Dara Larson and Max Yela

Dara Larson & Max Yela

"Chandelier" and "Screen"

The artists of the Look Here! Project have explored, analyzed, and researched digital and physical research objects preserved in the UWM Libraries, and transformed their understandings of these materials into original, expressive work. While the artists responded to the resources they encountered at the Library, Dara Larson, professor of art at Alverno College, and Max Yela, head of Special Collections at the UWM Libraries, responded to the choices being made by these artists, and the transformative experience that is a part of their process, by making installations of handmade paper that incorporate many of the images each artist selected for this project.

Larson and Yela are both interested in transformations, communication systems, and material meanings. Larson's work often focuses on the built environment and the urbanized human's relationship to nature and the environment. Yela's work centers on deconstructions and re-imaginations of media objects as a way of revealing their effects on the human condition. For this exhibition, Larson and Yela selected handmade paper as a substrate for its material metaphor of transformation. The Look Here! artists reformulate research material into original works of art; paper is a reformulation of plant and fiber-based material into an entirely new form that has its own expression and material meaning. Combined with imagery utilized by the artists in this show, Larson's and Yela's paper installations reflect the transformative research process that is highlighted by the Look Here! Project.

Larson and Yela formed their papers using cotton and abaca fibers, along with plant materials harvested from the grounds of the Villa Terrace Museum. Selected imagery used by the artists in this show were made into stencils to create watermarks and paper-pulp prints. Some of the imagery is evident on the surface of the paper, while others are only revealed through illumination. "Chandelier" cascades down the spiral staircase and is illuminated from within at the museum's entrance.  "Screen" is a constructed surface in the museum's library, on which is projected digital imagery from UWM's collections. The external illumination reveals the imagery embedded within the panels of the screen. Each is a metaphoric statement on the illumination of artistic research.

Dara Larson and Max Yela are deeply grateful to Cecilia Castro and Alison Newman for their able assistance on this project.