Jennifer Bartlett
Milwaukee Art Museum
For most of this decade Jennifer Bartlett has been creating quasi environments, elaborate installations made of large landscape-oriented paintings and freestanding sculptures strategically strewn into the viewers’ space. The pictorial and physical components of her work echo rather than collide; elements depicted on canvas—boats, small houses, fences—are transubstantiated into sculpture, setting up spatial and compositional tensions that elude easy reconciliation. This interest in what constitutes a pictorial field, and how that field can be stretched to a point of crisis or resolution has long