Gallery set up for my Fragments Project at the Heyde Center for the Arts

To go set up for the first official gallery of my life, I drove 481 miles in 24 hours. I loved it.

On Sunday, January 5th of 2014, I drove through a cold bitter day in Wisconsin from De Pere to La Crosse. About a 3 hour drive or so. It was an absolutely beautiful drive. Check out that sunset I got with my iPhone.

I stayed the night at great friend’s house with his lovely wife. Sam and Jenni were kind enough to feed me dinner, dessert, breakfast and even packed me a lunch for the next day when I finished my drive to Chippewa Falls. Jenni is awesome. She packed me a sandwich, an apple, a brownie and a bottle of water.

Monday morning when I awoke to leave from their warm and cozy apartment, it was -20 degrees Fahrenheit outside. That wasn’t even the windchill. Jenni’s car did not start, so Sam and I spent some time trying to get it to start, but sadly it did not happen. My glasses kept freezing up and the only way to get them to thaw was to get back inside the apartment.

We parted ways when Sam went to bring her to work with his truck. I began my day to trek another 100 miles north to the gallery location at the Heyde Center for the Arts, in Chippewa Falls. The building there is absolutely beautiful. Full of old wood work and big windows. My kind of place. I would honestly love to shoot there sometime for a personal project.

I arrived before the other featured artist, Emily Hartman. So when I arrived Ashley Voss, who gave me the gallery opportunity helped me unpack my prints from their boxes. That was when I had to start figuring out how to position them on the walls. Luckily they had all the hardware I needed to hang without having to modify any of the mounts to my pieces.

After a while Emily made her way and started setting up in her gallery room across the hall. She has outstanding portraits she created. I fell in love with her two biggest pieces. One of them is actually a self portrait. It was great to see her thought process as she was hanging all of her work.

I’ll be honest, Emily was able to hang her work a lot faster than I did. I was a bit distracted by the building and photographing the set ups to share with all of you. So once she left I knew I had to make sure I got my room done. The room is pretty big, but I managed to place my work, all 20 pieces, on the walls. 6 were 24×36 canvases while 14 were prints on double mattboard.

I gotta be honest. It feels surreal, scary and pretty damn good to have your own gallery in such a beautiful building. It wil be up for the entire month of January and hopefully new eyes will see my work and find some inspiration in it. I’ll be sure to capture photos of the reception and a recap on my first gallery experience when I go to take down.

The reception for my gallery will be Sunday, January 12, 2014 from 12-2pm.

The gallery will be viewable from now until Thursday morning of January 30th.