January 9-February 27, 2026
Nocturne — Ezekiel Cambey, Rebecca Kautz and Will Kanel
Opening reception Friday, January 9 from 5-8 pm
Ezekiel Cambey (b. North Carolina) is a painter, writer, and illustrator living in Chicago, Illinois. He attended Macalester College, where he earned a BA, and later completed a Post-Baccalaureate program in painting and drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has exhibited nationally in galleries across the southern and midwestern United States. His practice includes comics, oil painting, poetry, and ceramics.
“I have always worked by composing fragments. My paintings are hodge-podges, collages of distinct parts that cohere into meaning. My work is always narrative, stories created from the transversal between various components. These narratives are non-linear, containing abutments, reiterations, and unpredictability, and they can be read backwards and forwards. Ultimately my project is autobiographical, and each painting is an attempt to describe different aspects of my life.
I collect images from my experiences: people I love, or have seen on the train, books I have read, or photos I have seen. Images are not hierarchized by their importance. Everything can be interpreted through equivalent spectrums of reverence or depreciation. Anything may contain the potency of inspiration, from the marginal parts of my life to my deepest relationships.
My narratives do not provide answers or messages. They are not parables or morals. These paintings are tools that help the viewer understand their life and the world around them. I don’t want to tell you how to live your life. I want to understand my own through collection, interpretation, and organization. When seeing my experiences, you may recognize your own. You can take one fragment, object, or word and recontextualize it into your life to be helpful.
A woman once told me a drawing looked like her son who had passed away, and when she looked at it she felt his presence next to her. She took what she could and left the rest. Please do the same.”
Nocturne brings together three artists whose work carries its own version of night. Each artist reaches into night differently, whether through memory, symbolism, lived experience, or the atmosphere of imagined spaces. Their paintings move between the familiar and the dreamlike, creating scenes shaped as much by feeling as by observation. Bringing these artists together has been a joy, and Nocturne reminds us that while night often feels like an artist’s territory, the space it opens up is there for all of us.
Rebecca Kautz (b. Princeton, IL) is a Sun Prairie, Wisconsin–based artist, curator, and lecturer. She is a multidisciplinary artist with a background in performance, video, and painting and drawing, which is her current focus. Kautz is the recipient of the Midwest Regional Artists With Disabilities Award (2025) from Arts Midwest and the winner of the Dane County Forward Art Prize (2024), where she is also a two-time finalist. She holds an MFA in painting and drawing from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Kautz has an international exhibition record spanning more than three decades, and her work is held in public and private collections throughout the United States and Canada. Her work was recently published in Staring at the Sky: Essays on Art and Culture by Douglas Rosenberg (2024). Additional awards include the Award of Distinction from the 10th Annual International Drawing Exhibition, The Social Art Award, The Larry S. Tempkin Exhibition Award, and First Honorable Mention for the Russell and Paula Panczenko MFA Prize. She is represented by Woodwalk Gallery in Egg Harbor, Wisconsin, and is an art lecturer at Madison College.
“The imagery in my work comes directly from my rural Midwest upbringing but also contains influences of dreams and current contemporary life. A traumatic childhood event and family life drastically impacted my sense of self. Themes of personal relationships, belonging, and place are played out in allegorical scenes using repeating signs and symbols. Emblems of my childhood, such as the Vermont Castings wood burning stove, repeat and manifest in various iterations-signaling the persistence of past and a touchstone for the present. Alligators are ancient predators, the shadow side-representational of personal and societal problems. The work contains and exposes distortions, imaginatively representing the complex and subconscious self. I would classify my work as Neo-Surreal Feminist Folk. Current research interests include ideas around home-sickness, mysticism, and the loss of the ego in the second-half of life. “One cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning; for what was great in the morning of life will be of little importance in the evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening become a lie”. -C.G. Jung”
Will Kanel (b. Madison, WI) is a Milwaukee-based painter. He received his BFA in studio art with a concentration in painting and drawing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2025. His work has been exhibited both locally and regionally.
“My work explores the mystery and strangeness of the nocturnal urban environment. I paint melodramatic scenes populated with ambiguous, anonymous figures. These quiet vignettes, rendered in deep blues and dusty purples, move between menace and humor, uncanniness and absurdity. I borrow visual language from many sources, ranging from cartoons to film to modernist painting. These elements merge into a paint surface made of thin, luminous washes peeking out from under thick, dry top layers. This approach creates a fuzzy atmospheric quality that heightens the intensity and uncanniness of the work.
Space and perspective often function in unexpected ways, creating disorienting environments. I arrange subjects carefully to give the work hints of a narrative, but I withhold enough information to avoid a straightforward reading. This ambiguity is intentional. It invites viewers into the scene, encouraging a sense of unease, curiosity, and open interpretation.”