Paul Briskey: To Draw a Line
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Opening Reception: June 18, 4–7 pm
Preview Tour: June 11, 9am
On View: June 11 – August 7, 2026
To draw a line is to make a decision. It is to say: this exists. This matters. Look here.
Paul Briskey has spent a career asking what a line can do. Trained at UW–Madison, shaped by a decade living and working in Kuwait, line became his primary language because it could go where he went.
The work gathered here moves through time. Intimate non-objective pieces made during personal turmoil — a divorce, a relocation — in which autobiographical lines dissolve into accumulating marks. And then, in his most recent work, something shifts: a second line appears, not to obscure but to insist. To say again, more clearly: this one.
What that line describes, more often than not, is something we already know. A building. A streetscape. A monument. The kinds of structures that become invisible through familiarity — that we stop actually seeing because we've filed them away. Briskey, the perpetual traveler who learned to look at the world from the outside, turns that same fresh attention homeward. His Waunakee. His Madison. His streets.
These are portraits of place. And like all good portraits, they ask you to look again at something you thought you already knew.
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Preview Tour: Thursday, June 11, 9am
Opening Reception: Thursday, June 18 | 4–7 PM
On view: June 11 – August 7, 2026
Peace Gallery | 701 S Century Ave | Waunakee, WI
Preview Tour: June 11, 9am
On View: June 11 – August 7, 2026
To draw a line is to make a decision. It is to say: this exists. This matters. Look here.
Paul Briskey has spent a career asking what a line can do. Trained at UW–Madison, shaped by a decade living and working in Kuwait, line became his primary language because it could go where he went.
The work gathered here moves through time. Intimate non-objective pieces made during personal turmoil — a divorce, a relocation — in which autobiographical lines dissolve into accumulating marks. And then, in his most recent work, something shifts: a second line appears, not to obscure but to insist. To say again, more clearly: this one.
What that line describes, more often than not, is something we already know. A building. A streetscape. A monument. The kinds of structures that become invisible through familiarity — that we stop actually seeing because we've filed them away. Briskey, the perpetual traveler who learned to look at the world from the outside, turns that same fresh attention homeward. His Waunakee. His Madison. His streets.
These are portraits of place. And like all good portraits, they ask you to look again at something you thought you already knew.
—
Preview Tour: Thursday, June 11, 9am
Opening Reception: Thursday, June 18 | 4–7 PM
On view: June 11 – August 7, 2026
Peace Gallery | 701 S Century Ave | Waunakee, WI
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Where is it happening?
701 S Century Ave, Waunakee, WI, United States, Wisconsin 53597
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
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Host or PublisherCreate Waunakee
