All Exhibitions

Snow Globe by Leif Larson

Jan 17–Apr 13, 2025

The Vitrine

Winter Where Winter Works: Art of Solitude and Contemplation

The sun slowly dips toward the horizon and the days shorten. Indian Summer gives way to breezy, brisk days anticipating what will be another long cold winter for folks in the Upper Midwest. The hardy stock from the Dakotas, Minnesota, and Wisconsin will prepare for the event by preserving food and slowing down in a manner not dissimilar from the regional fauna that sinks into hibernation. That Winter journey begins with a bracing defiance that knows that solitude, restraint, and preparation will be the best strategies for the hope of future fruits. The art world in the North manifests this spirit in a particularly wonderful and idiosyncratic manner. Winter Where Winter Works: Art of Solitude and Contemplation showcases art that reflects the spirit of that specific type of winter labor. Jason Vaughn’s ghostly deer stands function as both a vision of and a metaphor for, isolation and focus. Danielle Winger’s paintings capture the creaky quiet of winter across the “dark fields of the Republic” as Nick Carraway reflected in Gatsby. Her paintings freeze the haunting solitude of those fields in place. Leif Larson’s snow globe installation in the Vitrine will place the viewer into a similar space as they admire his playful and colorful painting. It was once remarked that the culture around ice fishing might be the greatest performance artform the Northern Midwest ever created, and the work in the Closet will take viewers into the depths of that bizarre ecosystem as it springs to life every year on Lake Winnebago. Saint Kate’s artist-in-residence Megan Woodard Johnson, for her part, considers the potential that the chilly interlude might bring to the act of creativity in a series of works about how private creativity pushes up against social interconnectedness.


Snow Globe
By Leif Larson

Oshkosh-based painter Leif Larson’s work reflects the art and history of its place of creation. His folk-visionary paintings capture the spirit of the local landscape from a birds-eye perspective–a vantage that evokes a timeless expansiveness particular to seeing the world from above. Like other great Wisconsin landscape magicians, such as Charles Munch and John Wilde, Larsen’s work seems as touched by nature’s spirit as nature is touched by his active paintbrush. The symbiosis between the land and the art is enchanted and uncanny. Like all of Larsen’s work, the work in Snow Globe evokes the vastness and solitude of that overarching point-of-view on the world. The same feeling one gets when they peer into a snow globe: the world becoming tiny and profoundly large all at once; inside and outside simultaneously. In this installation. Larsen’s painting of an actual snow globe becomes the subject of a kind of diorama-like construction. A snow globe inside a snow globe. Nested realities and layers of shimmering magic, all piling up like flakes of snow falling gently across the rolling moraines of central Wisconsin.

Since graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh in 2005, Leif Larson has been creating, showing, and selling his artwork across the United States. He’s shown in galleries, museums, universities, and public buildings all over Wisconsin, and galleries and public buildings in New York, Northern and Southern California, Illinois, and Arkansas. His acrylic paintings, drawings, watercolors, and murals deal with many different subjects involving human and animal behavior, human-made objects and spaces, nature, light, and color relationships. His work is represented by The Art Collective in Rodgers, AR., and Real Tinsel Gallery in Milwaukee, WI

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