Exhibitions on view through June 2015
Opening: August 1–3, 2014
Poor Farm
E6325 County Highway BB
Manawa, WI 54949
The Poor Farm hosts year-long exhibitions at the former Waupaca County Poor Farm (built 1876) in rural Little Wolf, Wisconsin. The first weekend in August kicks off exhibitions with an annual Great Poor Farm Experiment.
Henrik Plenge Jakobsen’s exhibition titled Divorce will span two large galleries with sculptures and videos that draw from the aesthetics of European and African folk traditions. These evoke scenery between animistic rituals and ludicrous gestures.
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung’s Packing My Library 2014–2015 evokes Walter Benjamin’s “For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order?” For the next year Zuckerman-Hartung’s library will reside at Poor Farm.
A project by Grennan and Sperandio, The Cargo Space is a mobile artist residency built into a converted diesel transit bus. Bad at Sports, the art world’s favorite talkers, will be “rocking Waupaca County with the freshest art chatter this side of the great lakes.”
Open Sessions at The Drawing Center is a two-year platform open to artists working in a variety of disciplines and offering exhibition opportunities at TDC and other venues. Over the next two years a rotating selection of work by Open Session artists will be presented at Poor Farm.
Assaf Evron’s photographic installation is based on infrared kinect sensor light. Evron’s purple images offer a perceptual visual experience and a conceptual engagement into the history of painting, metaphors of vision, and the optical apparatus.
Summer School is an informal gathering of students, faculty and artists exploring experimental forms of dialog and education. It resides within the opening weekend of the Great Poor Farm Experiment each year.
Amikam Toren will have a ‘remote composition’ built on site from his ongoing “Stacks” series. The Poor Farm Stack will be a provisional cardboard-box sculpture derived from standard shipping symbols.
Abigail Deville’s accretive installation in the Poor Farm basement, begun in the summer of 2013, will remain on view.
Nelly Agassi will adapt her I’m the One performance that premiered at Tate Modern. Agassi gives away t-shirts printed with the phrase I’m the One in white-on-white, rendering each person who takes one simultaneously a self-aware individual and a member of a subtle collective identity.
Steve Wetzel will screen a video about a wood tick festival in Minnesota where wood ticks are collected and raced as part of an annual social performance in the heart of the nation’s once-thriving iron ore industry. A related installation will comment on the Poor Farm’s existence as a sometimes lonely, sometimes socially burgeoning locale, and the passage of real time in representational space.
John Riepenhoff and Richard Galling will be hosting their annual ”Lazy River, Keep Showing Me Your Rafts,” a raft building competition and float down the Little Wolf River.
Lifetime Achievement is a pedagogical platform based in Milwaukee, WI. Programing at the Poor Farm will include: an obstacle-course group show, poetry reading/campfire-building workshop, and an outdoor screening by Microlights, a neighborhood cinema based in Milwaukee.
Sara Caron will operate Poor Store out of a canvas tent. It will sell all the essentials for a weekend of Poor Farm camping: beer, rain ponchos, snacks, inner tubes, fishing bait etc.
Levi Budd and Maddie Reyna will collaborate in a site-specific, permanent intervention wherein a text will be carved into a tree on the site of The Poor Farm.
Lise Haller Baggesen will preview her book Mothernism, due for release in October. Advance copies will be available.
Danish writer Jacob Lillemose is the 2014 Poor Farm resident critic and Milwaukee-based artist and writer Nicholas Frank is resident curator.
