For Nicole Rodriguez, Sara Woldt and Lynette Davis, curating an exhibit at the Wisconsin Student Union was an insightful venture. It was also a painful one.
“We both bled on matting utensils… and thank goodness not on the artwork,” Woldt exclaimed as she continued to mat the artworks to be presented in “Selections from the Wisconsin Union Art Collection” just hours before the collection’s opening reception on Aug. 1.
Over the past few weeks, Woldt and Rodriguez, along with her boyfriend, had spent over 20 hours simply matting, framing and wiring the 15 or more works now exhibited in Memorial Union’s Lakefront on Langdon.
Not such an unusual task for gallery assistants. But what makes this task so unique — and a labor of love for Rodriguez, Woldt and Davis — is that these works were personally selected by each of the assistants. This is a first for the Wisconsin Union, as it has never — in the 20 to 30 exhibits it displays each year — hosted an exhibition curated solely by gallery assistants.
However, this isn’t the only first to arise from this exhibition. “Selections from the Wisconsin Union Art Collection” is also distinguished from other Union installations because each of the works displayed has never before been exhibited, with some works in the collection since the 1960s.
This project was a months-long process for the three girls, requiring them to acquire a completely new matting cutter which also devoured about half of their year budget. Still, selecting the topic and works to display was easy.
“I came in one night, stayed until close. … I picked the tranny first,” Rodriguez, an art history major, said, referencing a work entitled “Me Behind a Signboard as a Woman-Child.” This work is just one of five works intended to indicate Rodriguez’s personal investigation of transfiguration and the blurring of identity.
“That dichotomy about gender was really interesting,” Rodriguez said. “Part of it was I like it and I want to see how much further it can go framed.”
For Woldt, an art history and French major, her seven works — three were part of a series — represented the influences of space and materials on a person’s identity and the presence of their identity on those objects. One photograph depicts a dimly lit room that’s empty save for a mattress pathetically pushed up against a wall.
“This eerily soiled mattress. … It all kind of plays into a narrative,” Woldt said, emphasizing the photo’s psychological nature.
Davis, an art major who was not present at the time of the interview, explores the organic forms of the human identity in her five pieces. Two of her works feature repeating patterns that represent the human being on a cellular level, while the fabric the patterns are printed on further emphasizes the organic nature of the work.
Although the three assistants developed their themes based on their individual aesthetic preference, the three separate “collections” combine to create a surprisingly cohesive collection. All of the works except for one are prints, and the graphic nature of a few of the works in each girl’s selections ties the entire collection together.
Rodriguez and Woldt said they are already making plans to curate two exhibits next summer, though they haven’t quite decided on the projects’ themes yet. However, the girls have much to choose from, as the Union Art collection currently holds approximately 70 to 80 works — both framed and unframed — that have never been seen, but soon may be, in a gallery-like setting.
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“Selections from the Wisconsin Union Art Collection” will be displayed in Lakefront on Langdon in the Wisconsin Student Union until Sept. 16.
