfront. The architecture of the building is pretty spectacular. It’s roof is covered with the Burke Brise Soleil installation. This is a set of “wings” that opens when the museum opens. At noon, the wings close, then open again. Finally, they close for the day when the museum closes. They’re also designed to close automatically if the wind gets above 23 MPH.
The museum itself focuses primarily on contemporary art, although there are also European, Folk, and more classical American sections. We mostly stayed with the contemporary sections.
They had a special exhibit of work by James Nares, a British artist who lives and works in New York. He works in various different mediums, including film. We had purchased the audio tour for the museum and we’re both glad we did, as it really helped explain what he was doing and thinking with his art. We both felt we’d have been totally lost without it, but both really quite positive about his work by the end of the exhibit.
The museum was larger than we both wanted to traverse (we were “arted out” after a couple of hours), and we decided to go find some lunch after we finished the contemporary gallery.
Nares does a lot of paintings that are a single continuous movement such as this one. They’re on linen and end up looking almost photographic.
Another in that series
Another series contains movies where he is using a lightbulb in a dark room and filming as he moves the bulb
This is a snapshot of another movie where he’s sandwiched a glass globe between glass in front of the camera lense and it ends up reflecting everything as he walks around.
Most of his paintings require special brushes that he makes himself
This is a tracing of the pattern of a New York sidewalk covered in gold leaf (almost like a brass rubbing from an English church)
The photo gallery below shoes the “wings” in different locations as they close.
The ceiling of the museum with the “wings” above the glass
