“Love in the Chroma Zone” includes paintings, drawings and sculptures exploring the accelerating transformation of ideas about the spectrum of gender expression and sexuality. The exhibition will run through Friday, April 1st.
The Annette & Dale Schuh Visiting Artist Endowment supports an annual visit of a visual artist of a significant stature to UW-Whitewater. It offers a transformative visual arts experience to students in the Department of Art and Design. Past artists include Kiki Smith, Nick Cave and Stefan Sagmeister.
“Iz, one of our twins, came out to us as non-binary a few years ago. Iz, their siblings and friends have been educating us on their generation’s concepts of gender identity and sexuality. We discovered that a couple dozen sets of parents in our community were on a similar learning trajectory. Then sculptor Tree Lind at the University of Wisconsin recommended a book which referred to a recent study from the UK in which forty nine percent of participants 18-25 years old considered themselves neither gay nor straight, but somewhere in between.
I am a +60 cis-gendered straight white man. “Love in the Chroma Zone” documents my sometimes clumsy attempt to process these ideas through visualization. The project has created some enlightening conversations and some controversy. Some people have boycotted the project.
Annette Schuh’s interaction with artists Wayne Thiebaud, Roy Lichtenstein and William T. Wiley at the University of Wisconsin changed her life. As the Annette and Dale Schuh Visiting Artist, I worked with art and design faculty and students to finish pieces created over the last year.
“Love in the Chroma Zone” extrapolates upon artwork from the last 25 years. It is founded upon anthropomorphized sex chromosomes originally conceived as props for Rolling Stones set designs, later refined for a nightclub in Hamburg’s St. Pauli red-light district and then expanded upon for a hotel owned by Bill Marriott overlooking Times Square.
The work in the exhibition includes six larger than life sculptures, 28 sculptures at the scale of the Barbie and Ken dolls my sister and daughters played with and 100 images in watercolor, latex paint, felt and pencil.
“So immensely proud of my dad for the work he has done to learn about gender expansiveness. This show, “Love in the Chroma Zone” was so beautifully executed as well as touching and healing with regards to our relationship since coming out to him about four years ago. I never thought we’d get to this place….”
- Iz Mozer, Artist
It was great working with sculptor Tree Lind and her students. We had inspiring conversations, long and playful workdays reinforcing and then “dressing” the larger-than-life anthropomorphized XX and XY armatures in their pink, blue and purple clothes/skins. The ideas were amplified when we teamed up to compose the 28 Barbie + Ken scale sculptures in varied groupings to dig a little deeper into some of the ideas…”
Jordan Mozer
