LaNia Sproles: King for a Day
Margaret Muza: On Reflection
Mark Ottens: Slowcoach
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January 17 through March 15, 2025
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Gallery Talk
Margaret Muza: 1 p.m. Saturday, February 8. Free
LaNia Sproles
Chicago-based artist LaNia Sproles is known for contemplative and saucy explorations of self-perception, female empowerment, racial and sexual dynamics — seen through queer and feminist perspectives.
Sproles' practice involves drawing, painting, printmaking, and collage. For their first solo exhibition at Portrait Society titled "King for a Day," they have created several new bodies of work anchored by a series small-scale, expressively rendered portraits of friends. Other more elaborate figurative works are staged in imaginary landscapes, or harken to the pictorial language of Baroque painter Caravaggio. Fascinated by the terms of kinship, Sproles’ expands the range of emotional resonance within these richly detailed compositions that are infused with fantasy, sexual assertiveness, power, femininity, and carnal cravings. "There is mischief in this work," Sproles says.
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​Sproles earned a BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design in 2017. They have exhibited with Elijah Wheat Showroom hosted by David Zwirner’s online exhibition space, Platform; Goldfinch Gallery and FLXST Contemporary in Chicago; and Portrait Society Gallery (2019). A Mary L. Nohl fellow in 2019, Sproles has done projects with the Lynden Sculpture Garden, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, and curated an exhibition at a NADA art fair in partnership with Milwaukee’s Green Gallery.
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Margaret Muza
A second solo project titled “On Reflection” presents work by Milwaukee based photographer Margaret Muza. When the exhibition opens, one room of the gallery will appear nearly empty with 15 white shelves lining the walls. One completed ambrotype portrait will be displayed along with 15 blank antique 20 x 16 inch tinted glass plates. Throughout the two month run of the show, Muza will offer portrait commissions executed with a large box camera that prints directly on the glass plates. After she photographs participating individuals, their portraits will be added to the room. The show will conclude with a party on March 15 bringing participants and the public together.
Muza's studio and home is in a remodeled church in South Milwaukee. Anyone who commissions a portrait as part of this project will go there to be photographed. She has been experimenting with tin type photography and other historic processesses for ten years. Muza recently completed a yearlong fellowship through Gener8tor Art. She was also the Pfister Hotel's artist-in-residence in 2017. This is the first time PSG has presented her work.
The "On Reflection" ambrotype portraits are priced at $500 each and can be reserved by contacting the gallery at portraitsocietygallery@gmail.com
LaNia Sproles, ”Once made out of Dirt”, 2024. Collage mixed media, 30 x 22 inches
Margaret Muza, self portrait, 2024. Ambrotype, 20 x 16 inches
Mark Ottens
Mark Ottens earned his BFA from the School of Art Institute of Chicago in 1992. While at SAIC he would wander area museums and neighborhoods of Chicago, decoding the vibrant street life and histories into image based paintings. Ottens completed his MFA in 1995 at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) where his focus shifted to a more conceptual, abstract process.
As Ottens' became increasingly focused on elements of color, pattern and abstraction, his paintings became more painstakingly intricate. The work Ottens now produces explores richly layered patterns that build into jewel like paintings. Even at a small scale, these works suggest infinite, expansive cosmic fields that transport the viewer into dazzling fields of freedom and wonder. Recently, he has also been working back into his earlier figurative compositions, adding insertions of pattern and new surface layers.
Portrait Society Gallery has previously presented Ottens' work in "Drawn Out," a group exhibition in 2017, and "Linger On," a solo exhibition in 2019.
One of his professors from SAIC, Dan Devening, (who now runs Devening Projects in Chicago), recently did a studio visit and commented: "Although his earlier work was tinged with an irreverent Pop/Surrealist vibe, the more recent pieces are even more chromatically charged, psychedelic and richly patterned. They might bring to mind the paintings James Sienna or beautiful Missoni textiles. In a world saturated with digitally produced patterns and visual systems, it’s remarkable to come upon an artist who is absolutely committed to the necessity of producing his mind-boggling paintings by hand with pigment and brush. Most of the work is acrylic on panel or paper, although some recent sculptures incorporate objects made by his grandfather who was responsible for the displays for a department store in Sheboygan."
