OS Projects presents its own pristine devices, a solo exhibition of photographs by Milwaukee artist Lois Bielefeld. The show opens August 10 and continues through October 12. The gallery will host a reception for the artist on Saturday, August 10, from 1 – 3 pm. Bielefeld will also give an artist talk at the gallery on September 28 at 2 pm.

Through a creative practice that comprises several disciplines, Lois Bielefeld strives to make sense of the collisions that take place on a daily basis within the self, between the self and others, and between the self and the world. The artist’s methodically researched projects are an eloquent expression of the human impulse to ascribe meaning to the messiness of existence and to create order from complexity while asserting a claim for difference.

In the OS Projects exhibition, Bielefeld focuses on freeway islands, areas of land designed to capture excess precipitation and vehicle pollution. Over time, and unintentionally, these interstitial spaces have become complex mini habitats encircled by asphalt and rushing traffic.

By photographing and aestheticizing freeway islands from the West Coast to Wisconsin, Bielefeld questions our assumptions and romanticized notions of wilderness as untouched or uninhabited places. The project aligns with environmental historian William Cronon’s argument that wilderness is a product of civilization rather than something that stands apart from humans.

Just as Cronon challenges us to find wilderness in our backyards, abandoned lots and local parks, Bielefeld encourages us to do the same with the inconspicuous patches of land we pass every day as we navigate a highway system so extensive it could encircle the world twice.

About the Artist

Lois Bielefeld is a queer series-based artist working in photography, audio, video and performance. Their work continually asks what links routine and ritual to the formation of identity, personhood and the development of meaning-making. Their work is in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York City, the Museum of Wisconsin Art, Saint Kate Arts Hotel, the Warehouse Museum and the Racine Art Museum. Bielefeld has shown at The International Center of Photography in New York City, The National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC, de

Young Museum in San Francisco, The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago and Dom Wein in Vienna. Bielefeld is represented by Portrait Society Gallery in Milwaukee.

Image: Lois Bielefeld, Ramp 175N, 46th Street. Milwaukee, WI, 2019, Archival pigment print