Trace @ The Project Lodge

Paul Baker Prindle and his students invited us to show some work in Trace: Wisconsin Portrait Makers at the Project Lodge in Madison. Tom Jones showed his enveloping and lush recent portraits of Native American fur trader era re-enactors (mind-bending), Alan Luft's black-and-white photographs were hung salon style blending portraits examining his German-American ancestry alongside portraits made in the streets of Berlin (gorgeous prints, carefully composed). A giant print by Prindle from his Mementi Mori series portrayed a site where a gay person had been murdered (sad and creepy). Jake Naughton, a journalism student branching out into art, showed color portraits of banal chairs (haunting yet colorful). We showed small inkjet prints from our What We Do Here project hung in a row by small clips. When we were undergrads at UW Madison in the early 1980s, we lived around the corner from the Project Lodge. The space was a womyns food coop then selling brown rice and herb tea. It felt comfortable to be in that place again and reminded us of all the bands, filmmakers, artists, zine people and record stores that used to and still seem to populate the neighborhood.