OS Projects is pleased to present Things Seem Strong, a solo exhibition of photographs by Milwaukee artist Mark Brautigam, opening May 10 and continuing through July 12. A reception

for the artist will take place on Saturday, May 10, from 1–3 pm.

Mark Brautigam’s artwork interrogates our sense of time, on both a personal and geological scale. Using photography and video as his primary media, Brautigam explores how these different timescales manifest across our lives and the landscape.

In his OS Projects exhibition, Brautigam directs his attention to the Driftless Area, a region encompassing southwestern Wisconsin and parts of Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois that was spared the repeated leveling forces of glaciation common throughout the Upper Midwest. Cycles of sedimentation and erosion have continued to shape the landscape of the Driftless for millions of years, creating a geological terrain that stands in stark contrast to the areas that surround it.

The photographs in Things Seem Strong were made in the Driftless Area of Wisconsin, Illinois, and Minnesota from 2017-2020. Installed across the walls of the gallery like a film strip or the unbound pages of a book, the series contrasts two vastly different senses of time: the human sense of time, which we rely on to define our lives, and deep time, which defines the history of the planet. While many of the images feature the unique landforms of a region hundreds of millions of years old, they also depict fleeting moments of humanity and a world that is seasonally cyclical, ultimately pitting the ephemeral against the eternal.

About the Artist

Mark Brautigam is an artist whose work explores the intersection of place, time, and memory. He attended the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Minnesota, and served as an officer in the United States Marine Corps for four years. He has exhibited at the Haggerty Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center and the Newspace Center for Photography. His work is in the collections of the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Museum of Wisconsin Art, the Haggerty Museum of Art and the Racine Art Museum, as well as the We Energies Foundation Art Collection and numerous private collections.