Folio is pleased to present Defining Absence and Presence, a two-person exhibition by Green Bay-based artists Lydia Dildilian and Lisa Wicka. 

From 2021-22, as Folio’s opening was postponed during 2021 and 2022 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the vacant gallery space was used by Dildilian and Wicka as a shared studio. This became a place for the artists to work alongside one another, offer one another feedback and develop a deeper friendship. While Dildilian has a background in painting and Wicka in print, both artists embrace experimentation through interdisciplinary approaches that engage with a wide range of materials, techniques and subject matter. This exhibition shows some of their most recent works and highlights the experimental nature of both of their works.

Lydia Dildilian Bio: 

Lydia Dildilian was born in Mission Viejo, California but grew up in the American south. Dildilian received her B.F.A. in Painting and Drawing from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio in 2012, and her M.F.A. in Painting from the University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 2016 as Summa Cum Laude. Dildilian’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States and in China and Italy. Dildilian has received multiple exhibition awards, attended a veracity of residencies, and her work has appeared in notable publications like New American Painters, Studio Break Magazine, and Art in America. Currently, Dildilian is an Associate Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay where she manages the painting department and teaches painting, drawing, and design foundations courses, and runs the UWGB, Marinette art gallery. Dildilian is a mixed media artist whose work seeks to explore socio-economic systems and American identity through highly complex, saturated paintings, collages, and installations. By collapsing, colliding, and converging focal points between blurred and sharpened features, Dildilian translates layered sourced imagery found and captured from photographs, magazines, video games, and appropriated images into recursive and experimental spaces. 

Lisa Wicka  Bio:

Lisa Wicka is a mixed media printmaker and educator. Her work revolves around the evolution of self through experience, place, failures and successes. Often referencing architectural spaces, wallpapers, and raw materials, her work plays with perspective, dimension, fragility and time. Wicka graduated with her BFA from the University of  Central Florida and her MFA from Purdue University. Her work has been shown both nationally and internationally and she has participated in numerous residencies and workshops including SparkBox Studios, Women’s Studio Workshop, Ålgården workshop in Sweden, and Officina Stamperia del Nataio in Sicily. Wicka currently is Associate Professor of Printmaking at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay.