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While Mary Osmundsen was studying art at the Bauhaus University in Germany, she experienced the kind of culture and language shock that afflicts only those living and working abroad.

"I had to deal with the isolation and chaos that comes with living overseas but there was also a sense of connection and growth," Osmundsen, a UWM student working on her MA in visual art, said.

From this experience she created a set of drawings, "almost like a journal," that reflect her own ideas about the themes she addresses in her work.

A selection of these images along with charcoal wall drawings created specifically for installation will be shown at Hotcakes Gallery from Dec. 10 through Jan. 8.

"I'm very excited about the Hotcakes show, because I've never had a show of drawings before," Osmundsen said. "My drawings have always been very important in terms of working through ideas for larger projects, but suddenly I noticed that my studio was completely full of drawings, and obviously they're a huge part of my process."

Osmundsen studied photography and then painting at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design before attending UWM as a graduate student.

"I worked in photography for 10 years, but then my practice became much broader. One of the reasons I went back to school for my undergraduate degree (to MIAD) was that I began working extensively in mixed media, using oil paint on photographs, and I needed to learn more about different ways of working."

As an artist, Osmundsen has no interest in limiting herself to one medium. "I find it really exciting to move across all these genres, to pick up whatever makes sense in each visual language and use it to explore the same concepts," she said.

In addition to the Hotcakes show, Osmundsen has work in the MA Thesis Exhibition at Inova Gallery 3, running until Dec. 17. Her piece, "Living Is A Leaving of Traces," consists of a set of projectors on which small clumps of hair rest. The resulting projections are startling, visceral images of a defamiliarized form.

"One of the reasons I made this piece is that I was working on separate projects in video, drawing and sculpture but what I found really exciting was when I started to combine them. These images seem like big drawings to me. I like the duality of the object on the bed of the projector and the image on the wall. When you look down at the hair, it's very different, the light seems like sunlight backlit through the hair, but when you look up at the wall, it's a silhouette. I like the notion of drawing with light. I didn't realize at first that I was circling back to the photographic, but these are images are reminiscent of that."

The installation shares with her other work - wall drawings, in particular - a sense of the fleeting.

"I found it exciting when I got my first studio that I could do anything. I thought, hey, I'm going to draw on the wall, because I just found it liberating. And that's what I enjoy about this work too, that it's ephemeral, you turn the projectors off and the images don't exist. The pieces of hair - if a wind blows, if someone touches them, the images will change."

"I like working with images that are ephemeral," she added. "A wall drawing is not something you can take with you, it's not an object."

Osmundsen's use of organic materials reveals her interest in the body.

"I've been working with hair and cellular forms for a really long time," she said. "It's grown out of dealing with illness, but my interest has expanded into ideas of cellular forms as specimens or organisms as well as the idea of hair as simultaneously an object of fetish and a repulsive product of waste."

Part of the thrill of exhibition work is watching for viewers' reactions, Osmundsen said. "It's always a bit nerve-racking because we make work in a vacuum, by ourselves in the studio. So I'm very excited tonight to see how people interact or don't interact with the projections."

Osmundsen's show at Hotcakes Gallery runs from Dec. 10 - Jan. 8. The MA Thesis Exhibition runs through Dec. 17.

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