ICOSA Collective is proud to present Look, an exhibition of new works by Lana Waldrep-Appl and Jenn Wilson Shepherd exploring the deliberate act of looking through the context of painting. Painting becomes a conscious act that calls our viewers to, in turn, be more aware of indifferent, hidden, or common subject matter. This means of translation invites the viewer to stop and really look.

Lana Waldrep-Appl has long chosen to represent/re-present the things passively seen, but rarely actively looked at. This most recent work features a collection of exterior walls. These walls are almost all sourced from daily life and deliberately chosen for their genericism and ubiquity that often renders them invisible. Through the act of translating the objects with paint, Waldrep-Appl makes the invisible visible.

Lana Waldrep-Appl is an artist, educator, and mother of four who lives and works in San Marcos, Texas. She holds a MFA in painting from Virginia Commonwealth University and a BFA in Studio Art from The University of Texas at Austin. Waldrep-Appl has shown her work both on the statewide and national level. She has received artist grants and participated in residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. She has received a fellowship from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Her paintings have been featured in various publications including New American Paintings.

Jenn Wilson Shepherd takes inspiration from John Berger’s pivotal essay, “Why Look at Animals” and the tens of millennia tradition of painting animals. Wilson Shepherd collects images of camera traps from wildlife refuges-essential tools for scientists to track elusive and reclusive creatures. Behind the camera there is no person, just the machine that is triggered by the animals’ movement. Essentially, the animal activates the image and becomes the unbeknownst author and the observed.

Jenn Wilson Shepherd is an artist from Austin, Texas. Notable exhibitions include TSA LA (Los Angeles), Corbett vs Dempsey (Chicago), Packer-Schopf Gallery (Chicago), American University of Beirut (Lebanon), University of Arkansas Fine Arts Center Gallery, and Kohler Art Museum in Wisconsin. Her work has been reviewed in Artslant, Newcity Magazine, Austin Chronicle, MW Capacity, Timeout Chicago, Chicago Magazine, Chicago Reader, and the Chicago Tribune.