feature image: Rachel Hausmann Schall: Leave All the Doors Open at No Instructions Gallery. Photo: Artdose magazine.
By Samantha Timm
Rachel Hausmann Schall’s dynamic exhibition Leave All the Doors Open invites us to look closely and decipher her colorful language of marks, and provides a window into her rigorous process of creating.
When I spoke with Rachel about her work, our conversation meandered around the excitement of the opening reception, the twists and turns her practice has taken since she first started to dabble in collage, and the revelations that come with navigating when to place restrictions on the work, and when to pull them back.
As we chatted on opening night at No Instructions Gallery in Milwaukee’s Bay View neighborhood, Rachel described the feeling of creating something original: “I feel like I’ve invented my own language,” she said. This language is built on an interplay of material, her ability to seamlessly collage materials, techniques, and ideas, and her impossibly balanced compositions.
This interplay becomes highly visible, for instance, in a grouping of nine paintings in the show. In “Twice as Nice,” we are introduced to sumptuous swathes of purple and grey through a watery screen of whites and blues, which seem to document an almost archeological process in their texture—both additive and subtractive. As the purples and peaches below descend into swirls of greens and blues, and begin to flirt with the realm of printmaking, the bits of collaged material are inlaid with spray paint, softening it all into a color world of harmonious gestures.
“Nice to Meet You” and “Take a Stance” in the same grouping also attest to an intensive and incredibly thoughtful wrestling with material. The carved neon gestures that electrify the pieces with the immediacy of drawing exist within the embrace of organic sculptural shapes, whose curvature seems to cradle the colors within them.
An earlier iteration of this group of nine—shown at Rountree Gallery in Indiana Green 2023—appeared as a display of five set against a backdrop of smoky, spray-painted and collaged panels.
These works are alive. With their change in setting and positioning in relation to each other, they demonstrate Rachel collaging not just material, but also concept and time within the context of her own practice.
The show’s title is indicative of this process and the ways viewers might navigate the work: by allowing time and space for the art’s infinite potential to take shape.
She notes, “I equate leaving doors open with a pathway…a threshold between two spaces, which can sometimes be scary, unknown.”
Leave All the Doors Open prompts a conversation not only about materials, but also amongst the pieces themselves—they speak to each other through the self-referential “history of marks” that Rachel knows intimately, and playfully reveals in her work.
What she describes as a “beautiful mash-up” is a way of grappling with, processing, and re-combining material, technique, and culture. The many resonances of the exhibition’s title and the work itself unfold similarly—in a way that allows the ideas and the artist’s own art history to expand, contract, build and re-build, somersault, and weave between surface and texture in front of us.
Rachel’s particular visual language invites us to gather around her art to look closer, deeper, longer.
What I did not ask Rachel was how she resolves each piece. I think the power in collage as a medium is that we may never find a resolution in these works, and there doesn’t need to be. Collage work acquires meaning wherever and whenever it goes, and in response may ask to be embellished, shifted, sanded, obscured, or crystallized.
Like collage as a medium, experiencing Rachel’s paintings in Leave All the Doors Open involves a necessary “mash-up” that is emboldened by a lack of finality; rather, just as creative practice does, it continues.
No Instructions Gallery is located at 2124 E. Rusk Avenue, Milwaukee, WI, and open Fridays 12 – 5 pm and Saturdays 10 am – 4 pm.
For more information on Rachel’s work, contact the artist directly: rhausmannschall@gmail.com
For a price list of the work on display, contact James Stepanek at No Instructions Gallery: contact@noinstructs.com
If You Go:
Leave All the Doors Open runs through August 15, 2025
No Instructions Gallery
2124 E Rusk Ave, Milwaukee, WI 53207