Santiago Cucullu has made a mess of cherry-red paint and adhesive tape at the Green Gallery.
For the main work in his exhibition, Cucullu stretched, cut and carved masking tape into the shape of a metal fence, carefully and laboriously installed it as a large, representational "space" across two walls and then lobbed several dozen paint-filled balloons at the whole thing before peeling away the tape.
The result is a fence-shaped negative space that we can see clearly from across the street. We easily recognize the fence posts, walls and a frenzy of heated activity that could be read as graffiti, spillage or blood. The installation, 28 feet across and 10 feet high, is a mash-up of vandalism and high art, drawing and installation, representation and abstraction.
And when we learn this piece is titled "The Fence Around the Ladies' Jail," it becomes something else entirely. It piques our curiosity further, lending weight to a potential story without actually giving too much away. This process of turning unknown images into something vaguely known and potent is at the heart of this Milwaukee artist's practice. For his startling, site-specific works, he combines carefully refined forms with found images, his own memories, a vivid imagination, a bit of improvisational boldness and a dark humor.
"I try to come up with ways of portraying things I have seen, and make a connection to the emotions I may feel, through my own distorted sense of memory, while still hopefully offering something up to a faceless audience," says Cucullu.
For this work, Cucullu depicts a fence he passes on his treks across Milwaukee. After a bit of research, he found out about the correctional facility inside and began conjuring up possibilities. He constructs his art first by snapping photos on his meanderings and later as stories in his head. Then he starts to envision the actual work and begins to construct it, which takes visual twists and turns as he explores the imagery.
"In looking," says Cucullu, "I wonder if there is any space for beauty in... badly camouflaged closed-circuit TVs or a barricade that is unmanned and long forgotten."
He asks if there is "any sort of cosmic interference in bleak and often mundane situations."
No, even the most astute viewer won't know that Cucullu's friend Christina - murdered by someone named Castleneck - made him obsess over an Irish song he associates with the women's jail or how and if that's translated into the work.
And it might take onlookers some time, as it did for me, to see the gray abstraction in "Wyannie Look-Alike Punk Girl Dancing at The Outhouse," an 8-by-8 foot vinyl cutout artwork near the gallery door, as a portrait of a girl Cucullu recently met and photographed dancing, too. The girl reminded Cucullu of an old friend, which is what sparked the photography.
Still, these personalized touches inform how Cucullu makes things. Even without knowing what he knows, without knowing what's in his head, we feel the urgency in his work, in the space between the formalism and manic freneticism.
"It's a double-edged sword mining my memory with the present, and the solution is to make new memories" as art, he says.
Christiane Grauert, Santiago's partner and an artist herself, says Cucullu's piece makes her think how a reactive force can uncover elements that lie hidden until they are disturbed. It's as if the masked-out fence had always been present on the gallery wall, and it was Cucullu's intrusion that made it visible.
The traditions of radical protest through paint bombs are also recalled by the work, and the installation seems to question in a general way the control imposed by fences, prisons and even the white walls of the gallery.
"The Outhouse," the title of the show, references not only the obvious, the makeshift bathroom, but also a bar where Cucullu initiated some of the stories in his work and the acts of resistance that Cucullu celebrates and makes visible.
In addition to the two works I've mentioned, "615 West Keefe Ave in Spring," a silk screen of his fence on cardboard, and "Two-Sided Remnant Painting No. 1," a collage of the tape that had been splattered with red paint, are also on view. For a special treat, ask to see Cucullu's watercolors and his artist book behind the counter, both of which accomplish similar narratives but in a less abstract way.
This is a richly layered exhibition that creates immediate tension through its compositional play across space. And it only deepens as we work our way through Cucullu's process-based considerations. Both Cucullu's "The Outhouse" and Anicka Yi's "Excuse Me, Your Necklace Is Leaking" - also worth a visit - are up through June 12 at the Green Gallery, 1500 N. Farwell Ave.
Nathaniel Stern is an experimental installation and video artist, an assistant professor of art at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a regular contributor to the Art City blog: jsonline.com/artcity.