In our poppy marketing culture, things are brightly imbued with color — a peppy pink duster, an aqua loofah, and red Swedish Fish.
Collaborators Lois Bielefeld and Keturah Michael are interested in how objects transcend their human-attributed use value and assert their own agency, or “thing-power.”
Throughout their careers in photography and styling, they have predominantly centered on people and their spaces while asking: at what point do things become attached to people? When do objects begin to carry meaning and memory, and hold sway over us? And what does it mean to live surrounded by things that are increasingly designed to seduce us — engineered in color, shape, and texture to trigger desire before we have even consciously registered them?
Though Bielefeld and Michael have worked together regularly in their professional commercial lives, (Some)thing began somewhere more instinctive, with a shared fascination with color and a desire to build a color story entirely out of objects. Turning their attention away from the human figure, they began sourcing items from their own homes, thrift stores, and the prop house of a commercial studio, constructing and arranging images that sit somewhere between still life and set design — deliberate, color-saturated, and quietly charged. The selection process itself became part of the inquiry: why does this object feel right next to that one? What does it mean for a thing to feel lonely, powerful, or out of place? Michael’s background in fiber arts and her instinct for texture and materiality brought a tactile sensibility to the work, while Bielefeld’s lens-based practice shaped how those arrangements were ultimately seen and held. Together they developed a working rhythm that was as much about conversation and intuition as it was about composition.
What began as an exercise in color and composition grew into a deeper exploration of how everyday things accumulate meaning, memory, and quiet power. They are interested in how things act on us within this vibrant, color-driven capitalist consumer society — how a particular shade of pink can carry nostalgia, how an object on a shelf can anchor an entire sense of self. Drawing on Timothy Morton’s essay All Objects Are Deviant: Feminism and Ecological Intimacy, they engage with the idea that the relationship between humans and objects is never truly one-directional — that we are not simply choosing things so much as things are also pulling us toward them, and that somewhere in that “mutual veering” is where meaning resides. (Some)thing was exhibited in the group show Informal at Water Street Studios in Batavia, Illinois, in 2023.
About Lois Bielefeld
Lois Bielefeld is a queer, series-based artist working in photography, audio, video, and performance. Their work continually explores the connections between routine and ritual and the formation of identity, personhood, and systems of meaning-making.
Currently based in Milwaukee, Bielefeld has lived on both coasts and holds an MFA in Photography from the California Institute of the Arts and a BFA in Photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Their work is included in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York City, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Museum of Wisconsin Art, Saint Kate Arts Hotel, and The Warehouse. Bielefeld has exhibited at the International Center of Photography in New York City, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, the de Young Museum in San Francisco, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, and Dom Wein in Vienna.
Bielefeld is represented by Portrait Society Gallery in Milwaukee. [Official Website]
About Keturah Michael
Keturah Michael is a Chicago-based artist and commercial stylist whose practice spans fiber arts, prop styling, and set design. A graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a focus in Accessory Design, Michael brings a tactile, object-driven sensibility to everything she touches — whether building out a commercial set or constructing a handmade textile work.
Her eye for color, composition, and the expressive potential of everyday objects is at the core of both her fine art and her professional work, where she has styled shoots across a wide range of brands and creative productions. [Official Website]
