All Exhibitions

The Peace of Wild Things by Danielle Winger

Jan 17–Apr 20, 2025

The Space

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.


The Peace of Wild Things
By Danielle Winger

Danielle Winger’s paintings celebrate the landscape for its own sake; for its forms, colors, and space. But they also look to the land as a metaphor for energies and dimensions that transcend the purely terrestrial and visual.

Mountains become places of ascension, inwardness, and grace. Desert as indifference. Anthropomorphic trees light up in moonlight, reflected in water that has no boundaries but holds memory all the same. Untamed and wild landscape, in all its apathy, elicits a primal pull to enter it, to be joined with it, to know it intimately. Seeking the solace of empty places, her work creates intensely personal portraits of quiet, meditative spaces that encourage contemplation, reflection, and investigation of self, sublimity, and the divine.

This collection of work emphasizes the solemnity and quietude of winter. Icy blues and cool greens capture the fading light in the early evenings of December and January. Drawn from her experiences of living in a rural setting, the work in Peace evokes the awesome but quiet power of the chilly backwoods of the Midwest.

Winger lives and works in Indianapolis, Indiana. She received a BS from Middle Tennessee State University and an MFA from East Tennessee State University. Winger is represented by Red Arrow Gallery in Nashville, TN, Visions West Contemporary in Denver, CO, and James May Gallery in Algoma, WI. Her work was recently featured in the Spring Break art fair in New York City and is held in numerous private collections both nationally and internationally.

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